Steal-o-matic

For people to easily visualise what our music video would be like, we made a steal-o-matic that contains content similar to the ones we want in ours.

We put together influences and references that we helped us visualise our music video. The main music videos that influenced our idea were all fairly minimalistic, which included San Cisco's Fred Astaire, Awkward and McFly's Love is Easy and Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass. 

These music videos influenced our set design, camera angles and prop use.

Camera angles example

Set Design exmaple

Use of Props/Minimalistic

We also managed to find a clip on youtube of the exact same editing for our dance sequence of through the different era(50s, 70s, 80s ,90s and modern).

FEEDBACK

Feedback from Teacher

Our initial idea included having the eras: 50s, Vikings, 80s, Ancient Greece and Victorians. This was to have a wide variety from the past eras. However after receiving feedback from our teacher, we revised our music video and included more band performance with different eras that are more popular in the pop culture: 50s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

One of my group members, Brandon, was suggested to be the lead since he has previous experience. However since we already had an idea of who the lead would be, we decided to do a screen test of both the candidates to choose who will be the lead.

4 Key Decisions: Artist

We decided our artist would be an indie band due to the fact in our brief, we were told that we are an independent record label, so indie record labels would usually also have indie bands which produce indie music.
Indie bands tend to have quirky and unique names; so we decided on 'Sticky And The Melonheads', after Juliette's dad suggested it to her. It really fits our band, due to the quirkiness of it and the indie feel to represent the indie genre. We thought it was appropriate after hearing bands of the names 'Smashing Pumpkins'(rock) and 'Catfish and the Bottlemen'(indie rock).
Unlike many bands, we decided our band would have two girls and two guys. This was done so that the organisation would be easier for us and we would not need to deal with more external actors. Also while filming, even if 3 of us are on set, one person could still be filming from behind the camera. As mentioned in previous post, our idea was to have a couple in the narrative along side band performance; the main singer, would also act as the guy in the couple. By having a mixed gender band, we would be appealing to a wider audience, males and females could relate to the band easily and possibly aspire to be them, allowing us to meet the gaps in the market.

Possible Band Line-Up:

Juliette: Female Protagonist
External Member: Lead Singer
Chrystal: Female Bassist
Audrey: Female Guitarist
Brandon: Male Drummer

To decide this, we asked each member which would be the most comfortable role for them. Audrey and I preferred to be part of the band, where are Juliette and Brandon did not mind, except they wanted to be able to take part in the filming from behind the camera. We thought if Brandon was the lead singer he would not get a lot of time behind the camera, so we decided that he would be the male drummer.

In the image below, include the bands we got band image inspiration from. We wanted our band to have a similar image between Walk the Moon(the original track artist) and Everything Everything. We dont want the band to be similar to Walk the Moon since their band image is more festival and we want our band to be more casual and indie, so their clothing would be similar to Daughter, which is stylized but casual.

4 Key Decisions: Track

Track Title: Shut Up + Dance
Track Artist: Walk The Moon
Record Label: RCA Records
Genre: Indie pop
Length: 03:17


We listened to each of our chosen suitable tracks on our blogs and finally came to the decision of this song; 'Shut Up+Dance' by Walk The Moon. We all really liked this due to the upbeat nature of the song which we could easily edit to and the unique sound of the indie pop genre.

This track appealed to me as in my original idea i wanted to have a band performance in the music video, which this track allows due to the different instruments used in the song. The lyrics also gave us a narrative to follow which we could  create in a studio easily and simply yet still look professional. So the fact that this track was able to have a band performance as well as a narrative was what caught my eye.

The track length was right for us and it had a clear theme of soul mates and romance, which helped us think of a music video idea easily. There were particular parts in the song which perked our interest, allowing us to widen our ideas. For example, the main part in the lyrics was 'she said shut up and dance with me' and 'she took my arm', that gave us an idea of what image to give the female in this narrative; we decided she would initiate most of the dances with her assertiveness.

Since the genre of this track is indie, we are the primary audience, 16-25 year old. which makes it easier for us to figure out how to target the audience. The core audience is very wide since it is just fans of the indie genre.

This track is owned by RCA records, so we e-mails Sony Music Entertainment(who own RCA records) for permission to use their copyrighted track. By gaining the permission to use their copyrighted track, we would then be able to post it on website like Youtube without it being flagged for copyright infringement.

4 Key Decisions: Record Label

After researching indie record labels, they tend to have simply names, hence the simple and short name Husky Records, similar to Domino Records, the name Husky would have a double meaning of the dog breed as well as the artists' voices. It would also have a plain black and white colour scheme.
We then looked into the record label of the track we had chosen(Shut up+Dance), which is RCA Records. We decided that our record label would be a branch, like RCA is, of Sony Music Entertainment, based in the UK. Wanting similar bands to ours, in the image above, we have referenced artists that we would have in our record label, hypothetically.

4 Key Decision: Audiences

Considering our track is indie pop, we decided to work around that to figure out what our audience.

• We decided to have indie fans as our core audience; it is neither genre specific or age specific, having a wider range of audience as our core.
• For secondary, we chose the old fans that tend to listen to indie music and would want to discover new indie bands like our.
• Our tertiary audience are younger as they would just be starting to discover different types of genres and would be very interested in indie music.

Production Meetings

As a group, we would meet up every Tuesday and Friday during our free periods and lunch of other days. In these production meetings, we would first set an objective we aim to complete during that session, then when the meeting ends, we would set a target to complete by the next session.

Meetings

First Meeting notes

For our first meeting, we decided our audience, record label, track and artist. To work those out, we first went through each of our blogs, listening to our suitable tracks and the ideas we all had for them then decided on which track we all liked the best.

Second Meeting Notes

In our second meeting, since we had decided on a track, we wrote down the type of artist and video style we wanted. For example, one of our most used references was Awkward by San Cisco for music video. As for artist style, we wanted it to be between Everything Everything and Walk The Moon(the original band that made the song)Then we suddenly all had an epiphany, that a couple would be dancing through different times/eras, due to the theme and lyrics of the song. So we started listing eras that would be iconic and easy for the audience to recognise.

Eras

After some more discussion, we decided to make the eras more spread to emphasize the fact that the couples would be going through any time period yet still being together. So we settled on Ancient Greece, Vikings, Victorians, 50s and 80s.



Since we can't always keep in contact with each other face to face, we have a facebook group to easily share our ideas with the interactivity of the world wide web and social media.