CHANGE OF PLAN / Outing to Richmix studio's

Today as a class, my a2 media went all the way to Shoreditch in East London for a talk about media, and music video's. The 'Richmix' studios we went to included 3 cinema's, screening blockbusters and up and coming music video's along with a theatre for performances', locally and nationally, along with a huge bar/gig area for bands to perform and even its own art gallery. As you can tell, this place was amazing. We met some amazing people in the business; producers, chief examiners and directors of music video's of this day and age. It was such an influential talk.

From 10-12 we had an inspiring talk from the OCR chief examiner for media studies. His name was Pete Fraser, also a media studies teacher at a school in Cambridge. He lead us through a talk for the duration of the morning. Information and advice was given out to help us all as a group producing our video. It was very helpful, as we watched a lot of previous music video's ranging from the 30's to present day. Video's include Beetles, Queen, Madonna, 50 Cent, Jay Z, looking at the difference in each video and how they varied in genre and shot types.

We also learnt about MTV and facts on how it was introduced and who the company was based around (mostly the white population) No black artists had been seen on MTV until Michael Jackson brought out his hit record 'Billie Jean'.

Songs such as 'Video killed the radio star' was one of the first songs to be played on MTV, a British produced song.

Methods of Analysis - Andrew Goodwin
-Genre characteristics
-Visual relationships with lyrics and music
-Needs to sell the artist as a star
-Voyeurism/looking - artist appearing on screen as the character.
- characters looking at singer- emphasis.
-Intertexuality - Referring to films, previous video's. Making contextual links.
- A live performance, or pretending to be a live performance.

Making your own music video. - Advice given.
-learn to lip sync
-do karaoke multi angle version of track for fun
-remake old video frame by frame
-50 shots per minute MINIMUM
-around 150-250 shots per song
-make it your own video
-write a treatment
-clear idea, be realistic
-plan everything; people, props, locations, costume
-aim to shoot early to get more time to edit
-rehearse and be ORGANISED
-take the music with you and external speakers on location and whenever you are filming
-shoot the performance of a minimum of 10 times
-singer needs to sing first line of song
-lots of close ups
-shoot more than you think

CHANGE OF PLAN
After this we had lunch and that’s when the dilemma started. We began to take in to consideration, Pete's advice. I wasn't comfortable with the song choice we had as it meant we would have to rely on a boy we knew to lip sync the words and act exactly how we wanted. This to me seemed too much effort as the boy in it would not be able to be the main character and be there every single time we wanted to shoot, especially if we wanted to randomly film a shot and we couldn’t because he does not go to school with us. So we began to brainstorm ideas for a girls song, still with the same idea concept of love and relationships, but it would make it a whole lot easier if it was a girl singing as one of us in our group (me I think) would be reliable and not camera shy.

We came up with the song 'Broken Arrow' by Pixie Lott as it is a song about love and a nice song and not complicated to change over with as the lyric's are easy to follow. My group and I began to listen to the song intensely to see if we could pick up idea's and we all agreed it was the best thing to do. This of course means we need to rethink a name for the singer as well as research into the lyrics. Although this is going to set us back a bit, we are dedicated enough to meet up every day this week, texting and communicating to get our video back on form. Hopefully we will be fine as this is the best solution for a successful filming and final video at the end of it.

Back to the outing
After lunch and all decisions made, we went back to meet a producer of a Soho music company and a director similarly from the same company. Both were so interesting learning all about what they do, and how they got there. We watched many of their music video's they had been involved in and created and all were amazing and inspirational.

Overall, the day was so helpful and we all learnt a lot.