Track permission

To summarise: we are allowed to use their track as long as we do not display it to a wider audience, this includes YouTube. 

Make up and constume

Make Up

We had a meeting with Olivia to discuss and experiment our ideas for make up. First we were told everyone on camera has to wear make up even if we don't want them to look "made up". 

Balloon scene 

For the balloon scene we wanted there to be a festival inspired make up look. We experimented with blue and pink eye shadow. For the extras we discussed glitter and in general bold shapes and colours.

We are thinking of doing it without the yellow for the real shoot.

Forest Paint fight

Decided on naturalistic make up in order to make the paint stand out.

Neon Scene

Told to be careful when applying neon paint as it is important to get it right the first time. As we are unsure whether we have enough black light for neon to be possible, an alternative is to use dark colours such as purple and to invert the colours when editing to give of the illusion of neon face paint. 

Notes from the meeting on tips and brands:

Costume

Notes on costume for each scene: 

Performance scene: 

DJ costume: short sleeved shirts, black trousers and trainers 

Tried a variety of outfits, took pictures and showed them to the group. 

Final outfit:

Second choice shirt that we brought to school and Gavin ended up wearing.

Georgie (lead singer) 

We used Facebook chat to talk to Georgie, and get her to send us costume options. 

1. Grey crop top and disco pants

We thought this was alright and suited her characters image but not glamorous enough for performance scene. 

2. Gold jumpsuit 

We liked this outfit as it was more glamorous then the previous outfit without being too girly. 

White scene (cupcake)

For this scene we wanted Georgie to be in casual cloths. 

The group had a conversation with Georgie on Facebook chat discussing costume and make up. 

We decided on jeans, grey sweater and red trainers. 

Production Meeing



Story boarding process

Looking at the lyrics and interpreting them helped us have an idea of what shots we wanted where. Our video is an illustration to the music, in particular the lyrics and title of the song "my head is a jungle".

The process of interpreting the lyrics and creating the story board was simultaneous both helping the other progress. For the story board we used a colour scheme to signify scene changes (just like the animatic). It was helpful as it forced us to think about the details of our video, and find the most effective way to tell the narrative through shot types and what and who would be in each shot.



Album Cover Flat Plan

Focal image

As this is our artist debut album for the front cover we thought of having a face on shot in order to introduce them with the audience.

Style ( Font and Colour)

We wanted the font to be white and simplistic, possibly all lower case or capital. For the white to stand out the focal image would need to be colorful. We wanted the colors of the powder paint in the video to be reflective of the artist stylistic color scheme choices and we were thinking of using mainly pink/purple and blue powder paint.

Front

Focal Image

The back we wanted a naturalistic shot of a group of friends, possibly from behind. We were hoping to get this photo on the day of the shoot in the forest after the powder paint fight.

Back

Animatic

KEY:
Green- Forest Scenes
Pink- Perfromance
White- Seaward Studio
Blue- Baloons
Black- Neon Performance

 

The animatic serves as a combination of your mood board and shot list, together with the song. It helps to imagine how the video will look and raise issues from the story board such as what shots will look good together.

From doing this we realised that there were some head and shoulder shots of Georgie performing next to side on mid close up sots of Georgie in the narrative (eating the cake) which could look weird next to each other or alternatively become a graphic match if we made them both face on.

For us the changes in the rhythm of the music effect the mood, and we wanted to pick the best shots to match the mood. Therefore seeing the story board combined with the track was very helpful.

Pre Production- Test

After story boarding and creating our animatic we decided we needed to test out the beginning of our narrative. We originally wanted to use projections, but when checking with the technicalities it became clear that this would not work. So overlaying footage became a good alternative. Archive footage was something we talked about from the start, so it seemed like the right decision to use footage of The Alice In Wonderland production from 1951, in keeping with the themes of our video.

Here is the result of the video over layed with the Alice in Wonderland footage:



We are very pleased with the results and will use this technique in our music video.

Meeting: Sequencing

We are now starting to refine our idea, this includes creating a shot sequence. In our group meeting we began this process by listing the type of shots, props, setting, and actors we wanted for each set up. 

Notes

As we have a lot of props, we decided it is essential that we test these out first. We made a list of some of the things we came across that would need testing.

By doing this process some changes that would have to be made became evident. For example one thing we discussed was for the music video to follow the journey of just the lead female vocal, rather than the whole band, as it would be more practical and clearer for the audience, and then to establish the band in performance shots separately.

Developing the concept
After doing this we moved on to story boarding, when doing this we decided to follow the Alice In Wonderland reference throughout. Therefore we decided to open our sequence with the lead singer walking through a park, and noticing a tunnel (equivalent to rabbit hole) entering it (curiosity like Alice) and once inside, what would now be the studio, sees a cupcake on a stool and eats it ("Eat me" biscuits). This reference would run through the following dance scenes in some way in order to create a kind of "Wonderland". For example the balloon scene will feature mushrooms made of balloons and the performance scene will have arrow signposts in the background.

Meeting: Album Flat Plan

In our meeting we discussed the focal image, font, color schemes and stylistic choices of our album cover. We liked the white font against the background on MGMT's album cover, as well as the picture of the band on the front and a group of friends on the back. 

For the inside we wanted to thought about having an image of somebody blowing powder paint that stretched across the two sections. 

Production Meetings (First Week)

In our first meeting we brainstormed our ideas and shared our research. Some ideas that came up were to follow a group of friends around London and a powder paint fight. We concluded that a track of the dance genre would be best as it could work well with our ideas and all our research told us that it was very popular at the moment. Also we all had references to dance music videos on our blogs for various reasons such as color, camera angles, dance movement, but we figured this was a good sign.

Next we tackled the 4 key decisions: Track, Artist, Audience and Label (the decisions are in detail below on separate posts).

Then we put our influences together creating a "stealomatic", this helped visualize our video and establish the main themes.

Whilst creating our stealomatic we also researched into the practicalities of what we wanted to achieve, in particular the powder paint fight and neon scene. We found that we would not be allowed to have a powder paint fight in the studio as it would ruin the permanent white backdrop, therefore we developed our idea deciding to base it outdoors, in a forest. Also the department did not have enough black light to light the studio for the neon scene, so we decided to use a smaller space and use this for head and shoulders performance shots like this...

Audience

Core

16-24 female, not typically girly, enjoys dance music, going out, dancing and seeing friends, going to festivals.

How the artist will appeal to them: the lead singer will be a bit of a tomboy as shown through her styling and body language.

How the music video will appeal: Prominent focus on female lead, the friendships portrayed, the dancing and partying throughout.

audience image & attitudes

Audience activities- festivals

Secondary 

16-24 male, likes dance music

How the artist will appeal to them: The two male DJ's

How the music video will appeal: Mixed gender friendships will be portrayed

Wider audience

Fans of dance music, all ages

How are artist will appeal: The genre is dance music

How the video will appeal: The constant dancing throughout

Dance music festival

Record Label

Our record label is called Technicity a small, specialist dance genre label, branching off mainstream label Universal.

When creating this label we looked at labels that other dance genre music were signed too. One label we looked at was Positivia, a subsidiary of EMI Records, and one of the biggest dance music labels in the UK. Accoding to their Wikipedia page "Positiva has always claimed that it is simply a record label which takes underground hits and pushes them to the forefront, and its influence on dance music is hard to ignore." Since this is our artists debut album this seemed like a good label to base ours on.

Avicii- An artist signed to Positivia Records

Stealomatic

Our stealomatic shows our influences behind the 4 main set ups to our video:
- A powder paint forest party
- A neon scene (mainly for lipsync)
- Baloons
- Projections (if we can get it to work)

It also establishes our artist (a female lead vocalist and 2 DJ's) and their styling.

We were influenced by the story of Alice in Wonderland when thinking of ideas, in particular the "eat me" cakes and were thinking of referencing it in our video. However we are still thinking of how to adapt some of the ideas.

There is a running theme of dancing throughout our stealomatic, we also aim to adopt this fun, natural dance style (as opposed to a chorography) throughout our video.

Artist

Our artist will be a mixed gender group, consisting of a female vocalist and two DJ's. This formation is fairly unique of this genre, however is beginning to become a trend through successful artists such as Clean Bandit and Alunageorge.

The female vocalist's image will be based on artists such as Katy B and AlunaGeorge as we thought their image connoted top boy as well as feminine offering audiences an alternative role model to the traditional female pop star.

Lead Female Vocals

Katy B- Styling, make up, jewellery

Katy B- styling

Alunageorge- styling and mixed gender artist

2 Male DJs

We like the styling of Disclosure, a male dj duo. We thought young male audiences would be able to identify with their casual look. 

Track

Chosen Track: Wankelmut, Emma Louise- My Head is A Jungle (MK Remix)





This track is a remix of "Jungle" by Emma Louise, an Australian singer songwriter. She is signed to record label Vertigo/Universal:





The remix is by Wankelmut, an upcoming but fairly unknown DJ based in Berlin.

The song is then remixed by MK (Mark Kinchen) a successful american DJ and music producer.

We chose it because we wanted to do a song in the dance genre and we thought the lyrics "my head is a jungle" worked well with our ideas.

The song is owned by Positivia Records

Our artist will be very different to both Wanklemut and Emma Louise, firstly they will be a group consisting of female vocal and two DJ's (male or female).

We have also decided to call our track "my head is a jungle" as we thought this connoted the main aspects of our music video and how we had interpreted the song to best target our audience.