GBBO - Nadiya Hussein.

I’m never going to put boundaries on myself ever again.
I’m never going to say “I can’t do it”.
I’m never going to say “maybe”.
I’m never going to say “I don’t think I can”
I can and I will.

– Nadiya Hussein

Katy Perry : Part of me.

Katy Perry is one of few artists that feature a theme of military for a music video, it makes it even better that she stars a main female protagonist. The video follows the build up towards her journey through the U.S military, however it focuses on elements of direct combat and use of heavy weapons such as tanks and machine guns, which obviously we will not be able to do as A2 media students. Despite this the shots and framing compositions that are used act as a great inspiration to our group and gives us a good idea of the types of shots and angles we wish to include.  Below are my favourite two shots and the lyrical visuals I would hope to par them with.

"Look me in the eye when I'm talking to you" 

"I'm ready for it all..."
(Ending line)

LIKE A GIRL #always

Always started a social experiment back in 2014 by asking different groups of social groups what it meant to do something #LIKEAGIRL, what they found was that the little girls they interviewed ran, fought  and threw with force and confidence, however groups such as young boys and grown women took the question as an insult reproducing actions of weakness and fragility. They aim to 'epically battle' the common conventions of acting #likeagirl and change it from being an insult to being a compliment. 
Below is their original campaigning footage.



This (video below) is a more recent campaign they've started, in which they aim to empower girls and women of all ages to understand that they ARE unstoppable and they CAN be anything they want to be. I find this campaign links well with our music video as in 2014 it was recored that Female personnel currently make up only 9.4% - some 17,620 - of the British armed forces. The area of military is an obviously male dominated sector and our group aims to use this theme as a focal point in order to show that we ARE unstoppable, much like always' just #likeagirl campaign.

THIS GIRL CAN

This girl can is one of my favourite female positive campaigns. They describe themselves as 'a national campaign developed by Sport England' who advocate the activeness of women across the world by publishing videos which capture the essence of females and their sporting techniques. The theme of matriarchy and unity throughout their main campaign video (posted below) is truly influential and inspiring and I hope to be able to successfully reproduce the same sense of empowerment in our music video. They also feature individuals stories such as RUBY VS PRECONCEPTIONS, VICTORIA VS SWEAT AND GRACE VS PACE.

All of which you can find on the website listed below.

http://www.thisgirlcan.co.uk

Story boarding progress.

We are around half way through storyboarding! It is proving to be quite the challenge in regards to the timings and the content. We weren't fully prepared with the entire narrative so having to work out where to put all the shots we wanted to include is becoming rather overwhelming. Our deadline however is the lesson after half term so the group as an entire week to get it finished so then we can finally start filming! 

Band name!

So here as a group we discuss our finished band name, album title and track list.

Finished track list.

So we've finally finished our track list. Overall we have 9 tracks as well as 3 bonus tracks. 

Songs:

We fall (originally known as 'ready.')

Telling The Tale
Cara
Where We Come Home
Set In Stone
A Few Sweet Nothings
Victory
Core
Unseen
Our Island

Bonus tracks:

1634
At Our Best
Whiskey

 

Example Track lists

All of the examples below showcase the typical 'indie' track list. A mixture of single words and deep phrases. I would like to reproduce this theme in our own track list by including single worded songs such as 'Cara' as well as longer phrases such as 'Where we come home.' 

I particular like Kodaline's artwork as the songs are framed over a twilight landscape shot prepping a musky and very indie feel to it. I would defiently want to frame a landscape shot as a background to the track list just because it conforms perfectly to the conventions of an indie album.

Hozier - Hozier. 

Kodaline - coming up for air.

Mumford and sons - I will wait. 

Years and years - communion.

Track list (in pending.)

So currently we are writing the track list. On the gaelic website where we found our band name, we also found many words and phrases that we thought would suit the indie genre, phrases like 'telling the tale,' 'a few sweet nothings' and 'our island.'

Band name and Album title. (& our inspiration)

After a quick wiz on Microsoft Word we created the aesthetics of our Band name and album title. 

We've taken direct inspiration from the Kodaline themselves, I love the memorial trademark they leave on all of their vevo published music videos. Within the the opening shots they include their trademark band name, and underneath the title of the single being played. As a group we issued to adopt this technique as it would provide our music video with a professional embellishment as well as just being an aesthetically pleasing way of promoting our bands name.

'Pretty Gaelic words'

From noting down our inspirations Names and Band Titles we all agreed on using a translated word/ phrase. Using a word of foreign origin would create a unique and interesting ambience to our band.

Examples being MØ, who used her Danish origin initials as her stage name, and Bon Iver which directly translate to 'Good winter.'

As Kodaline is an Irish band, we felt using a Gaelic phrase/word would suit the track and our bands atmosphere.

After researching on Google we came across a website which gave 'Irelands 50 prettiest words.'

http://www.smartling.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Smartling_eBook_The50MostBeautifulWordsInTheIrishLanguage.pdf

After searching through all 50 we found a striking winner. 

Ceol, pronounced 'Ky-ol' with a direct translation into 'Music' and 'song' however with a much deeper meaning of 'the rhythm within us.' 

Bam. 

Band name and Album title material in one.  

Name inspiration

Currently the group is continuing to brainstorm some names, we did a task of collecting similar bands to our genre and noting down their Band names and Album Titles. From doing this we noted how we found translated words worked well, e.g. Bon Iver and MØ. 

Band names:

The 1975
Bon Iver (French translation of 'good winter')
The Neighbourhood
Amber Run
MØ (Icelandic translation)

Album Titles:
That's The Spirit (Bring Me The Horizon)
+ (Ed Sheeran)
Chaos And the Calm (James Bay)
Songs About Jane (Maroon 5)
Wilder Mind (Mumford and Sons)

Name Generator

In order to start naming our band, album and track list we played a 'name generator' game in order to give us some examples. In order to play we would each write down a noun, adjective or a verb, fold the paper over and then pass it on to another group member, the results were interesting...


1) The Fat Kitten Hits the Cow's Udder's Pie
2) The Lazy Eyebrow Twirls the Scrumptious Tree

3) The Destructive Ferret Suckles the Blue Bells

It's safe to say none of the sentences above will be the name of our band, however I found it a useful task as we were able to select specific phrases we liked, such as 'Destructive Ferret' and 'Blue Bells.' 

Many well known indie bands specialise in adopting strange and unique names, some being 'Arctic Monkeys', 'Cage the Elephant' and 'Vampire Weekend.' 

Vlog on lip-synching.

Story-boarding begins!

So our group began storyboarding and it's proving to be quite the challenge! These two and a half pages of notes account for only around 40 seconds, with each shot differencing in duration from 1.5 seconds to 8 seconds. 

In comparaison to storyboarding for our AS project, we filmed the entire opening using one location, meaning it was possible to get all of our footage in 2/3 days, however for our music video it's evident we have many more locations needed to shoot at, leading to us needing to begin our shooting as soon as possible. 

Audience feedback!

Our fellow peers, Mac 4 kindly allowed us to film them whilst watching our lip-syncing task back, they offered us plenty of audience feedback which we can take on board when thinking out lip-syncing in our real music video.

Points they offered was the professionalism of the plain white background we adopted, the excellent lighting in the media room meant no shadows were casted, which overall improved the quality of the video.

They also spoke of the friendship that radiated throughout this piece, creating an overall cheerful ambience.

Bloopers!

Every project comes with numerous mistakes being made, and I'm sure if we included all our muck ups in one clip it would certainly be a lot longer than the music video itself!

Below is the very humour bloopers reel...

'Ready' by Mac 1.

This is Mac 1s lip-syncing task, below is the result of many happy laughs, as well as frustrated cries.
It was extremely fun to make and edit together, and I'm very happy with the finished product.

Overall I found the editing fairly straight forward for this task, (however after it was uploaded the group did notice that a couple scenes were maybe a split second out.) I can imagine how difficult and frustrating it can turn out when you need to re-edit specific parts of the music video, as it would completely readjust the clips to the song, un-syncing the lip syncing altogether.




 

Portrayal of woman.

You don't need to be a feminist to notice the contrast to how women and men are represented in the media, especially in music videos. 

Whether they are acting promiscuous, reckless or even taking on a more instrumental role there is almost always a sexual overtone when a female is framed in a shot.
We aim to challenge these conventions by empowering woman, instead of objectifying them.
With both male and female artists, in their music videos, females are more than often seen to be dominated by males, and the patriarchal theme seems to be accepted as if it is 'natural.' 

Email for permission.

Due to the fact that we are faced with a copyright issue, our group emailed the producer of our chosen song song 'ready,' to gain consent. After a little help with google we gained access to Kodaline's executive producer, Jacknife Lee.

This is a screen-shot of the email we sent.

Lip-sync task

So our group have decided to to edit together a lip-syncing project of our chosen song.
(Despite not wanting to hear the word 'ready' for a good couple of days.)

Carrying out this task has given us enough experience to tackle the dreaded 'lip-syncing,' in regards to both filming AND editing.

Whilst filming people singing solo, we were able to lessen the embarrassment by making everyone else in the room sing along with them, making the person being filmed feel more comfortable, additionally we preferred the 'lip-synchers' to have fun whilst singing, doing things like dancing around rather than standing still which would create a more tedious ambience.

When it came to editing, it took around 6 hours to sort through all the footage and piece it together lyrically as perfectly as possible.
After watching endless music videos, the lip-syncing to the watcher comes across as natural and simple, it was only after we began editing it was uncovered how frustrating and challenging it really is.

What really helped was that we all sang the entire song during filming our solos and duets, so it was pretty easy to pick out and organise what parts to chop and what to use. However what I would definitely do differently when filming is to ensure whoever is lip-syncing is singing clear, due to problems we had where people were jumping around and covering their mouths, which made it hard to match up with the lyrics.

Audience feedback

So our group was able to receive (a lot) of audience feedback from our class to which we presented to. Majority of the feedback were concerns our group hadn't thought of so it was extremely helpful to analyse and answer them.


- Many of them noted similar concerns but the main theme of questions consisted of:

- The struggles of 'pulling off' army scenes, and how we would attempt to portray our protagonist in the army.

- Whether or not there would be a performance element and if a male would be introduced then.

- What range of shots and angles we will adopt to depict her mental strength, and how it will all link lyrically.

Treatment pitch

So this is the recording of the pitch my group gave. I'm really happy with how they presented it as it explains our concept but without the detail leaving our ideas vague to the rest of the class.