CONSTRUCTION: magazine advert progression

These were our first drafts of our magazine adverts, we felt like the image was too crowded with long lines of text which made the image less powerful and captivating.

The text of Semz and Zino were not bold enough and looked weak , however we wanted them to look powerful and effective in conveying the rappers to have dominance. This is the effect we wanted the text of their names to give, so we decided to change this.

In order for the names to dominate we decided we had to take away the long lines of text , by doing this we believed only using short punchy lines it made the advert more effective and more attractive.

We also thought in order to make it more realistic it was key to add all various types of media platforms in which their music and profiles are accessible.

Because of these things we redrafted and came up with this.

This is our Magazine advert.

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK: how it shaped our product

Generally the use of audience feedback was helpful in shaping our products as it guided us towards bettering our final products.

This was done through our final draft feedback aswell as digipak cover and magazine advert feedback.

Our digipak cover was the most vital audience feedback we got , we spent alot of vital time deciding wether we wanted the graffiti in the background or not and when we posed the question to our audience the majority voted in favour for it. As a result , it lead to syngery throughout as well as a professional final product.

We also used this advice from our final draft in order to enforce a music video which conformed to it's genre and look professional.

We discovered that we need to make the cuts quicker in order to bring one of the characters forward,  so that the audience see our video as an uptempo , fast paced new and upcoming rap video.

We then used this advice and implimented it throughout the whole of our music video.

RESEARCH: Audience Feedback: DigiPak

In this case we had already had some feedback from an audience perspective , once we had came up with 3 prominent drafts of background for the front of our digipaks. We had some people analyse which one they thought would be best.

They thought, that although the simple black and white text was good , the graffiti covering the whole of the background was too much. Overall , the background that had a faded bit of grafiti was the best as it used synergistic elements from the video itself but also captivated the audience as there is a pop of colour.

PRODUCTION: ROUGH CUT - FEEDBACK

We used this advice in order to make improvements to our final product.

we discovered that we need to make the cuts the quicker in order to match the genre , and cut the          clips in order to  bring one of the characters forwards. So that the audience see our video as an uptempo, fast paced new and upcoming uk rap video.

We tried to then filter this continually throughout the whole of our video.

PLANNING: shot list

This price of pre production planning made the production stage (filming) go a lot smoother on the day it also ensured we had enough footage and our music video matched our animatic.

PLANNING: mood board

This is a mood board for the type of scenes we feel would fit our music video. The images given are from examples of contemporary music videos.

PLANNING: costume , concept , examples

We decided to follow Lauren's music video concept , therefore these follow:

Locations:

• party
• date night
• london at night 
• Driving around in a 'nice car'

(conveying a certain type of lifestyle)

Characters:

• two central boys
• two central girls
• 'temptation' characters
• extras

Costumes:

• colour code of black red and white on each character

The main message of the video is to convey how in this day and age, it is difficult to be involved in a relationships when there is other people that put it on a plate and often ruin relationships because they can. Although it is the party involved in the relationship that is to fault, it shows how easy it is to get caught up and make these stupid decisions which we later realise wont get us what we want and love. 

PLANNING: Location, analysis, audience feedback

We wanted to keep our theme quite "urban" and "fresh" for our relatively young audience, as well as to convey to conventions for our genre.

Locations:

Central London/Southbank/Tube:
 Southbank provides some great views and attractions, which would allow us to take some great location shots and pans as well as making our video obviously based in London.
Southbank is also quite "edgy", equipped with its colourful, graffitied skate park, a possible location for us also and graffiti is a theme we wanted to use as synergy for our music video.
Tube Station - we thought of this after watching Yungen's Take My Number Music Video, showing the female protagonists travel on the tube, including scenes of them walking into the tube station, going up and down steps, getting on and off the tube, up escalators and exiting the tube station. We thought the location of a tube station rather than a train station kept the "urban", London effect

Bowling Alley/Arcade:
Heathrow Bowls - central to us all we decided to also film in an arcade/bowling alley setting. This was mainly to portray a date scenario of all protagonists, touching on the love/lustful theme. The bowling/arcade also links to youth and their interests and hobbies. Bowling and the arcade is also a relatable setting for many member of our audience, we want our audience to be able to relate.We also chose a bowling alley as it was easier to film there with the open space and our own lane, rather than a restaurant "date setting", it also gave our characters personality.

Garages:
Somewhere, where there is not many people so that we can take as much footage as we wanted to without having to worry about people around us.
The garage also means our protagonists will be able to drive the car, as well as sitting by the car miming to the camera as the car is "parked". This allows us to conform to the genre conventions and include a "nice" car.
The garage also kept our "urban" theme.

Audience Feedback:
The feedback we received on our locations was extremely positive, our audience were able to understand our concept and our reasoning behind our chosen locations. Our audience particularly stated that they were excited to see the bowling scenes as they will engage the audience as well as the scenes of the artists at the Southbank skate park.

PLANNING: TIMELINE

TIMELINE:

Monday: ALL DAY

-          Location : Garages,

-          Shots to be taken:

-          variation of shots of artists miming to the camera, also need to get shots of the car:

-          Artists driving car

-          Artists sitting on car

-          Car in background

-          Film whole song with artists miming to camera, including different panning shots

Wednesday: evening

-          Location: Arcade and Bowling;  “DATE SCENES”

-          Shots with Aaron and Lauren, and Hannah and Jo

-          Group shots of bowling

-          Shots of Lauren and Hannah, show the female friendship

-          Shots of Aaron and Jo, show the male friendship

-          Arcade scenes- all four characters playing arcade games

-          Shots of laughter

Friday: all day

-          Morning: - tube/train shots of female characters

-          Escalator shots of female characters

-          Female characters coming through barriers at train station

-          Boys first spotting girls scene

-          London Location shots; eg the river Thames, London buses..

-          Southbank Skatepark: artists miming to camera with graffiti background

-          Shots of couples walking together

-          Final scene to be filmed in London; girls and boys separating.

Research: Audience Feedback to animatic

Here is a youtube video of our audience feedback for our animatic storyboard.

PLANNING: animatic storyboard

Below is a video of our animatic

RESEARCH: pitch + storyboard feedback

In this video, we are receiving feedback on our group pitch and our storyboard

PLANNING: storyboard still frames

Here is our storyboard still frames:

They include:

Camera angles

shots

and transitions

Research: Audience Profile

Grime/hip-hop and UK rap is generally listened by a lot of our peers as friends as well as ourselves. This made it slightly easier when looking for a target audience.

Age Range 14-21:
- From research we found between this was the prime age range that actually listen to UK rap/hiphop, which is what our music video is.
-  Our music video is not the "stereotypical" rap video although it does contain certain conventions such as a "nice" car and the artists miming to camera although it does not contain anything explicit, hence why we can have our audience age in the teens.

Gender:
- We decided that our music video is for both male and female audiences due to the lyrics, which are written from a male perspective, however they are about a female, hence there will be two females in our music video, therefore they can too, be our audience.
- There is something for everyone in the sense that there are date scenes, location scenes, car scenes, friendship and love scenes, we made sure we didn't create ideas and content that could limit our audience.

RESEARCH: audience focus/group interview

We asked two teens to describe the type of music video they think would go along with the song after listening to it. This was their response:

RESEARCH: Song Lyric Analysis

Lyrical Analysis

The lyrics in the song that we chose (Semz & Zino - Fund Fetish) conform to the stereotypes of Hip Hop music, (sexualising women, money, status, power).

'See that african ting' with the big back'

'Why you always teasing, I always pre' your back when you're leaving'

The artist is making it obvious that he is looking at the girl in a sexual way.

'She's a gold digger'

'She's trying to get 100 bands'

'Just for the p she fell in love with a killer'

'She wants more stacks, and I do too'

Its almost like the artists and the women they are talking about are craving money and power.

PLANNING: Permission Sought for use of audio track

We got in touch with the artist through email and thankfully got permission to use the track.

PLANNING: Group Pitch to our class

Here is out group pitch to our class :

Evaluation of our group pitch:

WWW: - established our target audience
             - able to answer queries from our target audience
             - had good examples of the "look" we are going for
             - able to collectively put our ideas together


EBI: -more detail on what we are going to do
        - had prepared answers to questions
        - know how we are going to deal with lighting issues ect.
         - issues with cars , how we are going to film , who is going to drive, where we are going to get       the cars.

INITIAL RESEARCH: Audience

As a group we decided it would be best to do some research before creating our music video.
We decided to show our peers music videos of a similar genre to "Fund Fetish" - the track we are using.

We decided to show our peers the following music videos:

We then presented our peers with our track and initial ideas to help them to gage our objective.
We received the following feedback:

"I think the first music video we were shown "Take My Number" by Yungen was the best one. It fitted the genre well, as well as being a video both teenage boys and girls can watch" Marion

"A video in the style of Take My Number would really suit the narrative that you are trying to convey as your concept has many similarities to the video" Megan

"Take My Number, is fun and doesn't display women as sexual objects or include any explicit content, from listening to your pitch and ideas, it seems your video is going to be friendly for all and therefore I think you should definitely take inspiration from this very successful music video" Keira

PLANNING: genre

Below is a brief video explaining our song choice :

OUR FINAL IDEA:

We have decided to stick with our idea of using "Fund Fetish" , by Semz&Zino.

This is due to the fact that it fits the genre of music we have chosen perfectly, not only this but the type of music video we want to create also matches.

Furthermore, our close contact with the artists means that we already have permission to use the song and speeds the process of filming and everything else that goes with it easier.

Overall , we all believe that this song is the perfect one for us to make the best music video we can.

RESEARCH: Links to similar artists/bands

Yungen:

UK-based rapper from South London.  He found fame through his SBTV freestyle. He has released projects called Tha New Era Project and Project Black & Red (Deluxe) as well as having hit singles including ; Bestie, Take My Number, Cuffing Season and so many more!

Yxng Bane:

Oringinally from East London, the 21 year old topped charts with his "Shape of you" remix and has since then climbed the charts with his collaboration with Yungen for the song "Bestie". He has also had much success with his latest single "Rihanna".

Both artists are similar in style and content. Both artists are extremely diverse with Yungen having a lot of "grime" music as well as "hiphop". As a group we took inspiration from the styles and videos of both Yxng Bane and Yungen.

Similarities to Semz&Zino;

All of the artists use social media platforms in order to promote their music and share their music. This includes, instagram, twitter, snapchat and more. This is a way of self-advertising as well as a good marketing skill as the artists share snippets of songs on their social medias, drawing an audience in to want to purchase and listen to the real thing.

RESEARCH: Unsigned Artist

Semz & Zino

Moving like arsenal, my brudda what do you mean!!😂🔥 @imjustbait @risingtalents @theuglygram #teamfullofwinners

A post shared by Semz & Zino (@semzandzino) on Mar 17, 2017 at 2:06pm PDT

• Semz & Zino are two young, upcoming artists based in West London📍
• They are becoming increasingly popular through their short videos on Instagram 📹
• Their content is catered for a variety of audiences, however their most successful videos are the ones that are lighthearted and directed towards females:

It's been a minute😅 tag someone @risingtalents1 @imjustbait

A post shared by Semz & Zino (@semzandzino) on Jul 30, 2017 at 2:01pm PDT

• Considering the success of these types of videos, it would be smart to do a music video about females.
• The perfect song for this type of music video would be Semz & Zino - Fund Fetish:

Inspiration:

Our idea:
Locations:

• party
• date night
• london at night 
• Driving around in a 'nice car'

(conveying a certain type of lifestyle)

Characters:

• two boys
• two girls
• 'temptation' characters
• extras

The main message of the video is to convey how in this day and age, it is difficult to be involved in a relationships when there is other people that put it on a plate and often ruin relationships because they can. Although it is the party involved in the relationship that is to fault, it shows how easy it is to get caught up and make these stupid decisions which we later realise wont get us what we want and love.