Risk Assessment

There were various risks to which we had to take into consideration before we went out filming several scenes of our music video.

Friday 3rd November - Park Scenes

There were several risks to which we would entail when filming in our first location, the park. Factors such as public privacy, weather, and equipment could potentially become a massive risk when filming.

Public privacy would have to be the biggest risk when filming as due to being a public place, some individuals may not have wanted to be filmed meaning complaints could be made and we could encounter potential violent situations. Filming the public would have meant blurring faces and people in the background of shots, potentially ruining the effects on the scenes we wanted and storyboarded.

Weather also played a key factor in achieving the precise shots that we wanted. We hoped for sunny weather in order to the reflect the mood and atmosphere of the certain scenes we were filming to juxtapose the negative, more gloomy scenes later on in the music video. The sunny scenes would almost act as the equilibrium of the story, following Todorov's restoration theory.

Rainy weather would not only have given us a negative and disheartening effect on the scenes we wanted to film in the park venue but also could have ruined the camera equipment. Due to borrowing from the school, we wanted to keep the Canon camera, tripod and any other equipment in good condition, with rainy weather also having potential for the tripod to sink or slip giving us lob-sided and unfocused shots.

Predicting the weather deemed to be rather tricky and although checking the news and weather schedules, some days that we had planned to film the park scenes the weather took a turn for the worst leaving us unable to film.


Thursday 9th November - Bar Scenes

Our second Location to which we chose to film, a bar, could also have potential risks and heath and safety issues.

Gaining permission from the owner was the first step in securing filming ability. If the owner had said no, then we would have had to have had another group meeting to discuss another bar location or to re-think that scene altogether.

Fortunately the bar owner agreed to let us film, as long as we could prove our age by bringing ID. When in the bar we had to be extremely careful when setting up not to hit the bar furniture or film members of the public as again, we would have to blur out faces during the editing stage.

The bar scene allowed us to juxtapose the park scenes as it was considerably darker and gloomier connoting the emotions of the male/female protagonist in the scene we were able to film the disequilibrium of the music video's storyline. This also meant that we wouldn't have to use as many effects or colour manipulation during the editing stage to create the emotional effects.

Risks such as bar violence could have potentially arose inside the bar, this is why we chose to film in a quiet corner of the bar, away from members of the public. Being aware of members of the public was key during this location, the whole group were very careful and stuck to the filming space that the bar owner allowed us.

Throughout filming in both locations the whole group made sure to be aware of our surroundings sticking to the sections of locations that we were allowed whilst following any rules given. This meant that we could minimise any risks at hand, filming safely and securely without any accidents.

Cast

Cast

Pre-Production Focus Group

Music Video Focus Group - Kyle & Mitchell

A key part of our primary research was holding a focus group. Conducting this enabled myself, and my group to gather accurate demographics about our target audience, whilst gathering feedback and opinions on our ideas.

By voicing our ideas about the music video in terms of characters, plot, colour manipulation at the editing stage and camera shots/ angles, our audience of media peers could voice their opinions, helping us to finalise any good idea's and eliminate the undeveloped/negative ones.

The group decided that our first focus group should be amongst media peers due to the fact they had a wider knowledge of the industry and could give us a more accurate/professional view toward our initial ideas, whilst apply more conventions.

Juxtaposing this, we also created a focus group with members of the public so we had a wider range of feedback and could determine a more mass target audience as opposed to the local niche.

Analysis of Questionnaire Results

Question 1 - From this we hoped to find out the most common gender of our audience and as you can see the most common gender is Male. This means that in our video we will be likely to use a male protagonist in order for the audience to relate and feel a personal relationship with the character as they can relate to them. As well as this we want to use a female character in order to satisfy the male gaze theory for those with voyeuristic persona's and furthermore, we'll do this because females still make up 35% of the audience and that would be a large percent of the audience to leave unattended to.

Question 2- From this we hoped to see the most common age within our audience, with 40% the most common age group is 16-21. However, as a group we decided that in order to make the events that take place in our video seem more realistic we have decided to go with the second largest target audience of 28-33 as we have decided that if we do a video based on the breakdown of a relationship that we want the relationship to seem more matured. Of course people of the 16-21 age group can still have matured relationships however i feel as though it the age may compromise the professionalism of our video and so using older characters (28-33) will help to overcome this, and also it will give people of that age group a character who they can relate to.

Question 3 - the majority of our audience say that they only watch music videos once every few weeks which means that their library of music video knowledge may be a bit weaker than the 25% who said that they watch music videos everyday. This is important because in the later questions we will go through the questionnaires separately in order to see which responses we should place more emphasis on due to the fact that we believe the audiences who watch videos everyday will be more helpful than those who never watch videos, although all responses will be given some weight.

Question 4 - We wanted to know how our audiences usually access music, this question has been asked in order for us to know in which forms we should deliver our music video. The most common answer was that audiences use sites such as YouTube in order to access music videos; this means that once we have created our music video we shall post in on YouTube. I believe it is also important that a few audiences members said that they like to access music through the use of live gigs; this is important because it connotes that some of our audience clearly favor performance and so it may mean that in our video we should include some performance based scenes in order satisfy this sector of our audience. The other common format is that people like downloading music videos, by posting our video on YouTube although it will not be downloadable, it will be accessible on a huge variety of technological devices meaning that although audiences can't keep the file, it is always available to them.

Question 5 - We had already decided that as a group our desired music genre would be either metal or rock and this question helps to justify this as in total the two genres make up over half of our target audience. Even though pop is nearly a quarter of the audiences favorite genre we will not be doing this as as a group we feel that our knowledge of the genre isn't vast enough in order to deliver as high a quality pop music video as we would be able to deliver a rock/metal music video. The responses to this question mean that we will try to pick a song which will conform to the codes and conventions of the genre's.

Question 6 - In my opinion this question is absolutely vital to making our music video the best it can be. By finding out what audiences like best about their favorite genre's music videos we can see what numerous audience members favor most commonly (such as performance). After seeing which answers occur frequently we can try to work the most common ones into our own music video in order to satisfy the desires of the audience. it is clear already that performance based shots will be essential in our music video as it is a recurring theme that audiences (especially those of the rock/metal genre) like seeing this in music videos.

Question 7 - This question doesn't just help us to look at what we should include but more importantly helps us look at the quantity of each element that should be included. For example the majority of respondents said that performance was their favorite feature and so we shall aim to dedicate a larger percentage of our music video to performance shots. Many also favored special effects, as a group we decided that we don't want to use too many effects in our shots, however we would be more likely to use effects such as filters on our video. This is because we want to make the scenes seem as realistic as possible and don't want to compromise this with unneeded special effects.

It is also important to audiences that the characters have a persona, due to the fact that this was a common response from audience members who are fans of different genre's we have decided to not make our protagonist the stereotypical person you're likely to see in a rock video and instead make both him and the female character seem like a common couple in order to allow as many audiences to build personal relationships with them as possible. We will use the performance shots in order to conform to many codes of the rock genre and keep the performance shots as relatable as possible.

 

Question 8 -  In order to find inspiration for things which we could include in our own video we decided to ask the audience what their favorite music video is, and why. Some audience members said that they liked a uncommon approach to a otherwise cliche concept, an example being the response which states that Megadeth's Public Enemy No. 1 alters a cliche scenario by using monkeys instead of humans. Although we wont be going as far as using monkeys, i think that using a different perspective for a cliche concept is highly important. Firstly it puts a spin on the video, and secondly it can be powerful and make the audience think about the video after watching it, rather than just watching it and discarding it from their thoughts. Also by using a new perspective we somewhat conform to the wishes of the audience members who both used Thriller as an answer as a different perspective can allow the video to break new ground. A couple of respondents also said that they like videos and songs which they can relate to, this is important to our video, as I've already said, we wish to keep it relatable and realistic.

Question 9 - As previous answers have suggested audience members put greater value on performance based music videos as connoted by the fact that as well as performance being the highest, a mix of performance and narrative has the second highest vote. We have decided to have also include narrative as many audiences still valued it and the percentage of the audience who value it is too great to not have narrative shots; Also having a narrative helps with our previous findings that we can take a cliche scenario and give it a different perspective, in just a performance based video this would be much harder. Also a narrative allows us to attract different audiences as some may not be fans of the music genre yet may still like the story that the narrative portrays.

Question 10 -  As we don't know entirely what route we wish to take on our music video we decided to look at videos with different aims, portraying a message, being fun, and being performance based. By asking the audience their favorite music videos that have those aims we are able to analyse various different videos in order to see what ideas we can come up with and also what preexisting ideas the audience are already fond of. Also, each question helps us to see more into the audiences preferences as their answers tell us stuff about them; Their favorite video that carries a message can help us to become more aware of their beliefs and values, their favorite lighthearted video makes us aware of their style of humor and finally their favorite performance based video tells us where they like to see performance shots take place. From the responses i can already see that the audience values a message which portrays the effects of drugs varying from alcohol to things such as heroin and finally they like quite simple performance shots which take place in studios due to the fact that its professional and looks much more authentic. 

Music Video Questionnaire

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Nickelback confirmation

"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use." 

In order to comply with copyright laws I had to ask Nickelback for permission to use their song. As well as this I put on the description of the music video that "we do not own the copyright to this song" when uploading it to YouTube. 

Prop/Costume List - Performance Shots

This is a list of all of our props and costume items which we will use in the performance shots of our video. The table includes what shots the items will be used in, where we will get the items from, why we will use that particular item, and any theories which can be connected to the use of the item. We will film the performance shots in our sixth forms recording studio in order to make the music video look even more professional.

Song Choice and Lyric Scripting

"How You Remind Me"

Never made it as a wise man [Montage of man waking up and various flashback shots]  
I couldn't cut it as a poor man stealing

Tired of living like a blind man        

I'm sick of sight without a sense of feeling

And this is how you remind me    

This is how you remind me [extreme closeup of mans face as he puts on sunglasses]
Of what I really am [Performance shots]
This is how you remind me [Flashback of female at the lake]

Of what I really am [Performance shot]

It's not like you to say sorry
I was waiting on a different story [Flashback showing a moment of Breakdown in the relationship]
This time I'm mistaken

For handing you a heart worth breaking [Performance shots] 

And I've been wrong, I've been down, [Montage of Bar shots showing man drinking]

Been to the bottom of every bottle

These five words in my head

Scream "are we having fun yet?" [Fade between bar shot and performance shot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no [Performance shot of whole band]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no [Shots of couple walking to secluded part of the park +walking through the park]

It's not like you didn't know that [female staring at man as shot fades out]

I said I love you and I swear I still do [Close up of man in cafe whilst on phone]

And it must have been so bad [Female protagonist brings drinks over to the table]

Cause living with me must have damn near killed you 

And this is how, you remind me [performance shot of drummer]

Of what I really am [Male protagonist is unresponsive to female]

This is how, you remind me

Of what I really am [Performance shot, drummer then going onto shots of vocalist]

It's not like you to say sorry [Performance shots continue]

I was waiting on a different story 

This time I'm mistaken [Male protagonist puts the phone down]

For handing you a heart worth breaking [Performance shot of vocalist]

And I've been wrong, I've been down, [Female tries to look at males phone]

Been to the bottom of every bottle [Male snatches phone off of her, woman attempts to hit man]

These five words in my head [Man catches the girls hand, after a struggle she walks away]

Scream "are we having fun yet?" [Performance shot of the vocalist panning to drummer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no [montage of bar scenes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no [Montage showing male walking away from bar, female walking away from man]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no [Shot fading out of man standing in shock at woman walking away]

We chose to use Nickelback's 'How You Remind Me' due to the fact that it was a song that we both knew and liked, we knew the original video quite well and instantly had various ideas of how we could apply them to the lyrics of the song. As well as this, we needed to pick a song that would suit the vocalists image, as other possible songs such as 'When Im Gone' by 3 Doors Down wouldn't have been the right pitch for the voice of the vocalist. This means that even from an early stage we was thinking about the quality of the production and how it would look to the audience.

Target Audience : Psychographic & Demographic Profiles

As a group we decided to create various mind maps in order to further explore our target audiences Psychographic and Demographic profiles. This would give us a greater understanding of their background, lifestyle and interests. We decided the target audience would be likely to have little religious values, or possibly atheists; also their psychographic profile would likely to be similar to that of a 'Struggler'.

In terms of Demographic profile we decided the target audience would be British Young adults (18-30), living in urban areas. Their race would stereotypically be white, and gender would be all. 

The sexuality of our target audience doesn't need to be fixed, however due to the plot of our music video we feel it would more easily be relatable to heterosexual couples.