Timeline

Media Timeline from Zheltov2000

BUG 56

Some classmates had the opportunity to visit the BFI  and attend the event BUG 56 hosted by Adam Buxton. They were shown a variety of videos by independent music labels which were special in their own way and were shown reactions to those videos, as well as reviews. Essentially, they were talked through the process of developing a successful music video and the difference among the ones they had the chance to look at, making an emphasis in their highlights. 

Here's the link to the event: http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2bb4450f5b

The main advice those who attended the BFI event could give us was to make our videos visually interesting and to keep our audience on the edge of their seats.

Probably, the main focus was on ELEMENT by Kendrick Lamar, not groundbraking but very engaging.

Jaime specially highlighted the potential of one of the videos they were shown, LIFT by Radiohead, because it has some similarities to our own idea. I believe that we could all analyse it and take out the best from it.

It has some elements of transitioning throough a whole building with a range of people. 

Potential Location

Location (lily's) de elenae81

Great Dane: Branding

As we need synergy throughout our campaign to construct our star image, we have thought of some ideas to convey the idea that our singer is real. His passion for the arts and graffiti can be shown through the digipack, which would ideally be a dooble (supposedly) created by him, I was thinking of the outline of a house or a person (linking it back to the music video's neighbours). The doodle must be simple and minimal, or we could have some sort of collage with the same colours and motifs as the video and the website. Even patterns or textures would be effective if thought of well enough, matching the themes of the overall campaign. Here are some ideas we have gathered together:

Whatever seems natural and urban, belonging to the youth culture and inspire by the fashion we wear everyday could be welcomed as potential ideas for our digipack. industrial materials such as plastic can work too as a symbol of packaging, and it could be an irony which the singer uses to underline the fact that nothing, not even him, is entirely organic anymore.

For the website, I have thought of something very graphic as well, with sound effects in each button and digital Photoshopped drawings, in a simple black and white coloured theme. Animal Collective's website is a great example.

Great Dane: Digital Moodboard

                           

Pitching to Luke. Feedback

We presented our main idea to Luke today. We showed him the song and the original video on youtube, which only has 144K views and has very simple shots and narrative, not very interesting as a piece. We talked him through the original artists, Cosmo Pyke, who is a South Londoner of our age range who, apart from skating, composes his songs from time to time and has released an EP. 

Luke appreciated our idea and liked the choice of shots, mood and atmosphere we had chosen for our treatment and, consequently, for the music video. He liked the colour patterns and the idea of a tracking shot, as well as the fact that we film a diverse community all living in the same house. 

However, he emphasised the fact that it would be almost impossible to turn our idea into reality due to the difficulty to find a suitable location to film the video interestingly. Luke argued that if we used Lily's or Honor's house, the rooms would look like somewhere where parents live, rather than like a groovy location with inspiring characters interacting with each other.

I also think that we need to develop further our idea of the skinheads dancing as a link between the artist lip syncing in the basement and the people living upstairs in the various rooms as we don't have much detail regarding that aspect yet.

Jason, our teacher, has offered to show us the basement in Ewhurst, one of our boarding houses, and the Annex, which supposedly looks like a 5 star hotel. I will definitely consider this location, but I don't think that is the look that we are initially aiming for. Also, I am starting to think that our initial idea, the Dinner Oarty one, could have more potential than this one we are going for.

Great Dane: Star Image & Audience

In this quick video I talk about our ideas regarding the artist (solo singer) behind the song "Great Dane" which we have prepared the concept for. I explain our unique selling point and the image we want to sell, as well as comparing him to similar artists and referencing them. 

Great Dane Treatment

As the week evolves, we have decided as a group that the main idea we are going to develop from now on is "Great Dane" by Cosmo Pyke, as it is the one most people are interested and willing to carry out. We have made a treatment for it inspired in Luke's talk from last week, who came to teach us a lesson on pitching ideas for music videos and creating music videos and campaigns for industrial purposes. This should prove very helpful by the time we pitch the idea we are going for to Luke himself.

Great dane (house tour) treatment de elenae81

Group Idea 2

For the second idea, we want to play around with Cosmo Pyke's "Great Dane". It is a very chilled song, which means the video's rythm would be calm. The singer is an organic artist who enjoys connecting with his followers and sharing opinions with them. He has a very specific identity and is not too influenced by popular trends. 

In the music video, we want to include a Great Dane dog, as a reference to the title of the song. A big part of the video would be a tracking shot going through a whole house with several stories, with different people in each room involved in different tasks like typing, making tea (having the liquid dropping but the person in a freeze), always looking straight at the camera. Then we could go out to the garden and have a point of view shot of someone holding the dog. We are following it and alternating with the performance element of the singer. Inside the house, the people are standing still (as in the mannequin challenge). It would be interesting to have people of all ages and ethnicities to symbolyse a sort of blogal house, like we are everywhere and nowhere. The dog could be connecting all of them, being in the corner of each frame.

The singer could be both in the basement of the house, which we can even recreate in the studio, but we need to make it clear that we are looking at the same house. That way, we would have a sense of alienation between the contrast of the families upstairs and the singer in the semi darkness by himself.

Lily has a house in Guildford, which means that we could use it in the shooting day. It would be an easy option and the Victorian style is attractive. 

We also have a friend with a bigger house which we could potentially use, also nearby.

Concept for Song "In My Dreams": Audience

Our Target Audience for our Initial Idea would be young university artsy students with a passion for modern art, philosophy and film. They would be updated in the last trends but would be selective as to which ones to follow. Though being committed and interested in politics and other matters, they would enjoy as much going out and partying, as well as DJs and live music. They would certainly listen to our band every month, though not showing the other worldy obsession which is associated with the fandom of One Direction or similar. 

We have created an Instagram profile belonging to a girl who consistently attends music festivals and posts effortless sketches and pieces of artwork that strike her in the exhibitions she often visits, writing poems that go with them and never giving away too many feelings.

However, it is easy to conclude that she is a sensible person, which makes her enjoy this rock sentimental music which certainly has a romantic vibe overall, and the trippy side of it is associated with the need to evade and party to escape from the stress of everyday life and contemplate art in an inner way.

Concept for Song "In My Dreams"

"In My Dreams" by Scanners is one of the songs that we considered the most. Scanners is a fairly unknown female band of indie rock. The song's lyrics are about dreams and an alternative reality, which means that they match our idea about the dinner. The rythm and intensity of the vocals build up, which would also match the idea because, as the dinner progresses, the action gets more frantic.

The image of the band would be very organic. It would be composed of three young women with pale skin and distinctive face features who are dressed in suits like the rest of the men of the dinner. I think having a female band would certainly help bring some individuality to the video, and they would be easily distinguishable from the other guests.

As the video goes on, their make up would become trippy and more and more extreme and dark. Throughout all the campaign, I want to create an image of young experimental artists who encourage having fun but, in their daily life, despite having weird and modern looks, promote responsibility and maturity. They would have two faces, one for the stage and one for home, though in both they would be very engaged with the contemporary art scene.

Initial Group Idea

Once we started talking in our group, we found out we had some interests in common: we wanted to do an upbeat "trippy" video with a powerful narrative. We twisted the idea I presented to them about the formal dinner, but rejecting the song "Chameleon" because it got quite repetitive and boring. We want to film the band with some other guests dressed in suits having dinner (we have also considered a tea party), but really symbolising the fact that they have consumed some kind of magic mushrooms. The band is composed of four members, which are characters who will be developing throughout the video. 

The idea is to have a room inside a room, let's say, an alternative reality. While in the beginning, the dinner seems completely ordinary, when the effects of the mushrooms kick in, the guests start seeing things differently. The action takes place around them, to eventually cut to shots just in one reality or the other. For instance, we would have the band members jumping around in space hoppers symbolising the chairs. Also, they would have hang a piñata filled with liquid and eventually pop it as a metaphor of their frustrations. 

Initially, most of the filming would take place indoors, either in a suitable location or the studio (mainly for the trippy sections, as the lighting there is more effective). We would potentially include some shots in the forest. 

We want the psychedelic sequences to be very diferentiated from the normal ones, as if we are going into people's minds. We should achieve some of this in the editing stage, by altering colours.

We have been searching for suitable songs, though as we have very distinctive music tastes, we could barely find any which fit with our narrative and we all like. However, we all agreed that the song "In My Dreams", which I was going to use for my third idea, could be an option due to the rythm and the lyrics.

Visual Wordmap

We have created two wordmaps which have some ideas in common as a group.

Getting into our Groups

Today, we got assigned into our groups. From left to right, Petr Zheltov, Jaime Fraser-Pye (Ginger Boy), Lily Kaye and myself. I hope we work well together.

                          

Brief & Feedback

This year, we have been asked to think about a number of details in order to create a successful music campaign for a certain star image we create. This includes coming up with and idea for the music video, something I have been brainstorming for during summer, and then designing an according digipack and webpage. All of these products have to relate to each other in a simbiotic co-dependency. They will conform to certain stereotyped views about a star image or a genre that we will want to emulate.

On Thursday, I presented my second idea as I thought it has a lot of potential and it is easier/more attractive to explain to a group of people than my first idea, which is not as feasable due to the fact that the song is in a foreign language. Therefore, I explained my idea for the song "Chamaleon" by Jacco Gardner and, though the song could seem a bit boring to my audience, they accepted it as it belongs to an alternative genre of music. Overall, my idea was successful and I am satisfied with all the different elements I had come up with in order to construct a good narrative as the pillar of the music video. I believe it was more complete than other ideas whose approach was slightly vague and ambiguous. However, though my idea is quite straightforward and complete, it can always evolve to something else or merge with others, it is not a rigid thing rather than a cluster of resources which could even work for a different song.

I feel like I would work especially well with my fellow classmate Franek as his song also has a touch of neo-phychedelia and his approach is similar: he also wants to base his video on an unusual narrative, far from clichés, including long sequences of natural elements and landscapes. From my point of view, we would collaborate with each other to reach the perfect combination of our ideas. Also, as I am very organised while he is more easily distracted, I would be helpful. Jaime has a similar music taste to me too, and his ideas are often well structured.

On Monday, we will find out our groups and will start brainstorming. I'm looking forward to that.