Green Screen Testing

We gave the green screens a first test so we knew how to use them if we decided that we wanted them in our music video. First off, we recorded footage of someone with a green screen behind them and had them act in a specific scenario. After this, we found the image we wanted to use on the green screen online and edited them both together.
This was the final result.

Music Videos Are Promotional Devices: Primadonna

In the video for Marina And The Diamonds' track "Primadonna", she is modeled to express opinions and values similar to those who are believed to be her target audience, for example, looking relatively glamorous but still being in control of what you do with yourself. Combining this and frequent up-close shots, we see that Marina is depicted to be a somewhat spoiled girl that has both looks and money, similar to the ideals of her target audience. The video uses many close-ups in order to help the audience (both target, and not target) to identify with her and feel that she is relatable to a certain extent.

Redundancy And Entropy

Redundancy is the extent to which something is predictable and/or conventional; if something is redundant, it has high predictability.
Entropy, on the other hand, is the extent to which something is unpredictable and unconventional.

For example, a typical Taylor Swift video will have far higher redundancy than entropy due to her genre, her target audience and the way in which she is sold to said audience.

A Yo La Tengo video, however, is far more likely to have higher entropy and lower redundancy. This may be due to either having a fairly less generic genre or being a far less publicised group than Taylor Swift is.

OK Go, on the other hand, are a group that have music videos consisting of fairly redundant images that are manipulated in quite an entropic way.

I personally think that my music video will be a mix between being both entropic and redundant; I would like it to seem very generic but with elements of unpredictability, too, in order to help it to stand out. I believe that it will be in the genre of either Pop or K-Pop.

Reference To Looking & Voyeuristic Treatment

Laura Mulvey wrote about her theory of the "male gaze" uses in video and, thus, mass media. It argues that the audience of a film or video are encouraged to look at it from a male perspective through  three elements:

1. The gaze of the camera and the camera looking at the female body.
2. The gaze of the male and how the audience will witness a man looking at a woman followed by the camera looking at the woman.
3. The gaze of the audience and what the audience are looking at.

These points are expressed very well in the video for 50 Cent's song "Candy Shop", which features a male actor looking at objectified women which is then followed by the camera looking at them in the same way, as shown below.

However, in the music video for Primal Scream's song "County Girl", the female actor actively objectifies herself, but is still very much the subject. She does this in order to get what she wants from various males in the video and she still remains the dominating party as shown here:

Analysis Of A Music Video

Andrew Goodwin stated that there was a relationship between a music video and the lyrics that could either be described as having elements of three different ides. There ideas are:

- An Illustrative link, meaning that there is a direct visual and audible link between the two. For example, singing about playing a guitar whilst playing a guitar in the music video.

- An Amplifying link, meaning that the visuals and the effects are manipulated and the lyrics and visuals do not clash.

- A Disjunctive link, meaning that the lyrics have no possible relevance to what is happening in the music video.

For example, Lady GaGa's song "Just Dance" would have elements of illustrative where she is actively singing about dancing and would have elements of disjunctive where her strange antics in the video have nothing to do with her lyrics.

Demonstration of Music Genre Characteristics: Boybands

-Dark room, lights behind them, generic band positioning.

-Matching/similar clothing, positioned in a shot that allows us to see all of them

-Not much of a narrative, usually just features the band as a whole with close-ups of each individual band member.

-Edited with lots of cuts to the members singly or as a whole, usually cut speed matches pace of the song or their movements.

-Lack of props to represent them as important.

-Usually have matching movements, represents them as being in sync or a group.

-Doesn’t usually take place in a normal location and is somewhere that isn’t of interest so that it doesn’t distract from the group

Stop Motion Practice

We used the SLR cameras to create a stop motion animation of two balls of paper being crumpled and undone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fueLcwJRqbA&feature=youtu.be