Audience Research

In order to create an effective music video that connects and draws in my target audience I have to research into who my audience would be.

My audience will mainly be the people who watch the music video on music TV channels so I looked into what music channels may show 'Secrets' on them. After some research I found that MTV Two plays alternative rock music like One Republic. On their website they say:

"The music channel with attitude for indie, rock and alternative music enthusiasts An interactive music channel playing diverse and cutting edge music. MTV Two is where the viewer defines the music programming - create your own hour of videos via the web. With a leftfield take on the world, it really is a channel created by and for individuals.

Target audience: 16-24 male"

Another channel that shows alternative rock, Kerrang! put their target audience at 15-35 male. These two channels are fairly consistent with each other and show an audience that I should be targeting mainly when creating my own video and when conducting research and getting audience feedback.

To appeal to this audience the musicians in my video will have to look 'cool' so that the viewers can look up to and want to be them. They must also have qualities to them that is preferred by this audience such as being relatively young (20s-30s) and dress in an appropriate way.

For example, bands like One Republic and Coldplay often involve the members dressed in a smart-casual way with fashionable clothing.

Music Video Research - Editing and Conventions

Editing and camerawork are two of the most important aspects when creating a music video. To create a good music video, the editing must follow the pace of the song and make sure that key points in the song are highlighted by the video, all whilst keeping the video looking professional and clean.

A help website called about.com has outlined some of the key difficulties people have when filming a music video. These include such editing techniques as excessive zoom and excessive special effects. Although both of these can be used well, in many videos these will look amateurish and unfitting. Other points outlined in the article include the use of adding post-production sound effects and that a well-done simple idea can be better than a bad complex one. A quote from the article's author defines editing well:

"Your footage might be great, but it'll only become a great video through editing. To do a good job you'll need patience, time and more patience. You'll need to decide the 'feel' and pace of the video. Will it be made up of long sweeping shots, or quick sharp edits? Do you want to follow the mood of the song and edit to the music or do you want the video to contrast with the track?"

Many music videos include an introduction, a scene that occurs

before the song begins to play (or during a song intro). These intros can last from anything between 5 seconds and 2 minutes. Although this is usually done in narrative style videos to set the scene, it has also been done in performance style videos too such as in 'crushcrushcrush' by Paramore. Other songs where that have an intro include; Stop and Stare by One Republic, Maneater by Nelly Furtado and Stan by Eminem.

A main aspect of developing a music video is to make it clear who is privileged in each shot. For example when the listener can hear a guitar during a solo the guitarist should be privileged in the shot or even the only person in the shot. Close ups of the instruments are common for these types of shots as they can show the skill and manual dexterity of the musicians which fans like to see. Most of the time, however, the lead singer is privileged in shots. This is to emphasize the lyrics and to show the singer meaningfully singing the words as well

as to create and uphold their own iconography as mentioned in Andrew Goodwin's 'Dancing in the Distraction Factory'.

Also in Andrew Goodwin's book, he talks about the relationship between the music, lyrics and visuals that make up a music video. He explains that "There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics". This occurs in every single music video. An example of the visuals illustrating the lyrics is in a song called 'Toxic' by Britney Spears. It shows Britney dropping poison into a man's mouth as the words ''with a taste of poison paradise'' are heard in the lyrics. Another example is a Coldplay video for 'The Scientist'. It shows the lead singer walking in reverse which corresponds to the lyrics, ''lets go back to the start''. An example of the visuals contradicting the lyrics is in the song 'Good Riddance' by Greenday. The lyrics are sarcastic and although the singer says ''I hope you have the time of your life'', he doesn't mean it which is shown in the video.

The book explains how the continuous release of videos from an artist throughout their career can tell a story of the artist and how they developed, this was defined as a meta-narrative. It is important that artists maintain this meta-narrative or 'star persona' in order to keep their fans happy with consistent material. If a band/musician makes a big change in the music that they create, it can potentially cause them to lose fans (although also has the potential to gain fans).

Copyright Permission

The copyright holder for 'Secrets' turned out to be the band's lead singer and writer, Ryan Tedder. This is the letter we sent to him asking for permission to use the song, 'Secrets' for our project.

Chosen Song - Secrets, One Republic

The final choice of song that we made was 'Secrets' by the alternative rock band, One Republic. Before we can completely confirm this as a song choice, we are sending a letter to the writer/producer of the song asking for permission to use it which I will put in the next post.

Reasons for choice

Secrets - One Republic has a number of qualities that our group wanted in a song and presented good opportunities to create an exciting video.

• It lends itself well to a performance style video as the instruments are prominent and can be fittingly brought in throughout a video. This means that at different points in the song where certain instruments are privileged they can be shown in a video for a powerful effect.
• It has a unique sound with the use of different instruments like the cello and violin. This will not only make our music video stand out (with focuses on diverse instruments) but also help to create a 'feel' for the band. There is also an absence of guitars which also contributes to this.
• The song is not too fast. This allows us to set a calm scene with greater focus on each individual sound. It also allows us to have more flexibility with our locations in regards to filming. This is because fast songs tend to feel as though the video should involve a live concert.

Album Sales Trends

Over recent years, trends in music sales have begun to make a change toward a more digital market. In 2009 the BBC wrote an article about the fall in album sales giving way to a rise in digital sales. Overall album sales had decreased by 3.5% over the year despite downloaded album sales increasing massively by 56.1% consisting of 1 eighth of the total sold. This has become a growing trend and 2011 became the sixth year in a row where album sales have dropped. Despite this trend, singles sales are still increasing. In 2009 152 million singles were sold (up by 32.7% from the previous year) with 98% of those being digital downloads.

One of the most insteresting things in regards to albums is that none of the top 50 highest grossing albums were released after 2000. Michael Jackson's Thriller tops the list with 110 million estimated copies sold worldwide - over doubling the next highest; Back in Black by AC/DC at 49 million.

Music Video - Song Candidates

Before choosing song candidates to create our music video to, we first made up some guidelines on the style and type of songs that we wanted. To do this a number of things had to be decided:

• Performance or narrative based
• Genres
• Artists
• Song choices

At first our group had wanted to create a narrative-based video. However, after looking into different existing narrative and performance based videos we decided that it would be a better idea to make a performance video. Reasons for this include:

1. Performers were easier to obtain than good actors
2. Most songs lend themselves more to performance based videos
3. Easier to avoid cliche and bad end products
4. Less locations would be necessary to obtain

Once we chose this we moved on to music genres. The consensus in our group was that we should choose a genre from which a performance video would lend itself most to. Most rock style music videos that exist at the moment are semi or solely performance based, clearly showing in each video the band's energy and drive with their music. This genre clearly was a good choice to look into further, and as we did so we started to look at different sub-genres. Alternative rock was an area that sparked our interest as it still lent itself very well to performance style videos, but also had varied sounds and instruments within that weren't typical of normal rock music. We considered this as a good thing because we'd be able to create a unique video that stood out among others. This also, however, will create challenges later on when finding musicians that can play these instruments, but I will talk about these in a later post.

We looked at several artists within the alternative rock genre (and the rock genre for good measure) including Red Hot Chile Peppers, Gorillaz, One Republic, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Jovi, The Verve, Nirvana and the Oasis. Three songs stood out in particular for us from these artists:

1. The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
2. One Republic - Secrets
3. Bon Jovi - It's My Life

All three of these songs fit a performance style video and have their own unique sound using various techniques and instruments that would make for an interesting video.

In-depth Music Video Analysis - Stan, Eminem

The music video for 'Stan' by Eminem is narrative based (as opposed to performance based) and tells a story of a crazed fan who eventually murders his girlfriend and commits suicide. There is controversy as to whether or not the story is based off of a real event or not but it defiantly has relevance in the fact that some famous people have to deal with crazed fans like the character of Stan. The song was set to become the 2000 Christmas number 1 hit but was overtaken by Bob the Builder's 'Can We Fix It?'.

The music video for Stan has a large intro that lasts about 1 and a half minutes. The video begins with a shot outside a window in the rain and zooms in until Dido (Stan's girlfriend in the story) can be seen on a bed, pregnant. Rain outside the window acts as pathetic fallacy to set a dark, ominous mood. lightning strikes light up Dido while she sleeps adding even further to the depth of the problems ahead. More lightning strikes are used to hide the next short dissolves and repositioning of the camera. Firstly, a bird's eye view, then a side-on medium close up of her face, her expression lit up by the lightning is sorrowful and melancholic.

The next scene is of Stan in the bathroom. Instantly the viewer is taken aback as Stan looks very similar to Eminem but is not actually him. Stan has just cut his hair like Eminem's and is admiring it as his girlfriend tries to enter the room. A bird's eye view shot shows Stan getting annoyed with his girlfriend as she demands to come in. Stan is quickly shown to be angry and fanatical.

The song begins with Dido's chorus and the line 'My tea's gone cold and I'm wondering why I got out of bed at all'. Already, the tone and lyrics reveals much about the character which is accented in the video with all of the cool colours in the mise en scene. It suggests that she is uncomfortable with her life and wants change. The next line, 'The morning rain clouds up my window, and I can't see at all' however, reveals that her future is unforeseen and dark. The chorus continues and repeats as the video shows Stan going down to his basement and preparing to write a letter. His basement reveals just how fanatical he is. Posters and newspaper cutouts of eminem cover the walls and his desk with nothing else in the room aside from a TV showing eminem videos (most likely on loop or had been shown many times since Stan waved at it as Eminem waved at the camera).

When Eminem's verse begin, Stan is shown to be writing a letter to eminem (The verse even begins with 'Dear Slim'). This is the scene for most of the verses of the song. The use of panning and tracking shots outline Stan's emotions as he writes, building up tension with each new verse. There are 3 long verses (letters) throughout the song that show Stan become progressively more angry at Eminem and a final verse which is Eminem's reply. Stan's anger builds up to the extent that the last verse involves Stan about to commit suicide and murder of his girlfriend. The pace of the music drives the pace of the editing and as Stan gets more angry the camera begins to move quicker and with shorter cuts. This adds to the tension already created in the story and creates a dynamic and emotional video.

Stan's build-up of anger seems to stem from the absence of a response from Eminem to his letters. After the first letter (in the song) during the chorus a scene is shown of Stan's letter falling off the fan mail trolley which would have lead to the anger shown in the second letter (verse).

The second verse begins again with 'Dear slim' but Stan's attitude is much worse. He is shot in a medium close-up view but in a low-angle shot that amplifies his frustration and growing tension. Stan's words reveal an even greater degree of fanaticism during this verse when he writes 'PS: We should be together too'. He even is shown to paste a picture of Eminem over one of his girlfriend.

With the third verse, Stan has lost it, instead of starting his message with 'Dear Slim', he says 'Dear mister 'I'm too good to call or write my fans'. He is shown in a car talking into a voice recorder with heavy rain and lightning strikes outside acting as pathetic fallacy. The lyrics become heavy with curses as Stan explains to Eminem how he should feel guilty for making Stan do what he is about to do. At the end of the verse Stan drives off of a bridge killing himself and his girlfriend.

The final verse is Eminem writing a letter in response to Stan. Eminem is shown in a positive way in contrast to Stan's personality. He talks about how Stan should calm down and treat his girlfriend better. Another contrast is that although the window is black, there is no rain or lightning until the very end when lightning strikes light up the window to show Stan looking at Eminem like a ghost haunting its killer.