CHOREOGRAPHING

We spend the day at the Northwood site on Friday, so that we could coreograph certain pieces if the dance. We decided which bits of music we wanted dance in and coreographed around this. As I have danced from an early age and am currently studying dance at A2, i made up a lot of the dance, however we all had input into what moves we wanted. We decided to bring in the new styles in dance, and the most current moves, mostly wacking and vouging. This means being sexy and confident, which we are all capable of showing. Lady Gagas styles are very modern and there is a lot of tutting in her video (hand movements) We have diverted a little from this theme and only have a little bit of tutting. We have researched more into other girl bands, such as the videos I have already posted of Girls Aloud etc.. We saw a lot of strutting forward to show the confident sexy females, and decided we wanted to use this to show us in a feminist light, like the one side of Lady Gaga - the feminist view being females are strong and confident and do not need males as we decided not to have males in our video. This is us deciding on the steps for our video.

Lip Syncing

As we are doing a music video, we are going to have to sing (or lip sync) on camera. We haven't practised this yet but we know it wont be easy, so we have decided to research more into this. We found these tips on the internet on http://www.ehow.com






These tips should really help us and when we start filming our video and when we have done some lip syncing I will blog about how it goes.

Target Audience

http://prezi.com/pdeloivlqtjw/target-audience/



This prezi highlights our ideas on target audiences. I made this prezi to clear up who are target audience is and why we think we can target this audience.

Research and Planning

This week we have been planning our story boards and shooting scripts.We have drawn them and written on them on paper, as it was easier to get a sense of what was going to happen doing it manually. I am going to scan images of the drawn story boards and shooting scripts to show evidence on my blog. We have decided to use some conventions from Lady Gagas video. We have made fake dollar bills to throw around and have around the floor for the video, because we want to keep the theme of rich people having money to burn and superficiality (spending money on stupid things etc...) We also researched other female artists videos and found that they have backing dancers in most. We have decided to be the singers and the dancers in this video and not have any men to show the feminist view of women being able to do things on their own, and women having money and wealth instead of men. Most girl that we researched, Kylie Minouge, Britney Spears etc,, believe in girl power and highlight this in their videos by having women being the main focus. However, when planning this video we must take into account the theories of Carol Vernallis: who says that footage for a music video is completely different to any other filmed footage. 'Music videos avoid Aristotelian narrative's and fully drawn stories' This quote, from Vernallis book of theories, highlights that music videos are different types of footage, that do not require consistency or a full narrative, unlike films, as they do not need to make consistent sense. This makes it almost easier to create a music video, as putting a piece of dance next to a clip of one of us rolling around on the floor will not be unusual as it would in a real film.

IMAGES FOR THE WEBSITE AND MAGAZINE COVER






These are the images from our photo shoot, as you can see the quality of these is very high, and we will be using selected images for our magazine cover and website homepage. As you can see Kirsty edited some of the images to make them look better and fit with our theme for our video, for example, the lighting was changed to be brighter, with the saturation also changed, this will then fit with the bright colours we intend to use for our video.

Research and Planning: seeking permission

Seeking Permission: In order to use Lady Gagas song for our video we had to seek permission from the record company. I found out which record label Lady Gaga was with when she released Beautiful Dirty Rich. I found out she was with Cherry Tree Records, so I found there website and found out where to e-mail the company. So I wrote an email to them that went like this

Dear Madam, Sir.
My name is Christie Robbins and I am currently studying A Level Media at the New Academy Wolverhampton, England. My course enables me and my team to create our own music video. We have decided we would like to use Lady Gaga's Beautiful Dirty Rich as the backing track to our video, however, copyright laws state we must seek permission from the record label. I hope you will be kind enough to let us use this song, we assure you that our vidoe will not be published in anyway, or posted on the internet for any profit at all. Please e-mail back as soon as possible, Christie.

The company have not yet got back to me but hopefully they will before we shoot the video, if not we cannot post the video on Youtube.com or any other site and must not let it get on to the internet, or else it would be a breach of copyright.

Video we have chosen

This is the video we have chosen to base our own music video on. We chose this as we thought Lady Gaga was fresh and origional and suits our groups personalities. When choosing this video we also looked at a lot of girl bands, as we knew from the start this was the genre we wanted to base our video around. The first group we looked at was Girls Aloud, as they are one of the most successful girl groups in the Country at the moment.

This is the first video I looked at. I first noticed the shot of the girls walking forward together at the beginning of the video, making them look powerful as it is shot from a low and angle. I liked this shot from the start, and as i started exploring more videos I noticed it was a very popular in girl groups videos, and even in Lady Gagas video. We also noticed that each girl had a close up and a shot of their own, not just all together throughout. We decided we should do this to show four different sides of Lady Gaga, and also to give everybody in the group a chance to film and experiment with different angles.



This is the video we watched next. The clothing in this video stood out a lot, as the girls were wearing very little. Comparing this to the outfits Lady Gaga wears, you can see that both have a lot of skin showing, however, Lady Gagas outfits are a lot more strange and different compared to the usual 'sexy girl band' outfits the Pussycat Dolls are wearing. We decided to stick with the conventions of both videos and wear sexy clothes to make sure the girl band idea wasnt lost, but also to try and make the outfits different and of our own style instead of the conventional girl band outfits.

When we finally chose Lady Gaga, Beautiful Dirty Rich, we looked into the deeper meanings behind some of the things in her video, The song is all about being Beautiful and rich, but also dirty. we decided that the people Gaga is talking about are celebrities who are very rich, but 'dirty' for example, Lindsey Lohan, instead of using her talent, fame and fortune for good, she goes out and gets drunk and wastes her money, Paris Hilton, who does exactly the same, and Nicole Richie, who is also the same. We decided to stick with this concept and show how rich girls take everythign for granted, you can see this in the video as Lady Gaga rolls up a dolla note and lights it up and smokes it. This is highlighting how the little rich girls have money to burn. We are going to keep this concept in our videos.

CD COVER ANAYLSIS

Album/CD cover analysis



This is the album cover for the song we have chosen to do.

As we have chosen to use Lady Gaga as the inspiration for our music video, we researched some of her album covers, as we have to create either an album cover for a poster for our media task. The layout of her album covers seems to follow the same trend, simple and neat, usually using a close up picture of her face. My favourite cover is ‘The Fame’ cover, as she has an unusual pair of sunglasses on covering her eyes, making her look mysterious. The covers usually have the album title at the bottom of the case underneath Lady Gaga’s face. Me and my group all like the covers we have looked at, but as we are in a group we think that we could challenge ourselves more with an album cover rather than just close ups of our faces. Therefore we think we will contrast these album covers and create an original idea.The style of the album covers is quite controversial, for example she has an album where she is posing sexily for a mug shot. This is a controversial idea and me and my group do like the idea of something that will challenge society. The art on the front of the covers is also eye-catching, with either a dark background and her face in colour, or everything dark and just one item brightly coloured. Lady Gaga’s images are never animated, they are all real life, as she is a strong character with strong beliefs, and animating her images would make them seem a little childish and without meaning.As Lady Gaga is a pop singer, there are signs of this on her album covers, the modern funky and stylish looks she conveys with her outfits highlights the pop genre. However she also contrasts this genre and can look very rock on her album covers, for example using darker colours and having ruff cut hair with dark make up sometimes running down her face. Lady Gaga’s look has branded her as ‘strange’ in the public eye. This also can be seen in her covers, ash she has strange hair cuts in a few of her covers, and also eye-catching make-up. Her outfits are also very bizarre, one being a dress made completly of triangles. This has given Lady Gaga the ‘strange’ title.Lady Gaga is also very Americanisd and highlights this on her album covers with her looks and style. Her album cover is to highlight what the album will sound like and what type of artist Lady Gaga is. This is what our album will have to do to be successful. So we are going to both use characteristics from Lady Gaga’s covers and use our own origional ideas.


We also reasearched into other album covers from artists similar to Lady Gaga, and more of Lady Gagas covers.




This album cover again highlights the rock side of Lady Gaga, her darker side, as the makeup she uses is very similar to hard core rock bands album covers.









This image of Kiss shows their make up is similar but a lot more dramatic compared to Lady Gagas, this could highlight the convergence of the music genres over the years, as they are a lot more mixed then they used to be, for instance, Jay z has appeared along side Linkin Park in 'Numb' This is a hip hop artist and a rock band appearing together. Again this highlights the convergence between genres that Lady Gaga also highlights