Planning the editing styles

montage 

split screen

(tints-smashing-green screen)

juxtaposition of fast paced editing and slow paced editing

Planning the Artist's Image

Make-Up:

Planning the make up for the actors in our music video is important as we are aware that different make up style and the amount a person wears can connote different messages to the audience. 
We have four different make up looks:

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The first is a natural kind of make up that will be used when we are doing the scenes of her in her bedroom being sad and singing to the camera. We felt that a natural kind of make up with cream and neutral colours would be best as it would help to emphasis her vulnerability and how she is so overcome with sadness that she isn't even trying to cover up her emotions and feeling. Also having only a little bit of make up will help to make the audience make a deeper connection with her as they will feel more in tune with her feelings and this will make them feel more sorrow for her. 

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The second make up look that we have is the heavier, darker make up that we will be using for when she is doing the main performance sequence in front of the green screen. We felt that darker make up would be right as that is what the audience will assume she should have as she will be dressed up and when a artist is performing, you expect them to be unordinary and having natural make up would make her look normal. 
We were thinking of doing a brown smokey eye, with a darker pink for her lips to make them stand out more. 

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The third look is for the smashing of the glass hearts. We decided that she will have dark black eyes, with heavy eyeliner and dark eye shadow with bright dark red lips. We felt this would help to connote her anger to the audience and the audience connect the smashing to her anger.

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The fourth look is for when we are filming around London. She will have a normal day to day kind of make up, which will consist of eyeliner, mascara, blusher and a light colour for her lips. This is as we will be filming the couples date so she wouldn't have any make up on as she would have tried to make an effort but as it's a daytime date, she wouldn't have lots of make up on.

Hair:

Planning the hair is important as this can take time to do and it would make the filming last a lot longer if we hadn't planned it out and had to think on the spot. Also, we might change our minds whilst styling the actors hairs and this will cause more time in the filming schedule.
There are four different hair styles that we are doing:

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The first hair style is a wavy style which has fallen a little bit and looks like it's been slept in and looks a little messy. 
We have done this as she will be upset in this scene and she will be in her bedroom and it will help to show her vulnerability to the audience as it will show how she doesn't care how she looks and she is more concerned with her emotions. 

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The second hair style is for her performance and she will have big curly voluminous hair. This is due to the fact that she will be performing in this scene and we believe that her hair should look glamorous and it should make her look like ordinary and more extraordinary.

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In the glass heart smashing scene, Ashley will have dead straight hair and we felt that this would help to show her aggression and anger with the sharpness of her hair and it will make her look more slick and sharp. As a group, we also wanted to use a range of different hair styles as we felt this could help to emphasis the different emotions and feeling in the music video.

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The fourth and final hair style that we are doing is the naturally straight with a wave at the end which Ashley will have when we film around in the different London locations. We did this as we felt that for these scenes her hair should be styled but not too styled and over the top.

Clothing:

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For the scenes when Ashley is in the bedroom, she will be wearing baggy trousers and a basic shirt. The outfit will be looking like a pyjama set and this is due to the scene being the scene when Ashley is upset and crying on the bed. Her clothes will help to convey her vulnerability and also it shows that she isn't bothered by her appearance as she is overcome with emotion.

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For the performance, we decided that she needed to have a very flashy look as artists are meant to look unique and as far away from looking like a ordinary person as possible.

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bedroom - legging and baggy shirt
green screen - dressy dress and heels
glass heart ankle boots/ converses - all black outfit
london - blue dress, leather jacket and ankle boots

Planning the cinematography

Planning the cinematography shots are critical to the development and progression of the music video as if this isn't done, then the filming will be disorganised as the person filming would try many different angles as they wouldn't know where they want to place the camera. This can cause filming to be longer and this can make the editing longer as the person will have to roughly edit all the footage and then try to decide which would be best.

Close Up:

A close up shot is a shot that will normally just show the object being filmed and hardly any background. A close up is used to show the detail of what is happening in the scene.

We are using the close up in this scene to show the detail of the glass heart breaking as we are trying to convey the heartbreak emotion much more clearly to the audience as they are getting a visual of what the artist is singing about.

This is conventional to have close ups in pop videos , although normally it would be close ups of the artist but we have those from when she is performing.

This will effect the audience as they will understand the theme of the song more and they will be able to understand what the artist is singing about and how this is affecting her so much.

High Angle:

A high angle shot in normally used to show what is being filmed at a lower angle that the camera, which can make the object on screen seem weaker and also lets the audience see better into their life and emotions.

We decided as a group that we would use a high angle shot when the artist is ripping up the photo of her love interest and is upset.

This is conventionally used in pop love songs where the artist is upset, as they want to make the artist seems smaller than the audience when they are upset, which in turn will help the audience to feel like they can relate to her.

The higher angle will show her emotion more and it will help to make the audience understand her pain and feel pity & sympathy for her.

Long Shot:

A long shot is when you show most of the body of the object in the shot and it will be used to show motion in a music video normally.

We decided to use a long shot and show the artist running with a paper chain of hearts going behind her as she runs with it.

This is conventional as normally record labels will want to do shots of the artist's full body as this will show off their figure and as our artist is female, it is expected of her to show off her body & figure.

This is showing the audience that her emotions are free and anyone can see her love and heart ache and that she isn't hiding them, she is wearing them on her sleeve.

Mid Shot:

A mid shot is when a shot is shown to be showing half or a certain section of the object in the frame.

We decided to use a mid shot when the artist is ripping a picture of herself and the love interest together and this is due to the fact that we want the picture to be the main focus but we also want to see the action of her ripping it up too, which is why we chose to do a mid-shot instead of a close up.

This is conventional as the audience still gets to see the artist's actions and this will help to convey her emotions. She is also still the focus as she is on the image being ripped up and the audience will be able to see that.

This helps to create a deeper connection between the viewer and the artist as they will see her ripping it up and her actions will show what her emotions are. Also, as it's a mid shot, parts of her face will be shown at the top of the screen so they will see a little hint of her emotions on her face. 

Planning the setting & iconography

The purpose of the setting and the iconography is to help create the story in the viewer's head and iconography helps to convey all the codes and conventions to the audience. 

If our music video had no setting then it would be rather bland and basic as it would be a plain background and it probably wouldn't be appealing to the target audience. 

Iconography plays a huge part in the music video as it is the objects surrounding the actors and it is what viewers will look at to see if the music video fits with the genre that it has been placed in. 

Locations:

The first location is at the London Eye. We are going to have our two actors walk in the areas surrounding it as we want the London Eye in the background. We have chosen the London Eye as we felt this would show them to be more of a couple as many couples will go to the area where London Eye as there is many different attractions such as the London Aquarium and the London Dungeon. 

The second location is the Embankment area. We picked this area to film our main actor Ashley with the traffic going behind her and we can have her singing and performing to the camera. This will show how everything is changing quickly whilst in the actor's head, it is really moving slowly. 

The third location is the millennium bridge, which is where we will film two different scenes. We will have one scene which will be the main actor Ashley looking out over the bridge into the Thames looking sad and this will be after the break up. The other scene we will film will be of the two actors walking across the bridge holding hands and having a conversation, although the audience won't hear the dialogue. 

The fourth location will be the Strand. This is a long street that has many different building and shops on it and we felt that we could have Ashley walking along it where the more dark and gloomy building are, as they will connote her mood and feeling and place more emphasis on them. 

The fifth location will be outside, where we will do the smashing of the different hearts. For health and safety reasons, we decided to film outside as we felt that it would be safer and easier to clean up. Plus it would lower the risk of other objects being broken.

The sixth location will be inside a bedroom. We will have Ashley performing on the bed and we will also film scenes with Ashley acting upset and sad on the bed with lots of different pillows.

Iconography:

For the box sequence where Ashley is putting stuff away, we have pictures of the couple, jewellery and a heart pillow. We used these items throughout the entire music video and this helped us to keep everything connected and it made the narrative make more sense.

We used glass hearts in the music video, with either Ashley holding them or them being smashed and put into the chorus sequence. These were used as the song is called Glassheart and it helps the audience to connect the song to the lyrics and the titles. 

For the performance close up scene with Ashley lying down, we used many different items that we placed on the floor. This included different colour love signs, heart dishes with confetti in them and many different sized hearts. The colour scheme for the iconography in this scene was red and white, with the background being purple. The red and white contrasted against the light purple and stood out whilst not taking the attention away from the focus, which is the artist, Ashley.

Record Labels

Analysis of lyrics

We analysed the lyrics of the song 'Glassheart' together as a group in one of our group meetings. We wrote down everything that we discussed in the meeting on the two pieces of paper that are below:

Also in the group meeting, we decided that we should jot down the timing of the lyrics as this would help us with many different aspects of filming and editing and it would also help us to analysis the lyrics with the beat and tone changes.

Storyboards

We decided that the storyboards should be done as a group as we felt that it would make the process more organised and we wouldn't have to re-do or go over the storyboards, whereas if we did certain sections individually then the storyboard might not flow as well from one to another. 

Here are the storyboards that we did:

Research into chosen music genre

Evaluation

Sub culture theory:

A sub culture is a group of people who are united through a common value, i.e. music, clothes, politics, attitudes, etc. A sub culture is also a group who aren't in the mainstream, which in this moment is the pop genre for music. 

There are many different values for a subculture, such as conformity/rebellion as a sub culture is going against the conventional mainstream genre. A sub culture will be either traditional and want to keep the old methods and want to see them in their music videos or they will be 'neophyte', which is when they have new ideas and want to modernise the music they listen to. 

3 different people spoke about sub cultures and how they are created. They are Grant McCracken, CCCS & Hebdige.

Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken said that the postmodern world is full of diversity, dynamism & creativity which helps to appeal to a wide target audience and this is why record labels will rebrand a artist to make them have these values. He also said that if we look at the values and ideologies behind a artist then we will see that all sub cultures can't come from one culture. 

CCCS

The CCCS' view completely ignores McCracken's view on subcultures and they believe that sub cultures are a reaction to the mainstream culture (pop) and that it is up to the individual to decide what they would like to listen to. 

Hebdige

He came to the conclusion that even though subcultures seem to be different, if you look into the subculture in more detail, you will see that they are all determined and derived from the main culture. This could be due to the fact that the mainstream audience will get bored of the main culture so will come up with new styles of music that will have a subtle difference from the main genre.

Vox Pops

We decided to do some vox pops as part of our research as we felt that it would help us to narrow down the details about our music video and it helped us to see if we had made the right decisions regarding target audience and representations. 

Filming wise, we went around our school to find people of different ages to see what they thought of our idea as this would help us realise if we needed to change anything with our idea. We first wrote down all of our questions so that the filming would be more efficient and then we went and filmed. Afterwards we came make and edited the videos by cutting all the clips in the right places. This is what we had as our final vox pops:

We spoke to 5 different people in the end and we felt that we got a wide range of answers from the different people and that it helped us to be sure in what age range would be best for our target audience for our music video.

Pie Charts/Bar Charts

We decided to do pie charts and bar charts to analyse our data as we felt this would be the best way to interpret the results that we have and we would be able to see clearly what the majority answer was and what was the minority. 

Here are the results from the questionnaires:

Questionnaire

Questionnaires play a big part in seeing who your target audience should be for your product. A questionnaire will give you a insight into what people of different ages and genders what to see and what will appeal to them for a music video. When analysing the results from the questionnaire, I will be able to see which age group would prefer to see and who our ideas would appeal to the most. 

Here is an example of the questionnaire that we made:

We decided to survey 40 people with our questionnaire, as we felt this was a big enough number to give us a variety of answers whilst not being too big of a number which would give us too much data and would make the answers and results too unorganised.

We split the questionnaires between the three of us and then as we were in school, one of us went outside of school and sampled people who were of a different age and background, compared to the pupils and teachers at our school. 

Doing this meant that we had a range of the widespread general population and this will make our data more reliable. 

Also as it is a questionnaire, it lowers the social desirability bias, which means that people will answer more truthfully and this will give us more accurate results.

Copyright

The definition of copyright is the following; "the exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material".

Copyright is used in the music industry to keep artists from taking objects from people's songs and using it their own. It also helps an artist to keep their songs unique which will help them to stand out against all the other artists in their genre.

The first thing we did was work out who was the record label that released Leona Lewis' Glassheart song. After doing our research, we found that Syco, Simon Cowell's record label were who Leona Lewis was signed to. We found their email address, (admin@simoncowellonline.com) on their website and sent the following email to them:

We sent them another email as they hadn't replied to us after 1 month. Here is a screenshot of the second email that we sent.