Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Questionnaire Results

After giving out the questionnaire that we made, we collected the results and analysed them. These were our findings.

 Question 1 - How old are you?
The vast majority of the people who took the questionnaire fell into the 13 - 24 bracket. This makes sense since a large amount of our peers would fill out the survey. These young men would be either 17 or 18. We wanted to try and get a stratified sample so we made sure to ask people whom were older as to get a different perspective. As well as this we were rather pleased at this majority group because this is our target audience, we can use these results to try to further understand what our target audience likes and dislikes.

 Question 2 - What is your gender?
Due to a similar circumstance so question 1, most of the people who responded to our questionnaire were male. There were a small number of females because we made sure that we got a good sample.

 Question 3 - What is your favourite music genre?
The reason that I decided to ask this question was to try and find any links or patterns in what people liked in relation to their age, gender etc... This would allow us to market to our target market better. However, the results are so varied that no pattern can be ascertained. It seems that every genre of music is popular with different people. Music taste is very subjective and changes from person to person.

 Question 4 - How often will you watch a song's music video?
Of the people who responded, approx. 70% said that they watch music videos often or sometimes. I found this rather motivating during the production process. Personally, I didn't expect the percentage to be so high, originally thinking that a minority bothered to watch the music video.

 Question 5 - What characteristics should a good music video have?
The next three questions weren't multiple choice, any answer could be written down. Since this is difficult to group I have grouped what seem to be the most popular responses together. For example, one of the most popular answers for question 5 was; a good story and interesting visuals. This feedback is very important because it gives us direction. Since we know that most people value good visuals and a story we will focus on having these two things to a high standard.

 Question 6 - How do you usually hear a new song for the first time?
The two overwhelming responses to this question are via Radio or an online music streaming service like Spotify.  This is important because neither of these are able to show the music video. It is likely that we will launch the video on YouTube since it is free and easy to do so.

 Question 7 - Have you ever heard of Jose Gonzalez before?
This question is meant to see the popularity of the song we have chosen. Generally Jose is unknown, meaning that Far Away will be relatively unknown too. This can be both a blessing and a curse because it means that it will be a fresh perspective on the song for many of our viewers however people may not like the song itself since they have never heard it.
The questionnaire proved to be massively helpful in allowing us to gain an understanding of the people that we are trying to cater to. As well as this it helped us see the general consensus on various topics such as who Jose Gonzalez is. We will use this information during production to try and deliver the best video possible with aspects and ideas that the audience want to see such as a good story and interesting visuals.

Similar Products 3 - 'Broken' by Jake Bugg


'Broken' is a song written and performed by Jake Bugg. It was released as a single on his album in 2012. It reached spot #44 on the UK singles chart.

I wanted to analyse this music video because of the effect it has on the audience. It doesn't bear many similarities to what we plan to make visually, however, I want to recreate the way enchants its viewers by seeing how it accomplished this and how i can translate that to my project.


The plot of the video is simple, its follows Jake as he sings Broken in front of an audience of tough bikers and rednecks at an open-mic night taking place in a seedy bar. The audience start out rowdy however Jake's singing calms them down and soon they start to dance and reminisce. 

The reason that the video works so well to keep an audience engaged in my opinion is that it puts the viewer of the music video (us) into the shoes of one of the audience members in the video. We relate to them. While he is on stage Jake is completely alone, he has no backing singers or musicians. This forces us to focus on him since there is nothing else to really focus on. I think this is a great example of using mise-en-scene to force the audience to focus on what you want them to. I can use this in my project rather effectively in a lot of creative ways such as using lighting to achieve this. 

As the video and song progress the audience in the video begin to pay more attention to Jake as he sings. This mirrors what happens with the real life audience. It is through this method that the video gets the audience to relate to it. I do not think that I will be able to accomplish this is my project since the video that we are making has a rather unusual story and very few if not none will have experienced what the main character is going through. 

Tonally, the video supports the emotions that the song is trying to get across such as loss and regret. It does this in an interesting way from a storytelling perspective. As Jake sings the song we get a sense that this is what he has done and how he regrets it. The audience in the video each come to a realization, such as when a man who is about to be unfaithful to his wife sees what he is doing and stops to call his wife or how a fight is defused between two drunk men. The video separates Jake from the audience by never really showing them in the same shot together. This is something that I have found to be common in music videos. They show loneliness or separation by only having one specific character or object in the shot. This is definitely something that I will use in my project. 

Crew

Not including our two actors, there are three people working on this music video. By the end of the project we would like to each have done a similar amount of work, while at the same time having taken dominant roles in specific areas. 

This naturally leads to each person having a role that they will fulfill in the group. We wanted the selection of these roles to be as organic as possible, allowing each person to choose their task because they wanted. This led to some roles being shared as well as people taking a backseat in some activities and coming to the fore front in others.

For example, I rather quickly fell into the editing position. I think this is because it was my idea that was chosen and I had already thought of a rough plot line that would work well with the song. This developed into me taking a dominant role in the filming portion of the project. With things such as editing and production being taken on by the other two members of the group, Sam and Jack. 

Shared roles would have ideas being bounced around between all three of us, hopefully producing the best work that we could.

Audience Questionnaire

      I  feel that it is important to have understanding of both your target audience as well as the people who don't fall into that demographic. One of the best ways to try and understand these people are by understanding their interests. One of the best ways to do that is by creating a short questionnaire and analyzing the results. The questions that I have chosen were designed to be first get an idea about the individual and which category of people they fall into, whereas the final few questions are meant to provide relevant information for my project, hence why I ask about music videos and Jose Gonzalez.

Personally, I find that most people will not spend a lot of time answering a questionnaire. I thought about this when thinking of what I wanted to ask. I have tried to extract all of the important information that I want in as few questions as possible. 


    1.     How old are you?

a.     13 – 17
b.     18 – 24
c.      24 – 40
d.     40+

    2.     What is your Gender?

a.     Male
b.     Female

    3.     What is your favourite music genre?

a.     Rock n' Roll
b.     Pop
c.     Rn B
d.     Romantic
e.     Country
f.      Punk
g.     Alternative
h.     Metal
i.      Blues
j.      Classical
k.      Dub-step
l.       Musical
m.     Folk
n.      Comedy
o.      Other

    4.     How often will you watch a song's music video?
a.     Often
b.     Sometimes
c.     Not very often
d.     Never

    5.     What characteristics should a good music video have?

    6.     How do you usually hear a new song for the first time?

    7.     Have you ever heard of Jose Gonzalez before?



Saturday, 21 February 2015

Equipment

This is Prezi presentation about the equipment that the group has available.

*The full name of the video camera that we are going to use is the JVC GY-HM150E

Editing Software

We had three main options as to what we were going to use to edit our music video. Adobe Premiere Pro, Windows Movie Maker or Final Cut Express. The major differences between the options are that Premiere is installed on most computers in the school that are running a copy of Windows, whereas Final Cut is only available on the few iMac computers that the school owns. Windows Movie Maker is a free piece of software that I have installed on my laptop at home.

 Either options has advantages and disadvantages. Premiere Pro is installed on far more computers meaning that there will almost always be a free computer to work at, as well as this, Premiere is the editing software that I personally, am more familiar with.Premiere also has a fleshed out suite of tools to enable me to edit the colours of a piece of footage as well as the brightness, contrast, lens flare and many others. This means that I can fine tune the footage to be exactly how I want it to be. However, Premiere can be a resource hog and since the school computers that I would be working on are significantly under-powered Premiere can be unreliable, prone to crashing and can cause work to be lost.

 Final Cut is only installed on the schools iMac's, of which there are only two. This is less than ideal because of how there are three people in our group and if they are taken by other students then we wouldn't be able to edit. As well as this I have no previous experience with both Final Cut or the Mac operating system, meaning that I would have to learn how to use them, which takes time that could be used to edit. The advantage of Final Cut over Premiere is that it is far more reliable. This is because of how Final Cut is designed to be used on a Mac and interacts with the hardware far better, resulting in far less crashes and lost work. Final Cut has a similar amount of features as Premiere, however, I would need to learn how to use them all.

Windows Movie Maker is an interesting option, I have it available at home, however I am not familiar with it. It also lacks features that will prove useful and is very much a 'bare-bones' piece of software since it is free to use. As well as this since I can only work on it at home, I am not able to get advice and feedback on my work from my group.

 Our group has decided to use Premiere Pro as our editing software of choice due to our familiarity with it and the extensive options that it provides us when editing our music video. The instability can be worked around with backups and saving often.

Research into Industry

The music industry is a vast and complex topic to try and analyse, therefore I will focus on music videos since this is what we are going to be producing.

 Generally there are two big divides in the music industry; The famous, mega budget superstars that make millions from each single and the obscure indie groups that work on micro budgets with unique songs that gather a cult following. Which ever generalisation that an artist/group falls into directly affects the type of music video that they would produce, with the main difference being the available budget.

 An artist that falls into the former category would be able to have expensive lighting, equipment and production team which should, in theory, produce a superior video with higher quality overall. However, this isn't the case. Often, having these high production values can cause the video to lack direction and emotion, instead showcasing a male power fantasy.

 Indie groups differ from this due to not having a huge budget to afford every luxury. Instead they have to rely often on a single actor and camera. This forces innovation. Most music in this genre have an overall message or meaning which, due to constraints, are creatively implied via the imagery and emotion in the song/music video.

 This relates to our music video because of how we fall into the latter group. Since we have no budget, and the only equipment available is what is given to us. The locations we have access to are limited by both our ability to travel, if the location is free etc...

 We are forced by these limitations to think outside the box and come up with interesting and creative methods of storytelling. To this end we will focus on aspects such as mise-en-scene, lighting as well as setting to give the viewers a sense of what is happening in the scene as well as the emotions and motivations of the main characters.