Filming a band (Practice)

As a class we filmed a band today in order to see how our teacher directed them and also to gain further firsthand experience about the best ways to gain good usable footage. We all took turns using the cameras and working with different shot types, we had static shots, several roaming shots, shots from back stage and dolly shots using a wheelchair in order to gain a smooth movement from the camera.

I've found that filming in this way where everyone is moving at once and several different shots are being filmed simultaneously is really helpful to me in that I've now worked in a very different way to how I worked in not only the AS but also in my GCSE. It means that I know realise that it is feasible to film with more than one camera at a time and it's ok to have people or objects get in the way of some shots sometimes as it creates interesting cuts and unusual shots.

This process is completely different to any other way in which i've filmed before and allows for a lot more creative freedom for the camera people but also for the band  members. It means that there is less need for every shot to be exactly the same and allows for more movement. And all of this means that the overall footage will be more interesting and cause more interest from the audience members.

As a result of this workshop I will now try to include a much wider variety of shots and create a more interesting video. I will also try to use more interesting methods to gain a range of aesthetically appealing shots.

Website analysis

http://www.franzferdinand.com/

The Franz Ferdinand website is aimed at  primary target audience of reformers (psychographic) who are more interested in values than in status. For example they make decisions based upon the morals and values of themselves or companies that they might choose to associate themselves with. They unlike Aspirers are uninterested in the appearance, fame and fortune of their artists, instead caring more about the music itself.  

The website for Franz Ferdinand is primarily white with a bold logo that continually changes in it's style/appearance, for example appearing as orange or black orange and red etc. It makes extensive use of white space and appears very uncluttered. The simple yet stylish layout of the front page is engaging to the primary target audience because it doesn't try to make itself stand out or seem overly glamourous, it focuses entirely on the music instead of the band and as such appeals to the reformist target audiences values. It also makes wide use of interactive buttons in order to direct people to other pages for example the buttons surrounding the title button all swipe away and change when scrolled over and lets people know what is on the landing page connected to that image/button. 

The website itself appears to go against all of the typical conventions of successful artist websites, it has no real use of a typical hero shot, with the main image on the front page being a black and white performance photograph that moves aside when you scroll over is and becomes a button that takes you to information about their shows. 

The website links to several landing pages, for example, it links to a landing page which discusses their shows, one for their music, one for film and one for their shop. It also has a landing page called personnel which would provide the audience with background information on the band as a whole and the individual members. This has been done in order to cater for the fans interest in the band members and applies to Blumler and Katz's theory of surveillance as one of the reasons for people to consume media texts.   

The website itself shows no real types of convergence and stays solely focused upon the band and their music with no advertisements of other bands and the only offsite links being to their Facebook, Twitter and Myspace pages. 

Primary Research- Focus Groups

Today my group decided to work out which types of research we would be conducting, how we would conduct it and what we intend to find out. It was decided that I would be creating the questions for the focus group as well as research which videos I would show to the group. We decided that we would be conducting internet research as the project progressed and questionnaires we would distribute before conducting our focus group as the questionnaire responses would help us to choose our sample. We also discussed the benefits of conducting some interviews and have decided that overall use of interviews will greatly help us to gain some in depth understanding of what people like to see in music videos as well as what it is that hey expect to see. We've decided that we would benefit most from asking a music teacher a media teacher and someone who considers themselves to be a big fan of indie music.
We split these types of research up among the group members and decided that;

• I would write up the focus group questions and sort out the samples that participants would see as well as work out how to best record the information we gain.
• Ryan would write up the questionnaire questions and work out how best to distribute them in order to gain a variety of results. 
• Jamie would work out what we would ask our interviewee's in the interviews and who best to use in order to gain the best results.
• Teni would conduct the bulk of the internet research and look at some other bands of the same genre as comparison to our own band in order to see what it is we need to achieve. 

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For my part of the primary research I am working out the details of our focus group, I have decided with my group that the following are the questions we will be asking the group.

• Which of the videos that we have shown you is your favourite?
• Why did you prefer this video?
• What was it about the video that you felt was most appealing?
• What would you like to see in a  video of this genre?
•  Why do you think this would fit in with this genre?
• Why would you like to see this?

We are going to show at most 2 music videos of our intended genre (indie-rock) the following is my full potential list which I will be reducing in due course. 

Lip Syncing task

I recently completed a task in lip syncing, wherein I chose a song that I felt I confidently knew the lyrics for and proceeded to mime the song in front of the mac's camera. This exercise was intended to teach us the difficulties of lip syncing and also prepare us for the process of editing together the performance with the lyrics.

At first I chose a video with the lyrics of my song so that I would be able to hear the song and read the words as I went just in case I had any difficulties with the words. I had chosen to lip sync the song "All I need" by 'Within Temptation' as this is a song that I am very fond of and I'm sure that I know the lyrics well enough to accurately lip sync to them. I decided to do two takes showing me at different angles but with no incidental shots as I felt that generally they would be inappropriate based on the nature of the song. I then converted the audio from the same video I used for filming into an audio track and put it along with the footage into final cut I proceeded to sync the audio with the imagery and moved the footage onto different tracks and cut out the parts of the 1st track I felt were not as good as some of the shots I had in my 2nd lot of footage.

I think that overall the filming went as well as could be expected and the results were fairly good as I did sync with the words quite well. This meant the the editing process was also much more successful and in fact the end result showed decent syncing with the words and showed good syncing with the two different pieces of footage. I think that this activity has helped me a lot with preparing me for the actual coursework that I will soon be producing.

The main difficulty of the exercise was getting past my shy nature and actually performing the song even just to the mac. However I was able to overcome this and film the song twice. The other main issue was ensuring that the footage was in sync with the audio and cutting away from one footage track to the other at the appropriate time.

Song Choice and Permission

Today my group came to a decision as to which song we would be using in our Music video, We have chosen to use "Space Elevator" by The Smiling lies, who are a new independent band.

We, have also requested for permission from the band to use their song on the website ReverbNation. com

Richard Dyer's star theory- Mika

MIKA Richard Dyer

Iconography

Coldplay Iconography