Cutting To The Beat

As part of our preparation for when it comes to editing our final footage for our music video, we had to follow an activity of cutting to the beat. This was good practice on how to use the Final Cut software and also how to 'cut to the beat'.

Other than when we filmed and editing our swedes towards the end of last year, I am almost completely unfamiliar with using the Final Cut software, therefore I found this activity quite useful and was good preparation for when it comes to the final editing of our music video.

I decided to use footage from the film Despicable Me (1 and 2) with the song 'Animals by Martin Garrix'. I chose this song because the beat is very fast and therefore there would be a wide library of different footage that I could use from the Despicable Me films, especially of the Minion characters, which hold the key role in my Cutting To The Beat video.

Whilst collecting footage and deciding which would fit the beat of the song most correctly, I realised just how much time, patience and effort has to go into the editing of an actual music video. In order to create the most effective music video it is often very important to make sure that the footage recorded collates well with the music and flows correctly.

Cutting to the beat involves music and a music video. When you watch a music video, you can often notice that the scene cuts to another scene on a certain lyric or beat of the music. When you watch the video, you can actually take the lyrics and break it in to pieces/scenes where the music cuts to another shot. Every time the shot changes, you make another mark in accordance to your key to show that they have been cut on the beat. This technique is commonly used in the music production and music video industry.

Here is my attempt at 'cutting to the beat':

Swede

In order to test out our music video skills, learning how to use a camera properly and editing on final cut software, we had to shoot our own swede to our own choice of song. For my swede, we chose to do our swede to the song 'Call Me Maybe'. However resources were limited as it was supposed to be a low-budget swede and therefore the outcome of our swede was not of the highest quality nor professionalism. Although, producing this swede was a great indicator of any errors we made throughout the process and therefore will now recognise these mistakes and be sure not to repeat them when with the final product.

One of the major problems we specifically encountered was when it came to the editing of our swede. The problem was that we realised we had not filmed enough footage and therefore had to cut the time span of the video short. Once realising this problem, it was important to note down that for the final product that more than enough footage should be recorded so that there aren't any problems when it comes to the editing of the video and that there is no shots missing which were supposed to be there. 

Leading on from this problem, another problem was that we hadn't planned the swede out properly. For example; we didn't create a story board for the swede, nor did we calculate the exact timing of each shot. This therefore resulted in a poor outcome and the final product was not of the quality which we would have initially liked it to have been. Therefore, it is important that we do create a storyboard for our music video and have everything carefully planned out way in advance. 

One other problem encountered was that none of us took the swede very seriously and there was a lot of mucking around and therefore resulted in a huge lack of concentration and actual work being done. Due to the lack of efficient and effective work actually being produced, this showed me that for our final product we must be more punctual, organised and also get down to work straight away and cut out the mucking around or having a laugh.

Looking back at the outcome and process of the Swede, there are many mistakes which were made that I will now make sure I don't repeat with our final product.

Lip Syncing:

When filming the swede, it was important to master the art of 'lip syncing'. The swede required the main character to lip sync, and this needed to be done effectively and as accurately as possible so that it looks most effective. This required the main character to learn the words to the song (in this case 'Call Me Maybe') and then to lip sync along to the song.

We did encounter various problems in the process of creating our swede in regard to lip syncing. The first problem which we encountered was to make sure that the main character knew all the words to the song. It took the main character various days to learn the words so that the lip syncing would be most effective. Another problem which we stumbled across was when it came to the editing stage of our swede, the problem was that the lip syncing wasn't completely in time to the lyrics of the song. This therefore meant that lots of editing had to be done in order to master the timing of the lip syncing. From this exercise I have learnt how important it is to master lip syncing to the best accuracy possible in order to fulfil the most effective and professional looking video.

Initial Idea: 3 (ALSO THE FINAL IDEA)

I took on the role of writing up the third idea onto an emaze presentation. This is our third idea, and also our final idea. We have collectively decided that this is the strongest idea of the three and it is important to bare in mind that the third idea was also founded on the grounds of the other two previous ideas. Therefore it was already decided that we were going to rule out the first two ideas and create a third idea, which would hopefully become our final chosen idea.

Luckily, we all agreed that this was our strongest idea and that this should be our final idea as we are running out of time to keep thinking of more ideas, therefore now that we have chosen this as our idea and we are now going to start working on storyboarding and casting for our video. 

Starting to think about Digipak designs and the Album Advertisement

On top of producing a music video, we also have to choose two out of three of the following to create: 

1. Digipak
2. Album Advert
3. Website for chosen artist

I have chosen the first two; Digipak and Album advert. I have chosen these two because I really enjoy using photoshop software to create media-related items, of which a Digipak and album advert are both one. I learnt how to use the photoshop software from a previous year 12 coursework when we had to design a magazine front cover, a contents page and double page spread. I picked up various different and useful skills from that coursework which I will be able to apply when reuniting with photoshop to design my Digipak and album advert. 

Digipak:

Even though we are working as a group to produce our final music video, the four of us do not have to chose the same two, nor do they have to be the same designs if we did all chose the same two. For example; I could create a Digipak featuring a picture of the 'artist' on the cover, whereas another group member could create a Digipak and not use any pictures of the 'artist' whatsoever. This is the part of the coursework where we are completely independent and do not need to consult within the group any ideas we have about our Digipaks. Therefore we could initially have an outcome of four different Digipak designs for our artist; Passion Pit. 

The reason I have chosen to create a Digipak for my artist is because I really enjoy buying and collecting CDs and I think this would be a great opportunity to be able to design my own Digipak. There is no limit to the ideas I could generate for my Digipak; I could photograph a couple of friends who could be improvising to be the album artist, I could use photos of landscape that I have taken or I could simply create some sort of pattern on photoshop to use as the album cover; there is no limit. The album will be a release under the chosen artist 'Passion Pit' and will need to include the chosen song for our music video, which is 'Constant Conversations'. The rest of the songs can be made up titles, other song titles or other Passion Pit song titles.

When looking at various examples of Digipaks within the 'indietronica' genre, I have noticed that the artists do not tend to include any people on the cover of their albums, nor do they rarely include any within the Digipaks on a whole. Therefore I have noticed that most artists will use images on their album cover of landscape or just designs and patterns which have been created on photoshop or similar software. This has indicated to me that it would be perhaps a poor choice to design a Digipak which features the album artist on the cover as it seems that very little 'inidietronica' artists tend to follow this trend. Therefore I need to take some time to sit and brainstorm a few ideas which spring to mind that I could use for the design of my Digipak, other than people, which I have already opted against. 

Whilst analysing some Digipaks earlier on within the research part of my coursework, I was able to identify that some key conventions which will need to be included within my Digipak are; 

• Album title
• Barcode
• Track list
• Artist name and identification
• Logos
• Producers/ people involved
• Copyrighting

Then there are also various other conventions which do not necessarily need to be included but more often than not, they are included:

• Lyrics
• Thank You's
• Other photos from the photoshoot
• Official social media websites (twitter, facebook, main website etc)
• Exclusive bonus content (Deluxe Edition, fold-out poster etc)

Here are some examples of album covers from artists within the 'indietronica' genre:

 

Album Advert:

I have also decided that I want to chose the album advert option as opposed to the other option of creating a website for our chosen artist. I have made this decision because once again I enjoy using photoshop and would prefer to create another item on photoshop than having to actually create a website when I have very little understand or knowledge on how to do such thing. I think it would be a wise idea to replicate the album cover onto the album advert so that the album can be easily identifiable just from looking at the album advert. Therefore hopefully creating the album advert should not be too time consuming and I want it to follow a simple yet effective design which gives the key information and identification of the album artist in simple context. 

Similarly to the analysis of the Digipaks, I also analysed album adverts and from that analysis I once again identified many key conventions which are vital for the album advert:

• Album name
• Artist name
• Album release date
• Where to buy/pre-order
• Key singles which are included, that may have been released prior to the album

Record Label Research

When we decided that it would be a good idea to split up the earlier tasks within the planning for our music video, I volunteered to take charge of the record label research. I decided to use a presentation website called 'emaze' to create my so-called powerpoint on Passion Pit's record label. However, during my research I straight away discovered that they are actually currently on two different record labels, therefore my research is probably slightly longer than if it were research for an artist under just one label.

Passion Pit are under the following two labels:

1. Frenchkiss Records
2. Columbia

Target Audience Research

As a group, we decided it was a necessity to carry out some target research in order to understand whom our product is to be aimed at, and what conventions to include within our music video and digipak which will help entice the target audience and fulfil their needs within the indietronica genre.

In order to cater to the needs of our target audience, Abi created a questionnaire for our target audience research. She created the questionnaire on a website called 'Survey Monkey' and published the survey on social media websites such as; Facebook and Tumblr. These were a good choice of website because young people use both on a daily basis, and our target audience are most likely going to be young people so therefore getting their feedback was a key feature for our target audience research.

The Questionnaire

The first question which was asked in the questionnaire was which gender the respondent was. This question would hopefully give us an insight of which gender have a preference to indietronica music.



The second question which we asked was what age the respondent is. This is quite a vague question because in theory, anyone of any age can listen to and enjoy indietronica music. However, the aim of this questionnaire is obviously to find information about our target audience, so therefore understanding which age category got the most responses is key and will help us to identify the age range of our target audience. However, one downfall of this question is that the questionnaire was posted to websites such as Facebook and Tumblr, and most of Abi's friends on these websites will most likely be around the same age as us (16-20) and therefore most, if not all the respondents will come under this age category and therefore giving an inaccurate age representation.

The third question was if the respondent likes indietronica music, with the options of: Yes, No and Having no opinion either way. This was quite an important question to ask because we would need to be able to see that there was enough interest for the indietronica genre, otherwise there may be a lack of support for our final product.


Question 4 is a continuation of question 3; that if the respondent answered that they do like indietronica music, to then list which their favourite artist within the genre is. This question doesn't really have any positive or negative impact on our target audience research, it is more of a neutral question that is just helping to gain an understanding into what sort of artists within the genre are mentioned, to see if any in particular are mentioned more than once, and also to see if Passion Pit are of any mention.

Question 5 is once again not of much use to our target audience research, but more of a general question of whether the respondent watches music videos or not (of any genre). However, this will give some sort of indication as to whether music videos are still as popular, and also to note the age category of the respondent in response to if they watch music videos in order to see if we can identify some sort of pattern or not.

I found that this question would most likely receive unreliable and inaccurate responses. I felt this because how many people, unless they have literally just watched the video and then done this questionnaire, would remember the last music video that they watched. I know for sure that I have no recollection of what video was the last one I watched, so chances are people would just lie about the last video they have watched. Therefore I found that this question probably could have been dropped from the questionnaire as most people would probably be unable to answer it on the spot (especially without looking at their YouTube history).

However, leading on from question 6 onto question 7, the relevance of the question becomes a bit more significant. This question becomes more significant because the drop down of different options will help the respondent to understand and trigger their memory of why they watched the video in the first place (and perhaps even remember what the video was).

Question 8 I believe, was a prime question of the questionnaire. This question is really important for our target audience feedback because it will hopefully help us to be able to identify which aspects of a music video people enjoy most, and perhaps which aspects we should try to incorporate within our final product.


Once the results have been produced, it will be interesting to find out things such as; whether indietronica appeals more to males or females, whether people enjoy listening to indietronica music, what they enjoy seeing most in music videos and perhaps even seeing if people do actually remember the last music video they watched!

Abi then rounded up all her target audience research and put it into a Prezi powerpoint in order to show the statistics of each question and to expand into more detail.

 

Initial Idea: 2

For our second idea, Amy made a Prezi powerpoint in order to explain our idea fully. Our second idea was primarily taken from Zach's idea of 'the twin theory'. Here, there would be a twisted story exploring themes through two characters, which are twins. However, I objected to this idea as I felt that it lacked depth, was slightly cliche and was far too complicated for our final video, which we wanted to be relatively simple.

The primary aim of the video was to make the viewer think that the two scenes were the same person and then in the end to realise that they are actually two separate people, twins. Zach went round and showed the tester video to numerous people, including the group, and it seemed that very little actually grasped the initial concept of the video. Many people seemed confused and didn't catch the idea that they were twins at any point in the video. Therefore Zach went away and tried to mend this problem by creating a second 'tester' video with a different character, one of which our school friends weren't familiar with, perhaps to try and make it easier to identify the concept. Because with the first 'tester' everyone was familiar with the character, which was Amy and also the surroundings, which perhaps made it harder for people to understand the concept trying to be sold in the video.

Even though it seemed as if this first tester idea failed, Zach did receive some interesting feedback which could potentially spark some new ideas. He received thoughts such as 'alternate personalities' between the two characters, showing two different sides of a persons character and they were not at all twins. Another was the idea that the whole thing was 'a dream'. Yes, these are intelligent assumptions of the concept, yet they are not what Zach was initially looking to achieve.

With Zach's second 'tester' video, he kept in mind feedback from the first tester, in particular the idea that it wasn't made clear enough to the audience that the two characters were twins, and not supposed to be the same person. Leading on from this feedback, Zach decided it would be a better idea to film some sort of flashback scene which included a phone call between the twins, which should help the viewer to understand the whole twin concept. He also made the two scenarios quite separate and more distinct than the first tester video, which should also further help to generate the idea more clearly.

Although initially could have been a strong idea, we have opted against the 'twin theory'. Zach did produce a 'tester' which saw him put to work his idea of twins, and yes even though it did look effective and professionally produced, I still felt that this wasn't the strongest idea we could have the potential to come up with, so we have therefore decided to move away from this idea on a whole.




Here is some of the feedback which Zach received when showing people his initial tester 'twin' video:

After receiving this feedback, he then went on to create his second tester 'twin' video. And received the following feedback:

Initial Idea: 1

Zach wrote up our initial idea, and then shared it with the rest of the group to use, whilst Amy is writing up the second idea, and Abi the third ideas to be shared with the group within the next week hopefully. 

This was our first idea as a group, and of course the first idea is not necessarily going to be the strongest nor the final idea. Therefore although we all loved this idea at first glance, the more we discussed it, the more we realised how many potential problems we could stumble upon before and also during the production. We realised that for our idea, we would need to find adults for the video which would be a more difficult task as opposed to finding someone our age or around our age - which is 17/18 yrs old. It also seemed that none of us knew of any young adults which would be able to take on the roles of the actors in our videos, therefore this we were met with an almost immediate obstacle. It seemed that the fact that none of us would be able to find young adults which were to be used as the actors in our videos that this completely demolished the whole of the first initial idea. 

The Idea

Production Meeting

Once we had a few rough ideas, we thought it would be a good idea to hold a production meeting in order for us to brainstorm our ideas, what would work and what wouldn't about each idea, and any disagreements between us about certain ideas.

Although we were able to discuss our different ideas as a group, I still feel that there was actually very little outcome because we are still yet to finalise our idea, and thus achieved little in respects to the main aim of our task; choosing a final idea. However, what was achieved in our production meeting was that we finally got to share and listen to our initial ideas within the group, and give feedback on what we liked about certain ideas and why we felt that certain ideas may not work and the potential for any to become too complicated for us to produce.

Introduction to Planning

Now that the research section of my coursework is complete, it is time to move onto the planning section, which involves far more group work than the research section had previously included. There is a long stretch of various different tasks which need to be completed within our group. In order to speed up the planning process, we thought it would be a good idea to initially split up the earlier tasks between ourselves.

As a group (which consists of myself (Hannah), Amy, Abi and Zach) we hope to achieve by the end of the planning section to have a final idea and to work around the final idea with storyboards and in-depth planning, we are also aiming to start shooting the final music video by the beginning of December.

There is also the individual planning which we will need to do; besides the music video we also need to create two out of the three of the following: 1) Digipak 2) Album advert 3) Website. I have chosen to do the first and second; Digipak and Album advert. Even though we are working as a group, these tasks do not need to be achieved as a group, yet are tasks which are to be done as individuals.

Choice of song: Constant Conversations

In order to try to understand the meaning behind the lyrics of our chosen song; Constant Conversations I thought it would be a good idea to Google the meaning behind the lyrics. I was met by a website called 'Genius' which displays the lyrics and if you hover your mouse over the lyrics it tells you the meaning behind each lyrical line.

Here are the lyrics to the chosen song: Constant Conversations. If you click on the highlighted parts of the lyrics you can see the meaning behind that specific line; once we were able to understand the meaning behind the lyrics it was able to help with the initial ideas for our video. I thought this was a very useful tool to use because it helped me to understand what the theme of the song is (Which I understood to be alcoholism) and identify what key lyrics mean. Once understanding the theme of the song and its morals, this would hopeful have been a useful feature in order to help us think of initial ideas for our music video.

Read “Constant Conversations” by Passion Pit on Genius

Timeline of Planning

As a group, we used the website 'dipity' to create a timeline of planning; including exact dates of approximation of which we aim to embark on each task, as listed above in the timeline. We thought it would be a good idea to split the earlier tasks between the four of us within the group in order to speed up the planning process and share our work with each other. However, obviously once we reach the bigger tasks such as the actual filming for the video and evaluation, these will be done as a group with joint efforts between the four of us. 

Mood Board(s)

                       1. Mood Board - Passion Pit

The concept of a 'mood board' is a type of collage which consists of images, text and elements that are associated with the main character of the mood board. Mood board's can either be physical or digital (this one is evidently digital), and can be very effective when putting information together for either a presentation or for your own use. With this particular mood board I chose to stick to pictures which are completely about the band and associated with the band directly and this helps to form an identity of the band and create a sense of familiarity with their sound and genre. For example; I included various different album or EP covers which the band have released in order to show any similarities between the different album artwork; where I noticed that the Constant Conversations EP released from the album 'Gossamer' featured the same colouring and continued the same theme of the main album, therefore making the EP recognisable to the audience and also easily identifiable that it is taken from the album 'Gossamer'. 

                            2. Mood Board - Indietronica conventions

This second mood board is more representative of the 'Indietronica' genre as a whole, whereas the first mood board wholly focuses on Passion Pit as an artist within the 'Indietronica' genre. In this mood board I included pictures of a few different musical instruments which can often be found in music of this genre, these include; the electronic keyboard, synthesizer and the drum machine. There is also a picture of the British flag, I chose to include this because the 'Indietronica' genre originated from the United Kingdom (and also Germany) in the 1990s. There is also a picture of bright pain colours backed onto a black background; I chose to include this picture because I think that most of the music videos within the 'Indietronica' genre are usually quite fun and different and often feature lots of different colours, so I felt that this photo held a good representation of the music videos within this genre.

What I learnt

From gathering different bits of information about Passion Pit and also about the genre of Indietronica, I have made various different conclusions. For example; I have noted that it is a very colourful genre in the sense that most of the album artwork is colourful and the music videos often feature lots of colours. I also learnt that Passion Pit don't include pictures of themselves on their album artwork, which will be a useful tool for me to consider when it comes to creating my Digipak.