When we first started our music video project it took us a long time to find a band that we all liked and then even longer to decided on a song, and we went through about four different songs until we found one that was suitable and one that we had really good ideas for. In the end we settled on a song called 'Just Don't care' by 'All About Flux'. We had so much trouble choosing a song because we didn't want it to be boring or slow and a lot of there songs already had music videos so it was hard not to be influenced by the ideas that they had come up with. We chose 'Just Don't Care' because it was a mixture of everything, it has slow parts, fast parts and a steady beat that we could edit too.
At the start of my blog I did some individual research on different music videos and advertisements. To start with these analysis posts were of music videos that I generally liked and had no real link to our own products. Early on a did an influential post on Lady Gaga's video 'Telephone', this video was very entropic yet very redundant at the same time. This analysis opened my eyes to how weird and unusual things can be added into a video without the viewer really questioning why it's in there. As a group we really liked the idea of having at least one entropic element, so we then went onto research other videos that could have a possible link to our own music choice and target audience.
I did a lot of research on the band 'Paramore' as their music and image genre was similar to that of our own band. We also looked at other bands and artists such as Jessie J and Panic! At The Disco. These artists got us into the entropic style of things again and we settled on a clown or circus theme, the 'I Write Sins, Not Tragedies' video really helped us with this idea, they took a basic and redundant idea of a wedding in a church and made it really unusual and interesting by adding in elements from the circus such as performers and ring masters.
Referring back to Sir Ken Robinson's theory about how people grow out of creativity for the fear of being wrong. As a group we found it really hard to agree on ideas and we thought that this could be due to none of our ideas being really good, but after research and watching influential videos we came up with a great idea that everyone had input with. I think as we were god friends to start with and all of us are creative people and study creative subjects at college I don't think the idea of being wrong stopped us from putting forward or rejecting ideas.
After all of this research we put together a pitch, that we presented to the class to find out what people thought of our ideas and song choice, and that is where are audience research and feedback came into the idea generating process. Everyone reacted really well to the presentation and people thought it was a realistic but interesting idea and they said it would look really professional if it was done well.
We held several focus groups throughout our music video project, we found it helpful to find out what our target audience thought of works in progress and we definitely took into account what people said, right up until the end of our editing time. As we got further and further on in our project our focus groups got smaller as we wanted really detailed analysis from creative people without having to control a large amount of people that may feel uncomfortable expressing their opinions in front of people. Towards the end of our editing period one of our focus groups bought up the idea that performance would really help the video and that it would change it from a short film to a conventional music video, as a last minute discussion we then filmed a lot of performance elements and fitted them into the video which as a group we thought looked much better and our target audience also preferred the changed rough cut to the original one.
I think that the media products that I designed are as similar as possible to conventional media products given the time, technology and money restraints. For our group we struggled with getting good quality filming and lighting. As we were filming in a real auditorium it was difficult for us to get good lighting without using the professional studio lights that require training to use. Throughout the filming for our video we also ended up using several cameras, due to group members not being happy with the quality and also previous filming equipment being used at the same time as us. Personally I think that the print work is very similar to conventional branding, as we had use of all the professional programs that would have been used when creating real digipaks and print advertisements and we also did a lot of research early in the project on influencing digipaks.
Being original in the media world is very hard, and ideas can never be completely original due to all of the media influences that we all have around us. Overall I think our video is quite original it has sections that are realistic and matters that happen in real life, and I feel like we execute these well and show the emotions that people would go through in real life. But we also have entropic elements that change our video from a depressing story to an interesting, youthful and modern video. The use of the clown is our entropic element, he is used throughout to represent a 'normal' person, but then he is not, he is a clown. The video shows him having the same emotions and feelings that a normal person would have when in a complicated relationship. As we only have this one really entropic element I think we could have pushed the unexpectedness a little bit further, although I am happy with the balance between entropy and redundancy in our video. I think that the amount of each element that we have used is enough to make the audience question parts of the video yet not get confused, I think the story line for the video is still clear and easy to understand yet the entropic elements turn it into a generally more interesting video. The information that we got from audience feedback and our target audience focus groups was that they liked the idea but weren't sure how it would be executed in a clear and understandable way. We took this into account when editing and filming our music video. For example some people said the different gender of the singers could be confusing if the female was singing the male parts, so we made sure not to do this.
Walter Jon Williams is a theorist who believes that labeling a band/video with a genre is only a starting point and he also says that it will only find you an audience base and someone to aim at or advertise for. Personally I agree with Williams' theory as i think you can do everything in the way of advertising to a particular target audience but you still cant make them like the end product.
For our print work and video we held many focus groups, we tried to use people who fitted our viewer profile in order to get some really useful feedback, we also felt that it make the focus groups worth while instead of a hindrance.
