Celebrities In The Media

Practise Shots

These practise shots we would like to include in our music video as well as our digipack. The shot idea is Ellie (our character for our narrative) with her friends in a photo booth dressed up, messing around and having fun. This idea goes well with our narrative as it shows Ellie getting over her boyfriend as she is out having a good time.

We plan to use this footage on the lyrics "Freeze frame, I dodged that shot, the bigger pictures not good enough". Along with the involving the narrative within these shots my group and I also had the idea of the performer lip syncing the song in the photo booth dressed up while all the friends in the background are frozen in a picture like state.

Audience Review

This task was extremely helpful as it helped us gain knowledge of what different types of audiences thought of our song. Doing this abled us to make changes to our original ideas and also improve them to please the audience.

Email to artist

Music Video Inspiration

My group and I like this video and the editing presented in it. The changed from black and white to bright colours keeps the audience drawn in and entertained. Similarly to this music video our target audience will be teenagers, mainly female. Teenagers tend to get bored quite quickly and easily, therefore changing the video in and out of black and white and colour will keep them watching.



At the beginning of Ellie Goulding's music video, 'Burn', we see Goulding standing on a runway, there is a close up shot of her just as she starts singing and the lighting is very bright. The lighting used through out the entire video is interesting and odd, we would like to incorporate this in our music video, again to keep the audience drawn in. Also towards the end of the video Goulding in standing in front of a field of lights. This is where we got the inspiration and idea to use the location of Granary square fountains. We also would like to incorporate a large group of people in our video, just like Goulding does. However it may be hard to get a extremely large group like Goulding does so will we need to think of alternative ideas in case this becomes a difficult challenge.

Production Diary

Week 7

This week was assessment week, therefore, in this lesson we had to work in exam conditions, over looking our  AS blogs and explaining the strengths and weaknesses that were evident, explaining them in an essay. We also had to compare them with what we will do differently this year in our A2 blogs in order to achieve a high, better grade at the end of the year. I found that the originality of my blog wasn't of the highest standard therefore this was defiantly something I would aim to improve this year. As this media lesson was my only lesson today I decided to do more media work throughout my day and study periods. I looked deeply into the conventions of different genre music videos and made mind maps to then put onto my blog. Hand writing the mind maps helped to make the information I had found out stay fresh in my mind. 

In the next lesson my group and I decided it would be good to get research on our audience to ensure what we are doing is on the right lines and we can continue our research to meet their needs. It helped us learn that indie and R&B are popular, but pop have the most exciting videos, especially to our target audience. Many people said  that they enjoy concept but like to see lots of performance too. We have used these aspects to really get to know our genre which is Indie with a hint of R&B. Thinking about what our audience wanted to see, we started thinking about ideas for concept shots. 

Teacher assessment - general

A Level Media Progress Check - Gergia
Assessed by	NSE - Teacher
Focus of assessment		General
Relevant assessment criteria		Planning and research evidence will be complete and detailed.
Evidence of progress/ evidence of meeting criteria		Very good start to your blog. You are evaluating most of your posts/ideas. You have most of the work on there and you are beginning to use new ways to present your ideas.
Areas to work on next/ ideas to consider		Ensure your production diary is as detailed as possible, incorporating this feedback. Ensure labels are put on your blog homepage, as well as on each post! Ensure you complete as much individual research/planning as you can, to show the moderator your individual talent.
Additional comments

Teacher assessment - digipak research

A Level Media Progress Check - Georgia
	Assessed by		NSE - Teacher
Focus of assessment		digipak research
Relevant assessment criteria		There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.
Evidence of progress/ evidence of meeting criteria		A good analysis of each of the digipaks, considering purpose and the layout.
Areas to work on next/ ideas to consider		If you could think about how these entice the audience and a more detailed look into the use of colour and costume. Put re-created digipak onto a new post and explore what you learnt.
Additional comments		Good use of a new web 2.0 tool

Mood Board

Editing Practise

To get practise for when it comes to editing my groups music video I decided to create a short clip involving different editing techniques. The clip shows the basic video effects that can be used on the Premier Pro software. Even though I already had experience editing with Premier Pro from AS level it was still very helpful. I discovered some effects I didn't know about and gained more knowledge on how to use the software to full advantage. I'm confident that by practicing with editing and the software it will be less time consuming when editing my final piece.

Possible Locations

So far we have thought about going to London and filming in the crowded, fun locations to show she is getting out and having fun, getting over her boyfriend. If we show her interacting with people it will hopefully give off the impression that she has a better time without her ex-boyfriend, linking to the title of the song 'Days without you'.

Usually in pop music videos entertaining locations to keep the teen audience drawn in. An interesting location we found was Granary Square fountains. We plan to travel around London filming during the day and then travel to the fountains during the night time. Of a night time the fountains light up which will be a cool and interesting background to shoot in front of.

As London will be a challenging place to get to and as we will need to film a lot we have also come up with shooting ideas outside of London. For example we have access to a car so will use this to our advantage to get to places such as fields or food places.

We have also thought of shots that will relate to our target audience. For example teens will relate to locations such as a skate park, park, food places and a highstreet full of shops.

Teacher assessment - codes and conventions

A Level Media Progress Check - Georgia
	Assessed by		NSE - Teacher
Focus of assessment		Music video codes and conventions
Relevant assessment criteria		There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.
Evidence of progress/ evidence of meeting criteria		You have looked into a clear range of codes and conventions, generically and for different genres.
Areas to work on next/ ideas to consider		If you could be clear about how this will help you for your own planning/production. Could you type this up, using a web 2.0 tool?
Additional comments

Star Branding

Music Video Idea

Digipack research

Digipack ideas

For our digipak we wanted one of the images to be black and white with one thing in colour. We decided that in our music video our performer will be wearing brightly coloured lips, which will be our concept. With this in mind we decided we would have everything black and white and her lips in colour, keeping the coloured lip theme throughout our work. As the performers lips will stand out a lot I think the rest of her make-up should be simple so it doesn't distract from the rest of her face.

Production Diary

Week 6

This lesson I made improvements to my blog from the comments that my classmate left of my blog, from the peer assessment task. I also updated my production diary so I could keep on track. After this I began to do research into digipaks. As well as studying and analysing real life digipaks we were also to come up with some small ideas of what we wanted our digipak to possibly look like and what things we would want included.

Next lesson we began to research possible songs and ideas to go with them. We were to look at at least three songs and create three solid different ideas to go with them. Once we had these ideas we had to present to the class and then get feedback to help us with our decision. Listening to everyone feedback was really helpful in making our decision. This week was a good week as we had finally got an idea to start our coursework.  

Assesment

Assessment:
In my AS year the first thing I looked at was key features revolving around a film opening. Within this I expanded my knowledge on what to expect in film openings of all different genres, also learning about the conventions of each genre. However this piece of research was very brief as I had only bullet pointed facts and not explained them. When learning about the conventions of different genre music videos I will expand on them and look at them in much more depth. Along with this I will also look more at my specific genre. I did not do enough of this at AS and feel if I did it could have had a positive effect on my opening and end grade. When looking through my blog, at my research and planning, I found that I had only analysed one or two film openings of the genre I was doing in detail, and hadn’t done enough research into title sequences. This affected my group when editing our piece as we originally put our titles in the wrong order, limiting the time we had left to complete our final film opening.  When I’m looking at key features of a music video in my A2 work I will analyse three or four videos to make sure I understand what my video needs to include. Hopefully this will avoid any time consuming mistakes. Again another mistake was made in my AS research and planning area. My blog only had one piece of work on production logos; however it was only showing how our logo had developed, as we had changed it several times.  Therefore I had no evidence on my blog of actual research into real production logos. We left our logo to the very end, therefore, with little research and no inspiration we struggled trying to come up with a good idea. Lastly we made a shooting schedule, which was a good idea, however sometimes the schedule didn’t end up working for everyone and therefore we missed some shoots. When filming my music video it will be essential to my group and I to make a schedule and stick to it as the music video will be much longer than our film opening, meaning we will need more footage.

Despite the weaknesses of my research and planning there is also some strengths. We went into a lot of depth about mise en scene. This was very helpful as we knew what props, clothing and locations we needed to use. It was also very helpful in managing our time. I think we also considered our target audience well; we did this by having our target audience watch our opening then give us feedback.  We then used the feedback to improve our opening and cater better for our audience members.  I will incorporate this in my AS work.

To better my grade at AS I will be finding different ways to present my work.  All my A2 work was either presented on PowerPoint, word or prezzi. The only original thing my group and I did was creating a moving picture video and added a voice over. If I do more original things with my work this year I am confident I will get a much better grade than last year. Lastly before filming we need to take some practice footage, as we did not do this last year. This will hopefully help us when struggling  to come up with shot ideas.