Target Market Research

For our music video, we are trying to aim it towards our demographic of teenagers and people in their 20s, possibly stretching into early 30s. On average we are going for people typically aged 16-30. 

Fall Out Boy is a rock band but the song we have chosen from them is more of a soft rock rather than really heavy and so this gives us quite a different typical target market because it isn't a particularly heavy rock song which was a diversion for FOB from their normal tracks. We understand this but we want our band to be represented in a similar way to FOB but without the extreme heavy rock identity that comes with the majority of their other songs.

Typically, we also think that our target audience is going to be primarily male due to the following of FOB already and the style of music that it is but FOB do have some female fans as well which is something that we also want to aim for along with the song we chose being so different to FOB's typical songs.

The main thing we wanted target audience feedback on was our logo for our band and so we asked a few people out of the 3 options we had, which one they liked best. We took a few pictures of some of our target audience with their favourite logo and also came back with some good results.

Overall, we came to the conclusion that the bottom two logos on the sheet were the most popular but the most popular out of the three was the bottom one with the triangles so we think this is the one that we will probably be going with. When we come to do our digipak and advert this decision will become more clear depending on the colour scheme and layout we decide to go for but the bottom two are definitely the most popular which is what we predicted in the first place.

We created a pie chart on excel to show which logo was the most popular.  We noticed that logo 3, which was the one with triangles, got over 50% of the votes.  Obviously, we chose to use this logo.

Recording Equipment

Before we can start filming our video we must take into account the types of  shots which we are trying to achieve. From this, we are now determining which of the equipment we can use to help us achieve our desired shots and angles in our video.

After discussing what shots we need we have organised which pieces of equipment that we shall be using for the performance and narrative aspects of the video. The following list of equipment are what we have decided on using at some point throughout the video.

Camera - we will be using a Nikon camera D5100 which will be used to film the majority if not all of our footage for both the performance and the narrative.

Tripod - We are going to use a standard tripod and possibly a heavy tripod in order to get a steady and focused camera. This will be good when filming shots in which there is little movement in them as it can pan very easily and steadily.

Additional Lens - We may decide to use different lenses in order to achieve unique effects throughout the video to show different atmospheres and make shots appear more  professional than just the standard lens.

Crane - We'd like to use this in order to be able to change the height of a shot part way through a take which creates a far more professional look in use. This would be quite difficult to assemble when filming parts of the narrative, such as in the nightclub, but in terms of performance, it would give us our desired effect. it also means we can take a high angle and move it with ease to a low angle. 

Lighting - We are still to decide on the number of lights we would like to use but we do now know that we want to have at least 2-4 LEDs as fewer than that would mean that our footage would turn out too dark and so would otherwise render our footage useless.

Go-Pro - We have an idea fro a shot that we would like to film under water, therefore we are thinking of using a go-pro to achieve this effect. 

Roles Within Our Group

We have now started to think about more specific roles within our group in order to make sure everything runs smoothly. 

We are all putting in an even input into all areas but we are all in charge of certain areas to make sure that everything gets done in good time.

Annabelle

• Recruiting of our actors - Annabelle has found us our main actors for the video in the narrative shots.
• Costume - Annabelle was also in charge of deciding what sort of clothing each person should wear in the video in order to communicate the atmosphere and tone of the narrative as well as the identity of the band.
• Editing - Annabelle is most comfortable using Premiere Pro therefore will be taking on most of the editing.

Becca

• Organising timetables - We needed to find out when everyone was free including all of our actors so we created a huge timetable that tells everyone in the group when certain actors are free and also when the drama studio is free to be used for filming as well.
• Booking equipment - We need to be organised when it comes to booking out the equipment we need so Becca is in charge of making sure that we book equipment out in enough advance to ensure we get the equipment we need when we need it.

Jamie

• Locations - Jamie has so far spent a lot of time on Google Maps looking at potential locations in and around Newcastle and Gateshead areas for us to film in.
• Band members - Jamie has also recruited most of the band members that we are using in the video.

James



• Head of blog - James has done a lot of blog organising making sure certain posts were written and making sure everyone takes part in writing the blog. He also makes sure that everything goes up on the blog in plenty of time and is done in a way that we can use it when we are out and about filming.

Logo Ideas

Every known band has their own logo and therefore so must ours. We have brainstormed some ideas to come up with a logo fitting to our bands image. This had led us to think about what we'd like to represent the band and how we feel it should look whilst taking into account the themes of our video and the genre of the album. After trying different things in Photoshop, here are a few prototypes of some logos we may possibly use for our band. 

This logo was inspired by googling the words 'urban' and 'rapture' to see what connotations were linked to them. For the word, 'urban', there were lots of images of city landscapes/skylines and the word, 'rapture', had again skylines but with a green light/mist shinning through the buildings. We all agreed that we liked this design as it appears extremely modern however it may be too big and complicated for a band logo which is something that we have found, isn't something that you will see with many other band logos.

This was our second logo, it's really basic and uses only black, white and grey which isn't the most exciting colour pallet to represent a pop rock band. It uses a basic white circle which has a glowing white/grey effect coming from it. To contrast it is placed on a plain black background and the words 'Urban Rapture' are placed over in an edgy font. This is still a possibility for us in the choosing of our band logo, however, what is indisputable is it's likeness to the film, the ring.

The third and final logo is the one we favour the most as a group as we really like the bright colours which really makes the logo stand out and works really well with it being quite a simple design. The edgy black font also works really well in the middle of this logo as it stands out against the bright colours. This design, although simple is definitely the most effective and eye catching.

The reason we aren't fully decided on the logo between the last two options is because we don't really know how our advert or digipack is going to look yet and this is primarily where the logo is going to be featured. Depending on the colours and layout of our advert and digipack, we may have to make the decision based on which one goes best with it. It may not end up being the triangular one if we want to go for a darker advert and digipack. It will be much easier to decide once we have a bit of an idea about what we are planning to do for them. We would also like ideally to survey people who would be our target audience and see which logo most appeals to them as we need to market our band to entice to them.

Planning Group Availability

We have now sat down together as a group and worked out when we all have free periods so that we can find out where each person is and if they are free if we plan on filming at any point in the day.

We then sat down and wrote on the specific times we were all free after school and added this onto the bottom of each of our timetables. This way we can organise when we are all free to let our actors know and communicate with them easily to be able to rehearse what we need to when we want to,

We have since created another timetable which incorporates the availability of us, our actors and performers. This will help us figure out the best time to film with our actors and performers and means organising filming is easier.

Animatic

This is our finished animatic, we used Adobe Premier Pro to piece it all together. 

Each shot, isn't the full shot we are going to do. We are going to split up most shots into a few smaller shots from many angles. however we did not do this for the animatic as it will have taken a lot more time and what we have done still gives us a general idea of what we need/want to achieve on each shoot.

When we are out shooting, we will keep viewing this and the actual paper copy of the storyboard to ensure we get every scene we need filmed. undoubtedly, there will be some changes to how the shots look here in the finished video but this just gives us and idea to work with, then once we are out filming we can come up with more creative and stunning shots to include in our video.

We cut off a lot of the annotations on the version for the animatic, but we have it all written down on the original copy of the storyboard which we will also be using all the way through the project.

On further reflection of the animatic we have became worried that the narrative might be hard to understand. Therefore we are currently thinking of how we can make the revelation that the female character isn't real but is in fact a metaphorical drug really clear, but also shocking. One of our ideas is to have the male character kill the girl as a way of showing him giving up on drugs. We will pair this with a load of jump cuts to parallel him killing the girl and him actually getting rid of the drugs and cleaning up his act. 

Making the Animatic

Now we have managed to scan in our storyboard and edit each shot. We have started to put each shot into order in Adobe Premier Pro matching each scene to where we want it to be at different points of the song.

We worked on lining each shot change to fit in time with the beat of the song, as this is how we would like the finished video to be. We obviously haven't had the time to draw out each shot within a scene, this means the animatic will be missing shots we plan to take from different angles. Therefore some shots may feel quite long at the moment. However, once we start shooting the rough-cut footage and filming each scene with multiple angles, we can expect the rough cut to have a much faster pace of editing to match with the song and the narrative.

This will help us when we are filming the video as it gives us a better idea of what actors we need when, where we need to be and what equipment we need to be able to achieve each individual shot.

Once the animatic is finished, we will upload it to YouTube and then post it here on our blog so we can view it whenever we want throughout the project, to help us in producing our video.

Storyboard

These are the scanned images of our storyboard showing all of the annotations and shot numbers. We added a few random band shots at the end because we didn't draw out each time a band shot was going to come in.We drew out a few and then just wrote in the gaps where they would go so that when we made the animatic we would know what images went where.

We will be taking the storyboard to every shoot to ensure we have a clear idea of the shots we need and then where we need to put them in the video when it comes to editing everything together.

Some parts may yet be subject to change depending on what happens on each shoot but this at least gives us a simple framework to use and we can make as many changes to that as we wish.

Making the Storyboard

We have now started making our storyboard which we are now using as a basic plan to what visualise the types of shots we want to shoot and the order in which we want to shoot them in. This gives us a very good idea as to what we are going to do in terms of filming and we are going to frequently refer back to this when we are unsure of what to film or cannot decide what to film on the day.

We haven't included every single individual shot in the storyboard as this would take up a lot of time and wouldn't always be of much use to us and so we have just included general sections of particular lines in the lyrics and annotated them with where we want the band to come in. This makes sense to us as it gives us an idea of what we need to shoot on location but is versatile enough for us to use or not use depending on what actually happens. 

To go one step further with our storyboard. we will scan every single image into a scanner and edit them in Photoshop, so that each individual shot is a separate image. We will then put them into Adobe Premier Pro and match up each shot to the corresponding part of the song in order so we have a visual representation of how we want our video to look at it's most basic form. This could prove to become extremely useful in working out how well our timings will be when it comes to actual filming.

Band Name

When thinking about our bands identity we wanted them to appear quite rebellious, fun and against authority. So when coming up with an idea for the band's name, we thought we could use the ideas of morals. We wanted to keep it short and snappy using possibly one or two syllables. Our first idea was to call them 'morality'.

We then started thinking of an idea for a logo which would be the name 'morality' with an angel halo on the left corner and the devils pitchfork underlining it. However on further thought we realised this name made the band sound like a Christian rock band which went against the image we were aiming for.

This led to brainstorm all of our ideas and these are some of the names which we came up with -

• Without Moral
• Twisted Morality
• Breach
• Corruption

We finally decided on a band name - Urban Rapture

We chose this as it sounds edgy and different. The words having the connotations of modern society and life on the edge of a city whereas rapture gives more of a biblical meaning of accepting sin and moving on.  This relates to our main characters choices throughout the narrative.

Possible Settings For Our Video

Whilst creating the storyboard for the video, we considered different settings for each scene in order to decide what locations we need. For example, a dark / run down location in the storyboard would mean that we would have to film somewhere of that matching description. So far we have decided on the following:

We must find a dark, messy bedroom like the one pictured below. This is where a fair bit of our narrative will be filmed. It must look very run down, as if it was a drug addicts room. Therefore we should avoid using a room which is neat and try to find a room which looks fairly cheap

Various streets in and around Newcastle. The streets we choose should have a dark, eerie feel to them. We need a location to show the drug deal, this means it must be hidden away from busy streets, such as the mage below. We also must have other dark dingy locations for our two characters to spend time in. This would make for quite an interesting scene as its unusual for a couple to sit and stand around in dark alleyways with broken glass. 

We also require a club or bar for the drug relapse scene. Preferably it will have dark red lighting to suggest danger as the character is about to relapse. If possible to shoot in a club whilst it is open this would also be preferred as a busy club could reflect the chaos in the characters mind.

Fall Out Boy Biography

Fall Out Boy originally started as an emo-pop band in 2001 and they began to rise as an influential icon of this genre in the mid-2000s, wherein they sold more than four million albums!  This was thought to be mainly down to the work of the band's inspirational singer and bassist.  They managed to grab quite a handful of Top 40 hits during this period. The band was first formed in Wilmette, an area just 14 miles away from Chicago, in the early 2000's.  The members of the band; singer/guitarist Patrick Stump, guitarist Joe Trohman , drummer Andrew Hurley, and  bassist Pete Wentz were all previously involved in many of the underground bands in Chicago's hard-core scene.  The group incorporated this into their own music to eventually label themselves as an emo/punk pop band heavily devoted to the genre.  Their first release was a demo about mid-way through 2001, to then proceed in May 2002 with a split LP with Project Rocket.

Fall Out Boy went on to sign a deal with Island records, with whom they recorded their debut album - Take This to Your Grave in May 2003.  The album received great reviews and it was clear that Fall Out Boy had a big chance in the industry.  Throughout the following two years, Fall Out Boy worked on their next album - From Under the Cork Tree.  It was released in Spring 2005 and from this, Fall Out Boy took off.  It quickly reached the top ten in the Billboards album chart and two of the songs from the album - "Sugar We're Going Down" and "Dance, Dance", made it to the top ten in the charts.  The album was so popular and well received that it received a double platinum award, and the band was even nominated at the Grammies for Best New Artist.

Fall Out Boy were slowly building up a fan base and becoming quite well known.  This was due to things such as the Bands main lyricist and bassist Pete Wentz getting into a celebrity relationship with Ashlee Simpson.  After the huge success of their debut album, Fall Out Boy went on to create their second - Infinity on High.  The album was created with the help of Neil Avron.  Neil was the same producer who helped the band with their first album.  The album was released in early February 2007 and came with the hit single - "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race".  The album managed to grant Fall Out Boy number one on the Billboards' chart and then proceeded to achieve platinum sales a month later.  In early 2008, the CD/DVD package "Live in Phoenix" was released as a documentary about the band.  Followed a year later by "Folie a Deux" a full length studio picture.

At some point very shortly after the production of Folie a Deux,  Fall Out Boy started to break up.  Andy Hurley and Joe Trohman left and joined a new band together named 'Damned Things'.  Pete Wentz started a new band with vocalist Bebe Rexha known as Black Cards.  Stump launched a solo career focusing on a new genre, electro and R&B, instead of the genre that Fall Out Boy had been.

Around the start of 2013, after many rumours had risen, Fall Out Boy's reunion was showcased with the release of a new album - 'Save Rock and Roll'.  The single 'My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light 'Em Up)', hit number one in the U.S charts very quickly.  Fall Out Boy created a music video for every song on the album, and then proceeded to tour America, Europe and Australia.

In late 2014, the band released a new single named 'Centuries'.  The single was a sneak peek from their latest and sixth album, American Beauty-American Psycho.  This album was a sign that the group was changing.  This is because it comprised of punk, R&B, Hip Hop and Electronica.  The album swiftly reached the top of the charts and so did one of the singles, 'Uma Thurman'.  The single was certified platinum.  Fall Out Boy's most recent release was a remixed version of their sixth album.  It was called 'Make America Psycho Again'.  The band has always been a favourite of many different fans in many different genres.  They continue to work hard and hopefully they will release something even more special than anything else in the years to come.

It is likely that our bands image, style and genre will be similar to Fall Out Boys newer image as the song we have chosen is from their recent album 'American Beauty-American Psycho"

         

Cast Required for Video

Before we begin shooting our music video, we have to get cast members that we believe will be suited to the roles. 

For the narrative, we are going to need:

• The main character - to help capture the correct mise en scene into the video, we think we will have him wearing ragged clothes, mostly dark, usually looking quite spaced-out with messy hair to show that his life is currently at a standpoint and he doesn't really care about his appearance.

• The main character's girlfriend - We think that we will dress this character differently depending on the situation that they are in to represent the emotion of the scene.

• Drug dealer - dark clothes, dark lighting on face to show the darkness surrounding drugs

Extras:

• People in nightclub: normal going out-wear

For the performance, we are going to need:

• A Vocalist
• A Guitarist
• A Drummer
• A Bassist

For these actors, we decided to choose classic pop-punk styled clothing, possibly chains.  We are also going to ask them if they would try to keep a very straight, almost emotionless face to represent the mood of the song and video.

We are going to have to think long and hard about who we recruit to play these parts because they have to look convincing and they also have to look the part. Some of this will be down to us, e.g. their clothing etc. but the acting etc. needs to come from them. If we think that they aren't playing the role well enough, we need to be able to tell them what they need to do to be more convincing, or we need to replace them and use someone else who we believe will do a better job.

Mood Board

So here is the mood board which we have put together in order to display the themes of the music video in a way so that we can inspire ourselves with different ideas using these images. For example, the central image of the exchange between the money and the item display the addiction and desperation of what the audience will interpret to be either drugs or the relationship between the woman and the man.

The nightclub setting could be used to show the two main characters meeting one another and could show them at either their best or their worst depending on the point of the song and the way which they behave around each other. It could even be a setting in which you see him trying to get drunk in order to forget the trauma which substance abuse has caused him.

The picture (middle-right) shows how the relationship changes between happiness and dispute which we will use throughout the narrative of the video and will become a recurring theme throughout. This could maybe be shown at it's extremes during the chorus of the song as it could exaggerate the emotion being shown, something which we could really use to our advantage to really make this video emotive for the viewer.

There are also some darker themes in this video, as you can see, the dark forest, the dark rooms, the idea of loneliness and disconnect to the world are things which we want to be able to express in this video to show just how badly drugs have affected this person's life. We plan to do this through showing close-ups of emotion on the characters' faces and using light and dark to emphasise this emotion. 

Song Choice Pitch

So before we could proceed to further develop our music video. We had to pitch our song to members of the class as well as our teacher. In this pitch, we had to give reasons as to why we thought  that 'The Kids Aren't Alright' by Fallout Boy was the best song for us.

Here is a copy of our presentation:

This is the feedback which we received from our pitch:

Fall Out Boy, The Kids Aren’t Alright

It’s okay to mess up, you’ll still be fine

Ideas

References to black and darkness                                                                                                                                     

Colour is going to be very important?

1.       Love is like a drug (Found Love in a Hopeless Place?)  Love is addictive

2.       Lonely man turns to drugs – he has a made up relationship  (this is very like one of my last group’s videos – it was partially effective)

Very conservative and safe

Questions

Does Morality make you sound a bit Christian Rock?

Why are they staying together? Is it because its a passionate relationship? What makes them stay?
You need to refine the story line a bit more - put some meat on the bones and start to come up with a structured story.
Be more adventurous with the filming locations. The drama hall will only work if it is used well.

Narrative 1:

Will this need to be very passionate and sexy for it to be worth them sticking together?  How would you do this?

Narrative 2:

How will you make this exciting?

Your big focus is making this more creative and exciting.

Narrative Brainstorm

We decided to brainstorm our thoughts in order to generate ideas for our narrative. Below, you can see the results of this brainstorming. It has given us a range of potential themes which we could use for our video. These themes mostly consist of relationship issues, substance abuse as well as mental health issues. This is because when analysing the song lyrics of 'The Kids Aren't Alright' it seemed to be expressing problems with addiction. This could be read quite literally as an addiction to drugs, or metaphorically addicted to a bad relationship. This is where we came up with the idea that the female partner in the relationship is the drug and she isn't real. Alternative to this idea is the idea to portray a character with schizophrenia, however this storyline wouldn't deal with addiction but we could use the idea of a bad relationship as a metaphor for a man suffering schizophrenia.   

Final Song Choice - Fall Out Boy - The Kids Aren't Alright

So after much discussion, as a group, we decided that The Kids Aren't Alright was the best song for our music video. This was down to a number of reasons, here are three of them.

1). The genre of the song - Fallout Boy's music tends to be alternative rock / pop rock, this song is no exception to that and so this genre sets the tone of what we should try to look for in terms of a suitable narrative and pace of the shots / editing.

2). Lyrics - The lyrics in particular were quite intriguing which led us to develop a number of our own interpretations and from that, we used the lyrics to inspire the narrative of our video quite strongly with many of the lyrics going be represented in the video.

3). Narrative - The song's themes throughout the video can be interpreted in a number of different ways which has allowed us to develop the ideas for the video such as a story of drug addiction, relationships or mental health. This has given us a lot of different ideas which we are going to try to capitalise on when choosing shots, angles and mise-en-scene.

So through process of elimination with all off our song suggestions, we decided that when taking into account of different factors for making a music video, we all feel that this is the best song for us to do and also that this song's length ultimately decided for us that it was better for us to do this song rather than 'Warrior' by Imagine Dragons. 

 

We also spoke to our target audience about the song choice because they are both songs of the same genre and we wanted to get their opinion on which they liked the sound of more over the other. We asked 30 people who were in our target market what song they preferred and this was the result:

 

This was another crucial deciding point for us when choosing our song because at the end of the day, we are creating a product that has to attract the target audience we are trying to sell it to in order for it to be a successful product.

Lyric Analysis - Fall Out Boy - The Kids Aren't Alright

When we were between torn between the two songs (Fall Out Boy - The Kids Aren't Alright and Imagine Dragons - Warriors), we decided to annotate both sets of lyrics with narrative ideas to see which would have the strongest storyline, also taking into account the difference in the length of the two songs because there was over a minute in the time difference. 

This meant that a shorter song, although less time means fewer scenes to film, would mean that we wouldn't have as much time in which to convey a narrative. So this was ultimately our biggest dilemma and so choosing the video which gave us the most ideas seemed the most logical route to go down. 

The Kids Aren't Alright won as a result in the end, although, we still don't have a unanimous decision in the group about which narrative we want to go for. However, it had the most potential for a really interesting plot and the lyrics allowed us to interpret a lot of different meanings from the song allowing us a lot of room for experimenting. We thus-far, have condensed these all though ideas down to just three which we feel have good enough potential for our video.

The first idea we have is an abusive relationship using the metaphor; love is a drug. It's good when it's good, but its really bad when its bad, but they can't leave. We thought this would work really well, particularly with the line in the chorus: 'I think you're my best friend' and the line in the second verse: 'All those people in those old photographs I've seen are dead' because he/she thinks they are their best friend and so they cant leave the relationship behind. The interesting idea that came from the photograph line was as if they were looking at old photographs of them together and those people are "dead" because the relationship isn't the same as it was then.

The second idea we have is about a drug addict with the idea that "she isn't real". She only appears as an image of his imagination as a result of the drugs. Again, we were thinking about linking this to the line in the chorus 'I think you're my best friend' as well as all of the reference to darkness mainly at the beginning of the song as drugs is quite a dark area to focus on. We also linked the drugs concept to the first lines about a "bad trip" which relates to hallucinations, which comes with drug consumption.

The final idea we have is the concept that again, "she isn't real" but this time, not as a result of drugs, as a result of a mental illness such as Schizophrenia, an illness which causes sufferers to here voices in their head. On the topic of mental illnesses, we also looked into bipolar disorder and DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) as a multiple personality idea. We felt that the Schizophrenia idea would work in the same way as the drug addict narrative because it can result in hallucinations and delusions which can relate to the "she isn't real" concept.

The idea behind the multiple personalities was again, stemming from the line 'I think you're my best friend' and we had an idea almost like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We thought we could show a relationship in which one person has two personalities and the other member of the relationship never knows which one they will be greeted with - The one who they are completely in love with and the reason they don't want to end the relationship, or the one that always results in them arguing and causing mental and physical abuse. We highlighted all of the ideas associated with mental illness in pink to separate that out from our other ideas.

All of our ideas could potentially work really well but we need to sit down all together and look really closely at each narrative and start to form some real structure to them and make a decision on which concept is most interesting and is within reach with the equipment we have.

Lyric Analysis - Imagine Dragons - Warriors

The first song we listened to when we had narrowed down our song choices was Warriors by Imagine Dragons. We really liked the storyline and the lyrics of the song. It is a lot shorter than our Fall Out Boy choice which also came into our decision a lot. The main reason we doubt this one is because it is just under 3 minutes and from doing the preliminary task last year, we found it quite difficult to fit in everything we wanted to into a short space of time. We have quite a strong narrative idea for this one and we aren't sure how we would be able to fit everything into such a short song.

There also aren't very many lyrics available to interpret and focus in on.

The narrative idea for this song is two people - a runner and a dancer - who have been pushing and working since they were a child to follow their dreams in their passion of sport. We wanted to tell the story of each character from being a young child all the way up through their teenage years and into adulthood.

The narrative would show them being very worn out and tired as a child after training and rehearsals, being upset about missing out on things with their friends because they have to attend rehearsals and training, followed up at the end by them finally getting to where they want to be in their sport. We would highlight the struggle they went through and how they didn't give up despite being so tired and missing out on things as they were growing up. It would all be worth it and they are "warriors" for getting through it and showing people who doubted them that they can do it and they got to where they wanted to be. Upon listening to the song we decided we could create some powerful shots using slow motion and other clever editing techniques which parallel the worlds of other teenagers against the two our story will focus on.

Looking at both songs will be important at this stage in deciding which route we definitely want to go down.