Framing and composition of shots

Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a compositional rule in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

















Head room
Headroom refers to the distance between the top of the subject's head and the top of the frame, but the term is sometimes used instead of lead room, nose room or looking room to include the sense of space on both sides of the image. Headroom changes as the camera zooms in or out, and the camera must simultaneously tilt up or down to keep the center of interest approximately one-third of the way down from the top of the frame. The closer the subject, the less headroom needed. In extreme close-ups, the top of the head is out of the frame, but the concept of headroom still applies via the rule of thirds.
One of the most common mistakes that casual camera users make is to have too much headroom - too much space above the subject's head.

Questionnaire

We have made our questionnaire and started to hand it out to people to fill in to help us with our research and make our music video suitable for our audience.

These are our questions that we have asked and I will put the results up when we get them all in:

1. How old are you?
-14 [ ] 14-16 [ ] 17-20 [ ] 21-25 [ ] 25-30 [ ] 30+ [ ]

2. Are you male or female?
Male [ ] Female [ ]

3. How do you usually watch music videos?
TV [ ] Internet [ ] Download [ ] Other [ ]

4. What is your favourite genre?
Rock [ ] Pop [ ] Alternative [ ] Jazz [ ] RnB [ ] Heavy metal [ ] Classical [ ] Other [ ]

5. How often do you watch music videos?
Never [ ] Everyday [ ] Every week [ ] Every few weeks [ ] Rarely [ ]

6. Do you prefer funny or serious music videos?
Funny [ ] Serious [ ]

7. Do you prefer music videos that are reaistic or non realistic?
Realistic [ ] Non realistic [ ]

8. What are your expectations of rock music videos?

9. How do you interpret the lyrics "She's such a charmer"?

10. What music channel would you expect to see a Kings of Leon music video on?

11. What colours do you think represent the rock genre? and why?

I think that we have a wide variety of questions that will help us gain an understanding of what people want from a music video and what will work and we also used a mix of open and closed questions throughout the questionnaire.

Lip Syncing

We also used the flip cameras to practice lip syncing that we will be using in our music video. Charlotte from our group is going to be the girl that features in our video as the obsessed fan as we thought it would be easy to use someone in our group as we know they will be reliable and know the sort of results we want from our video. We are also already using people from outside the group to be our band in the video so we thought it would be nice to also have someone from the group in it too.

For the parts of the song where charlotte will be lip syncing it will mainly be extreme close ups of her mouth which makes it even more important to be perfect. We practised and put it in black and white because that's what our video is going to be shot in, however when we do the real thing, we will have Charlotte's lips bright red with lipstick to stand out as seductive and feminine.

Although this practice video is not perfect, we have learnt how to do it and hopefully when we do it for our real video we will have more experience so we can make it perfect.

Stage composition

Last week our group decided to use our flip cameras to try out the stage composition for our band in our school hall on the stage. We weren't sure if the school stage would be too big and look wrong for our video so we tried it out and by putting it in black and white decided that it may look quite good. We also said that if we cover the back and sides of the stage with big black coverings that Molly has at her church, we will be able to make the stage look suitable. We decided though that rather than trying to create a proper performance and having to find an audience to fill the hall which could look terrible and fake, we will make out the band are just at a casual practice. We gave eachother roles from the band and postitioned ourselves on stage to see what it looked like. Sarah was lead singer, Charlotte was bass, Molly was guitar and I was drums and this is what it looked like:

Questionnaire

We are creating a questionnaire as a group to gain audience feedback about music videos. This will help us to gain more ideas for our own music video because it will give us an understanding of the audience we are aiming our video at and what their expectations are.

The questions we will ask people will help us find out:
Who are our audience?
Where are they?
How do they access music videos?
What are their expectations of a music video from our rock genre?
What do they want in a music video?

We will ask a variety a qualitative and quantitative questions to gain a more detailed and personal response.
We will have to think about how we will distribute the questionnaire? whether it is face to face or on the internet on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Andrew Goodwin's analysis of music videos

When we were at the workshop at RichMix, Pete Fraser told us about Andrew Goodwin's theory in his book called "Dancing in the Distraction Factory" (Routledge 1992).
He has 6 points which he believes need to be included in a music video to make it successful:

1. They must demonstrate genre conventions - e.g stage performance for rock bands and a dance routine for girl bands

2. There must be a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals - to illustrate or amplify the lyrics

3. There must be a relationship between the music and the visuals - to illustrate or amplify the music, e.g use the beat of the song

4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs that run which recur across their work - their own recognisable creative style

5. There must be frequent reference to looking and the notion of looking - e.g screens within screens or voyeuristic treatment of the female body

6. There is often intertexual reference - to films, programmes or other music videos

We will consider these points when completing our storyboard for our own video and have already had an idea on how to include voyerism. We thought we could have the lead singer of our band walking into the obsessed fans' house and seeing lots of pictures of himself up around her room and looking at them in shock or disbelief.

Rich Mix

On the 9th November our media class went to Rich Mix which is an arts centre in Bethnal Green. We went to a work shop about music videos called "From MTV to Youtube" which lasted the whole day and really helped us with ideas and tips for our own music video coursework.

In the morning we had a session with the head examiner from the OCR media studies, Pete Fraser. He went over the history of music videos starting from the 1930's when there was the first experimental type of music video by Len Lye. He also gave us his 10 top tips for when we are making our own music video for our coursework which included keeping our concept simple and planning as well as we can. He also showed us some examples of past student music videos which I found useful because we could see the kind of standard of the videos from previous years and from different schools around the country. In the afternoon we had 2 more speakers who presented to us which I thought was the most interesting part of the day. First of all a music video producer, Liz Kessler, spoke to us about how to get into the media industry and about her own experiences. She also shared with us examples of her own work that she had produced which included artists such as Will Young and a new pop star called Lissie. The second part of the afternoon was run by a music video director called Corin Hardy who was very interesting and inspiring to listen to. He told us about how he got into his job and about the 30 minute feature film he made called "Butterfly" that took him 5 years to make. This film opened doors for him as the band "Keane"'s manager saw his film when it was entered into a film festival and asked Corin if he would make a music video for Keane. This led him to direct a number of music videos for bands such as The Horrors, Biffy Clyro and The Prodigy. We also had an exercise set during our lunch break which we had to complete. In our school groups we had to think of a concept for a music video for the song "God and Satan" by Biffy Clyro. We then nominated one person from our school to pitch our ideas to Corin Hardy and Liz Kessler infront of the other 6 schools there.

I really enjoyed the day and think it really helped us to get some important tips and ideas for our own music video.

We filmed some parts of the day with our flip camera which I will upload soon.

Story board practise

To have a go at creating a storyboarding and help us with our own storyboard, we used a song of the same genre, and same band, to draw a storyboard for it in practise for our own.

We chose the song "On Call" By Kings of Leon as we thought that by it being the same band it would be the closest match to our own song. We only storyboarded the very begninning of the song just to give us an idea and we actually found it quite hard because there was not many vocals but there were a lot of different shots for the instrument parts.

This is the song that we used but unfortunatly the embed code has been disabled so this is the link to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DK_8VZm_Dg&ob=av2e

This is our story board that we created for the first few lines of the song:



We also gained inspiration from this video as we liked the opening shot of the feet walking along and have decided that we can adapt this idea and fit it into to our theme of obsession and put it into our own video. We thought that we could have the feet of all the band members walking along the street and then a few steps afterwards have the obsessed fan walking in the same direction to give the idea that she is following them or always near them.

Audience theory

What is audience theory?
Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies.
With a specific focus on rhetoric, some, such as Walter Ong, have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the text is addressing. Others, such as Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor have said writers and speakers actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Some others like Ede and Lunsford try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is "fictionalized," as Ong would say, but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience.

What is the Hypodermic Syringe effect?
The hypodermic syringe model is a model of communications also referred to as the "magic bullet" perspective, or the transmission-belt model. Essentially, this model holds that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviorism and is largely considered obsolete today. The hypodermic syringe theory implied that mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behaviour change.