Music Video Ideas

I started out with 3 Main song ideas and video narratives.

My first was to take Beyonce's - Love on Top and make a video based on choreography and different types of dance. With many split screens and fast paced editing. However, after researching many student's past work I found that many of videos based on dancing didn't turn out as well as those with a set narrative.
The music video was released during planning (just like Taylor's song) and the video was based on dance and costume changes. Even though my initial idea wasn't EXACTLY like Beyonce's, I thought it was too similar.



Next I would use John Mayer's - Don't Stop this Train. This would be about a girl trying to find the colour in her life again after going to places where nothing really felt like home. The whole video would be in black and white and shows a journey through the black and white times until she reaches her destination, which would be in colour. The final scene showing the colour back in her life would be shown by being faded in.
Throughout the video i would be overlaying two clips over each other in split screens. The reason i decided not to use this idea as my final idea is because it'd be hard and expensive to be able to get on the train and find different stops to be able to get off and film around. Plus the final destination may be extremely busy.



John Mayer's Live version of Don't Stop This Train.
My final idea was Ours - Taylor Swift. The narrative for this would be based entirely on a love story, the conventional boy/girl soppy story. Unfortunately, during my time of planning this the music video was released and was based on the same plot as mine. I felt that it was too similar to mine therefore didn't decide to make this my final idea.



As you can see the narrative of this is based on a girl whose boyfriend is stationed in the army. It follows the story of Taylor (the girlfriend) having to go to work and deal with all the gossiping and speculations about her and her life.

My Questionnaire

Hopefully the Questionnaire is a lot clearer in this post!

Audience Research

Here are the questionnaires I had people fill out from the age of 12 - 30+. I decided to make the age range spread across a wide range of age groups to get a better view on the sort of music different age groups listen to.

I handed out a questionnaire as you can see in the picture to the right, with a varying range of questions.

I placed my results into three separate charts to show the diversity of answers within each age group.

This first chart simply states how old they are. As you can see the majority of the candidates i asked to participate in the questionnaire were in the 17 - 19 age group.

Next, I asked what their favourite gene of music was and it came out to be Hip Hop. This shows that the majority of my peers listen to Hip Hop rather than anything else.

Finally, in this graph it shows what sex they are. The majority being Male, this may be the reason why the highest result for genre may be Hip Hop.

Because of my results I tried to choose an upbeat song that may be relatable to my target audience.

One Take Music Video

This is the music video for Coldplay's 'Yellow'. It was taken in one take and the simplicity of it emphasises the meaning of the song and focuses more on the lyrics rather than what's going on in the video.

I really like this style of music video by James Frost & Alex but I feel that it can only be successful with meaningful songs where the lyrics are more important, therefore only working for certain genres. Because of the lack of effects and narrative it is easier to understand the song and cinematography placed with the music composition.

Why Does Love Do This To Me?

As a group we made a sample music video to a New Zealand band practising our editing skills. As you can see we experimented with split screening which gives the illusion that there are clones of one person.

I feel that our practice went quite well and that the seams are seamless. However, I wish we had made this sample a little bit longer and played around more with different effects.

Director Study

For my Director Study I will be using Trey Fanjoy who has directed many music videos for Taylor Swift and many more country stars.

Trey has been nominated multiple times at the Country Music Association Awards, Academy of Country Music, Billboard Music Awards and CMT Music Awards and MTV Awards and has won several of the awards she was nominated for. Her videos have appeared on CMT, VH-1, GAC, The Nashville Network, CMT Canada, and MTV. All these awards and nominations show she has been successful in her projects.

Her music videos consist mainly on a narrative wrapped around the song, which makes sense seeing as Taylor Swift is known for her 'story telling' in her music.



In Tim McGraw, which won Video breakout of the year at the CMT awards, the video follows the story of Taylor and a love interest who go their separate ways after their summer together. It shows how she still thinks of him and she wonders whether he still thinks of her when a song plays or when he drives his chevy truck.
If we apply Andrew Goodwin's theory to Trey's work we can see which of his codes and conventions apply to it. In this specific music video we can see that it definitely demonstrates the genre it relates to, a young sweet girl in a country field with a boy she loves.
Demonstrating not only the characteristics of what genre the music is in but also the artist.




The narrative in this music video is around the guy Taylor is in love with (Drew) and how he loves someone else and it revolves around how she spends her time crying over her guitar because of him.



This music video centres around Taylor and a sort of dream sequence because of the infatuation around a certain boy. This particular music video can relate to a wider range of audiences because the video doesn't focus on a main male protagonist so that the audience can place their own character into the song.

time to knuckle down...

recently I have been terribly slacking with my blog posts! I've just been so engaged with the planning of locations and costumes and such for my final music video idea!

All shall be revealed once i've got up to date with my blogging!

Stay tuned!!! :)