Research

Primary Research

My primary research has shown me a lot about my piece and it's potential with my target audience. 

I ended up receiving a total of 24 responses, with 22 of them being from people between the ages of 15 and 25 which is great considering this age range is my target audience. 100% of the people I asked also lived in the UK, which is also great because my intended demographic is the UK. 21 people out of the 24 people like alternative music, and over 50% said they watch music videos as well as stream music online. The majority of the people I asked watch music videos on average at least once a week, and when they do watch them 21 out of 24 people watch them online! 

All of this feedback is really helpful in giving me an idea of how to create my music video, because all of these things are how I suspected they would be. I thought that the majority of people liked alternative music and that they watched music videos almost exclusively online, which is great because the survey has just backed up my own intuition!

My target audience is people aged between 15 and 25, because I feel as though the younger generation of people will enjoy the genre of music more and they will understand the concept of the video more. People that are younger may struggle to understand the video and the message that the video is pointing out, and people who are older may dislike the music genre, thus negatively tainting their view on my video and making them less likely to watch it.

 My demographic is white males between the ages of 15 and 25 that live in the UK. I chose this age group because 96% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 access YouTube We are Flint. (2019), which is where my music video will be released and I chose males because males are more likely to like sci-fi videos than women are Daleisio (2019) and I found that more males listen to alternative music than women Lamere, P. (2019). They are either in full time education or retail work, and they live in terraced housing. I also did not know what to choose in terms of race, because there will only be one person with a race in the video and that will be a white female. All of the other characters will have robot masks on, therefore there will be no race. I chose for all of the characters to have masks on so that it takes away the humanisation and makes the video more sci-fi, so that it is still interesting and fun to watch whilst still portraying the message that I want to put across.

I will air my music video for the first time on YouTube. I chose YouTube because my primary research tells me that the individuals within my target audience do not watch music videos on the TV- they only watch music videos on the internet, so to include them and make it more likely to reach them/more likely for them to watch it, it must be available online. 

In terms of advertising my final product, I have chosen to do a trailer. I chose to do this because this will entice the audience in to watch my video, and because it will give the audience an idea of what they will see within my music video. It is atypical to do a trailer for a music video, however because my music video carries more traits of a short film rather than a music video, I feel as though it fits. 

Doing a short trailer rather than a poster or a t-shirt also fits better with my target audience, because the way they will access the final video is via the internet/YouTube so for the advertisement to also be available through this website, means that the audience that has watched my advertisement has guaranteed access to the final product.

For my trailer, I will simply edit the video together and then take some of the fundamental parts of that video, a section of the song and compile that together to create a final product. I am choosing to do it this way, because it will save a lot of time which means that I can spend more of my time focussing on my actual music video.

A problem that I have with my final project is the lack of a budget, and that will result in a lower quality video with a much smaller cast than I had once imagined. I plan to work around this by lowering the saturation and by giving it an intentionally "rough" feel, and by planning for the video to have a small cast rather than the huge cast that I had intended to have at the beginning.

Secondary Research

One of my secondary pieces of research includes the short story There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury Bradbury, (1950). The story is based upon a time in the future where humans no longer exist, however there is a house that is entirely automated and runs itself, however it is not aware that the humans are no longer there, so it continues to run until it burns down in a fire. 

I like the concept of this story, because it anticipates what will happen in the future in terms of technology working automatically and humans being lazy. It also highlights the fact that humans can be wiped out at any point, and it shows the power of technology to keep going even though there are no humans there to keep it working. I feel as though this is a good reflection on how technology works now in reality, as artificial intelligence is on the rise and more and more people are relying on technology to get through their days by: setting their alarms, travelling to and from work, seeing what the weather will be like, planning days etc. The difference is, is that humans are currently still around (although with the rise of global temperature due to global warming, this may not be the case in 100 years, and maybe technology will still be around to tell the tale).

Another piece of research that I looked at was the War of The Worlds G. Wells, H. (1897) CBS radio show re-enactment The War of the Worlds (radio), Zemeckis, R (1994) (1938) that sparked panic across the USA. The show included a seemingly normal radio broadcast with music, which was intermittently interrupted by "news bulletins"  Lots of people in the USA were listening, and as more and more people continued tuning in, they did not realise that it was a drama rather than a real life alien invasion. It sent most of New Jersey and other parts of the country into meltdown with roads becoming gridlocked, shops being ransacked and robbed, and people fleeing their homes looking for safety away from the alien invasion. The authorities were not made aware of the broadcast either, which made things even worse because instead of stopping people from panicking, they just joined in! Of course, eventually everyone found out that it was a drama and was not reality, which sparked outrage within the following days against the radio show for putting out false information to the audience. 

I really value this piece of research because I feel as though it is a fabulous example of people taking something fake and blowing it hugely out of proportion. Of course these people did not know the broadcast was fake at the time, but it was an hour long which included half an hour of a "victim" talking from "experience" so most viewers must have tuned in for a very short amount of time before going to panic stations and causing chaos locally. I want to replicate this sort of a message in my own music video- where the robots get a message (which will be unknown by the audience) and then they all follow this guy without full understanding of what the message is. Of course, in this instance it will be the opposite way round to the radio broadcast as the radio broadcast started off panic and then resulted in calm, however the message will begin with peace and then finish on danger.

Talking of peace and danger, I then thought about how I want to portray these in my video, and I thought about putting two symbols in my video that represent each of these words. The main problem was that I did not know how to make it obvious what each symbol means. The first thing I did was look up peace symbols and I immediately recognised what I saw- the peace symbol that is present in every scene where peace is represented e.g. the scene in Forrest Gump Zemeckis, R (1994) where all of the hippie type characters are protesting- you can see a number of peace symbols on different signs within the crowd, which can be seen in the video below.

I then moved onto the symbol for danger, and I immediately found what I was looking for once again. There was a sign for a hazard/death that is generally used on dangerous/hazardous chemicals like bleach. Of course, many households all have bleach in them so many people will be familiar with the symbol, and if not I am sure that a skull and crossbones in a triangle in fairly synonymous with danger and death. A place that this symbol can be seen is in the Simpsons Movie Silverman, (2007) when the hazardous waste is dumped into the river which can be seen below.

I like the idea of using both of these symbols because everyone knows what they mean. I showed a focus group of people within the age group of my target audience a picture of each symbol and they all identified what they meant, which is perfect because this means that they will understand the message that is being sent out within my film. All of this refers to the use of iconography YourDictionary. (2019), which is the use of icons to promote a certain subject, movement or ideal e.g. using the hazardous symbol will promote the idea of death and danger without actually showing it on screen.

For unit 12 we had to write an essay based on a topic of our choosing, and I chose how women are represented in music videos between 1970 to present Beckett, C. (2019). Within my music video I have planned to have one female character, and the rest of the characters will have no obvious gender because they will all have robot heads on, and will all look mostly the same (apart from their body type, of course).

Within my essay I researched the male gaze and how it effects the success of music videos, and it seems that all of the music videos that I looked at included a number of women in a lack of clothing. I thought about whether I would like to replicate this within my music video, and seeing as my target audience includes young males I decided that I would like to implement this within my own video.

Seeing as I wanted all of my robots to wear black so that they all looked the same, I wanted the female character to wear white. I also wanted her to wear white to connote that she is pure and a good character Cloud Ten Group. (2019)- although she may not seem this way in the beginning, as the video unfurls it will appear that she is actually trying to save the people involved, not stopping a message of peace from spreading. I also want the female character to wear something that reveals a lot of skin on the legs, arms and chest to further play on that male gaze, and I want the character to wear red lipstick as this has been proven to hold "the most prolonged gazes" HuffPost. (2019) from men, and there are lots of close-ups on her mouth within the video.

Now onto the robot characters- I first looked at a number of different robots within films and found a great website Evotion - Agence leader dans le domaine des événements innovants et technologiques. (2019) that had 5 different clips from films with robots in them, however I was soon to be disappointed when they looked nothing like the vision I had in my mind. All of the robots within the short clips were very human-like and rounded, however when I thought of robots I immediately thought of the typical box style robot heads.

As I continued to look at different robot films, I was shocked to find that none of the robots looked the way I had imagined them in my head. I looked at the following website pastemagazine.com. (2019) which included a number of rounded robots and human-like robots and even some box-shaped robots that looked nothing like my own vision, so I decided to do some sketches based on what I had seen and what my vision was. 

As you can see above, my sketches at the bottom in the circles are the ones that I settled on and liked the most, and the rest were based on different things that I had seen throughout my research of different things including the videos, websites and images.

I chose the colours based on what I thought would look best for my own video, which was a stereotypical silver/grey head with a red box/antenna on top. I drew black around the mouths so that the mouth was distinguishable from the rest of the head, and I chose to do the eyes as a swirl because it reminded me of being hypnotised, and I felt as though this would look good as the idea of the video is that the robots were being hypnotised by the messages that they had seen.

I chose to do the main robot head with red eyes because red symbolises danger, and I did the caution stripes around the outside for obvious reasons... it means caution! So although the robot seems as if it is sending out a message of peace at the beginning, the eyes foreshadow the robot being a bad character before the audience is even aware of it.

I then chose to look at two different music videos from within the same genre to see if there were any conventions within those that I liked and would like to use within my own. The music videos that I chose are both also by The Prodigy, and they are: RUN WITH THE WOLVES- The Prodigy Clashproduction (2010) and Take Me To The Hospital- The Prodigy The Prodigy (2009).

I like how Run With The Wolves has a number of different shot lengths, and they are not necessarily where you would expect. So, before the chorus there is a section of very quick changing shots, but then when the chorus/instrumental part starts and is very fast-paced, there is a long shot which goes against the norms of music video editing. I also liked how the video included a section where there was a clip playing, and there were certain parts cut out and replaced so it cut up the long piece of footage and gave the video dimension, but still allowed you to watch that entire bit of footage. Lastly, I liked the mix between the two types of footage, being standard and slow-motion. I feel as though that gave the video a certain dynamic that I would really like to replicate within my own.



I also like how in Take Me To The Hospital there is a mix between performance and how they only lip-sync some of the words. Because there is a very limited number of words within my own song choice, I like this idea, and will be recreating this within my own.

Overall, looking at the two music videos really helped me to shape my own idea and gave me a good indication of what I would like within my own music video. Of course, in order for it to be my own I cannot copy what they did, but I can take elements from each and work them into my own idea.

One thing I knew that I was going to struggle with was creating professional looking credits, therefore I turned to YouTube to help me create my credits. 
 AdobeMasters (2017).

       

I found this video really helpful as it took me through what to do step by step, and I'm really glad that I took the time to learn how to make credits professionally because I feel as though it makes the piece a lot more professional looking and it finishes the video off just right.

I needed to look at a trailer so that I could get an idea of what mine should look like, so I looked up "music video trailers" on Google, and it linked me to this video:
Snake, Dj (2018).

I liked a few things about this video. The first thing being the fact that it is very short- at only 21 seconds it is a very short advert which is good because it holds the audience's attention and doesn't get boring. Another thing I liked is that they didn't specifically say what it was that was coming out, but it was the audience's job to infer that it was a music video/song featuring the artists in the advert. Lastly, I liked the fact that at the end it only told the audience when it was coming out and where.

I have decided that I want to implement these features into my own- I want my own trailer to be short and snappy, and I want it to infer what the actual product is and where it will be out without directly stating it.