Research and Planning for Music Video

Group:
I am working as a group of three on the practical production product of a music video. Within my group are Peter Hoyles and Matthew Herriot. We are all in the same media class and have a similar taste in music. Also we worked together as a group on the AS film opening and so are able to communicate ideas and thoughts successfully.

Lesson Update:
In our lessons until now we have been researching and planning what our music will be and contain.

Firstly, we needed to decide what music we would use. This proved rather difficult at first as the music needed to be copyright free. We knew that a teacher at our school was part of a band and so decided to ask if there was a possibility that we could use one of their songs. We were a given a disk of all copyright free tracks that they had composed and listened through each song. We were not immediately grabbed by any but were happy to work with one of slower tracks. However, after me and Peter attended a Music Technology course we discovered a song written by a few people in the year below that we thought would be perfect. We asked their permission and they immediately agreed. After playing this to Mattie he also thought that this would be the perfect song choice for our music video. It is called 'The City' and falls into the following genres:

• Acoustic
• Easy Listening/ Middle of the Road
• Slightly Indie

After deciding upon our song we now needed to research into the conventions of music videos from similar genres. We looked mostly at acoustic male artists as we felt this was the closest to what our song would be like. This is the list of artists that we chose to focus on:

• James Blunt
• David Gray
• Jack Johnson
• Jason Mraz
• Newton Faulkner
• Jose Gonzalez
• Paulo Nutini

We found the following things to be included in all of their music videos which we used for research and inspiration:

• Slow Motion
• Mixture of performance and narrative
• Black and White
• Performance - guitar shots
• Close Up, Panning, Tracking, Establishing

These are therefore 5 things that we will use within our music video.