Audience.

We found our audience were mainly teenage girls, but with still quite a large male following, who were into indie music that was a little on the pop punk side. We found this out through Twitter, school and our knowledge of You Me At Six and their fans. We decided to target the age group of 14-20 because of the average age of You Me At Six fans and how we can relate to this age group.
Due to them being predominately female we thought we could try and appeal to them through our actors and have them on screen a lot. The boys will all be 17-18 years of age so should be quite appealing to all ages of our target audience, we also decided we would dress them up to make them as attractive as possible. We still have to appeal to the boys in our target audience too so we will have to make the band look like good role models to them and people they want to be like, with things like the way they dress and how they style their hair. We will also try to make our story interesting for both males and females.
Another way we will attempt to appeal to the target audience is through fashion. The bassist of You Me At Six has his own clothing line (Cheer Up Clothing) and one of our actors will wear a shirt of that line so that the audience can identify with the characters of the story. We also plan to put our female actors in clothes from places such as Topshop and River Island so that girls can go out and dress exactly like the people in the video and it ensures that we are up to date with current fashion trends.
We will also attempt to attract our audience with our websites and digipaks as they're important to the target audience as it's something they will desire and want to visit.

Cheer Up Clothing Shirt:

You Me At Six Research.

From our track research we had a good idea of how You Me At Six dress, but we decided to research a little furthur. We realise the importance of having a band which appeals to the target audience and that their clothes are an important part of this.
We have already decided that the love theme and slower pace of the song calls for more smart dress than casual. We have looked at some photos of the band to get a better idea of the clothes they should wear.

Here you can see that the band are dressed fairly smart and similar, this shows that they are close as a band as they are dressing the same this also gives the impression that they are quite professional. These picture's also show the similirites between how they dress in and out of the music videos. The way this band dress has inspired us to make our actors dress in a smart fashion in our music promo as we feel this will look more appealing to the target audience rather than them wearing casual clothes. We want to make our actors look as appealing as possible to ensure that the viewers enjoy the video and like the look of the band.
We asked our band to wear a blazer, shirt, tie (optional) and smart trousers/black jeans. We thought this would create the best look and the one we wanted for our band.

You Me At Six Track Research.

We decided to look at some previous You Me At Six videos to get a good idea of what the band is about and what they've already done. We wanted some cohesion between our video and the videos they've already made as we knew it was important to appeal to their audience.

Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers is the earliest video we have researched. The video shows a couple which have obviously a volatile relationship, but there are also many shots of the band. The band are dressed smart casually and it gives a good insight to the bands dress sense. We found that there was a lot of focus on the lead singer of the band and this is shown with how many closeups there are and the lighting. They also used a technique of blurring the band in the background and focusing on the lead singer which we really liked. The same thing was also done with the lighting and the band are in shadows and the lead in bright light, which is something we are thinking of doing in our own video. We also liked the slow motion effect which was used on some of the scenes, it gave an almost serene film to a huge argument.
This video clearly follows Goodwin's theory point of meeting the demands of the record label as it provides many shots of the band preforming. Although the video does have a story and a narrative the story isn't as linked to the song as we'd want ours to be.

Stay With Me

Stay With Me was filmed in America when You Me At Six were over there in summer of 2010. The video consits of many shots of the band and other smaller stories. The story in the video isn't linked to the lyrics very much, which is something we're going to do differently. There are many shots of the band and the camera zooms into the instruments quite a bit, we liked this and we think this is something we will do in our music video. They focus again a lot on the lead singer with multiple closeups, especially when he's singing. There are more clips of the band than the story as they're trying to appeal to the demands of the record label. They are dressed a little more relaxed in this video, but we think it's because they are outside and that gives it a more chilled out vibe. They've used natural light in this video and it looks like it could be mid-late day.

 

Underdog

This is the fastest pace song we've looked at, but we thought the video has a lot of similar things in it that we've also spoke about doing. The lyrics link to the video nicely and the pace links to what's shown on screen, for example, when the girl is dancing it's obviously to the songs music. We noticed that yet again they're dressed quite smart casually. They've used a lot of close ups of the lead singer again and this is definitely something we will do as it's meeting the demands of the record label. We also noticed the use of slow motion in some parts of the video and we liked the effect it created, we will look to using this if it is appropriate to.

The actors used in this video are all of a similar age to their target audience of 14-20 and this is something we've also decided to do with our video. We think that this will make it easier for our audience to relate to the story and will appeal to their ages more. It also meets the demands of the record label.

 

No One Does It Better

This is one of the bands latest singles off the new album. This was also filmed in America when they were over there on tour. The video is a bit different as this is the only one we've looked at where the band are not with their instruments. We toyed with this idea, but from the other videos we thought it would be better if we shot the band playing their instruments and that this also gives us a variety of shots.

The pace of this song is fairly slow, but similar to the way Crash is (slow verses, bigger chorus). There is a relationship between the visuals and the music like during the slow pace of the song there are slow edits and the motions used for the story of the video are also slow, however when the song hits the chorus the shots speed up to match the pace of the song. We think it would be a good idea for us to give ourselves the challenge of including a narrative style, meeting the record label demands and trying to create this music and visuals relationship for our own video. This will help us to gain more skill in filming and editing.

Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers is the earliest video we have researched. The video shows a couple which have obviously a volatile relationship, but there are also many shots of the band. The band are dressed smart casually and it gives a good insight to the bands dress sense. We found that there was a lot of focus on the lead singer of the band and this is shown with how many closeups there are and the lighting. They also used a technique of blurring the band in the background and focusing on the lead singer which we really liked. The same thing was also done with the lighting and the band are in shadows and the lead in bright light, which is something we are thinking of doing in our own video. We also liked the slow motion effect which was used on some of the scenes, it gave an almost serene film to a huge argument.
This video clearly follows Goodwin's theory point of meeting the demands of the record label as it provides many shots of the band preforming. Although the video does have a story and a narrative the story isn't as linked to the song as we'd want ours to be.


After looking at these tracks and their videos, we have decided on the sorts of techniques we want to include in our music video, when appropriate. The videos have helped us decide that we want to provide our audience with many shots of our band performing as this will make our video more appealing to them. We've also decided to use actors of a similar age to our age group to keep our audience interested. These videos have also helped us realise that it is a good idea to ensure there is a clear relationship between the visuals and music so that everything runs smoothly together at similar pace. The videos have also started to give us an idea on how the band shape themselves and the ways in which they dress, although we will carry out some further research to get a clearer understanding of the band.

Indie.

We still didn't think we had enough information to make an informed decision on what band and song we should do for the music video. To help this become more clear we looked at 5 different artists and a song from each. We found songs within the indie genre and used bands people had named on our questionnaire. Part of our specification was that the song had to be without an official video or at least ten years old. Since the bands highlighted by the questionnaire were fairly recent we decided to select songs without videos.
The bands which we decided to chose songs from were Two Door Cinema Club, You Me At Six and Foster The People.

Two Door Cinema Club - The World Is Watching
This song is fairly fast paced for a love song although there is still quite a dream like and relaxing feel to it. It's a nice song with lovely lyrics which are very much about love which is our theme for our music video. It's not necessarily about a couple, but more about infatuation or lusting after someone you may not be able to have. This means it could be quite hard to have lots of couple scenes like our questionairre suggested we could have.

You Me At Six - Crash
This song is a song from one of our favourite bands. It's a fairly slow paced song until you reach the chorus and it gets faster and more dramatic. We researched the meaning behind this song and the information we got was that it is about how someone can have such a big impact on your life. The information said that each verse was a different stage of love. We feel that this song has a very good and obvious narrative.

Foster The People - I Would do Anything for You
This song is a fairly fast pace song. It's a bit quicker than the others we've looked at and the lyrics are about love but they are almost obsessive.

After listening to these songs we decided the most appropriate song choice would be Crash by You Me At Six. We came to this conclusion mostly for the lyrics. We felt that there was a clear narrative within the lyrics and we could create an authentic looking video. Whilst we were listening to it we had so many ideas and we liked that we were so enthusisatic about it. This is also a song that me and my group member really like and we are fans of the band so we felt that this would help us understand how to dress the characters in our video and we would also therefore enjoy making a video to this particular song.

Questionnaire.

Since we had our genre we decided that our next step should be looking at our audience and what they expect from an indie artist. We decided that making a questionnaire would be the most efficient and helpful way of finding out this information.
The first thing we wanted to know is whether or not the person filling in the questionnaire likes the indie genre, we feel that this important as it could reflect the other answers, so this was our first question on the survey. To enhance our questionnaire we decided to ask questions which include points of Goodwin's theory, this will help us when choosing to do a narrative based video or concept based etc.

Here are the questions which we asked:

1. Do you enjoy listening to the indie style of music?
2. What do you expect to see in music videos of this genre?
3. Do you like these videos to be narrative? (To tell a story)
4. What kinds of stories do you like to see in an indie music video?
5. Do you like to see a lot of close ups of the artists?
6. Do you enjoy indie music videos that contain live footage of the artists performing, e.g. in concerts?
7. Does the idea of intertextual reference interest you? (Do you like videos that are based around T.V shows or films)
8. What kinds of films would you expect an indie video to be set around?
9. List two of your favourite indie artists.

Here's an example:

 

                                              

 

 

One of the completed questionaires:

 

We collected in the questionnaires after asking a number of our peers. The answer to the first question was a resounding 'yes' which really encouraged us with our decision of choosing the indie genre. We were happy that our target audience actually enjoy the genre.

From our second questions answers we found out what's expected from the genre and most of the answers said love stories or couples. This helped us with deciding on what we should include to keep our audience interested.

The third question revealed that most people like there to be a story included in a music video and the fourth question was answered and most said 'love stories' (coherent with our answers to question 2). From this information we decided that we should make a love story based music video as it's what our target audience wants. Someone said the would like to see a scary story told however we felt this was not suitable to this genre and felt it fit more into the rock category.

We also asked the audience if they would like to see a lot of close ups of the artists as this would be helping us meet the demands of the record label. The results showed that everyone answered 'yes'. This is something we will definitely include in our video. As we will be providing close ups of the artists we want to make sure that we choose people to make up our band that are going to be fairly good at lip syncing so that our video looks professional.

A lot of the audience said they don't enjoy live footage of the artist being included in the music videos so this is something we will not be including in ours. We also decided not to do this as we would find it difficult to find a location that would create the live footage image. The audience also said they didn't want to see any intertextual reference in the video so this again is something that we will not be incorporating into our video. To follow this question we also asked what kinds of films they would like to see in the video if they were to say yes to the previous questions. The majority answered 'love story'. A lot of the questions link together on the idea of involving couples and a love theme so this is definitely what we are going to do with our video.

Our last question asked them to list two of their favourite indie artists to help us decide which artists we will research when deciding on a track. The answers we got more than once were people like: You Me At Six, Foster The People, Two Door Cinema Club and The Maccabees. We will be researching tracks made by these artists to help us decide on which one will help us create our love story the best.

Genre Research.

Before we started filming or storyboarding we first needed to decide what genre we could use to create a video. We felt that it was important to decide on a genre and audience before we started storyboarding or choosing a song. To help us with this decision we chose to look at three different songs from three different genres. The genres we chose to look at were indie, rock and pop as they're our favourite music genres. We thought that being fans of these genres would help us create an authentic and rateable video for fans. We also decided to take advantage of our knowledge of the teenage market so are looking to target 14-21 year olds.
These were three songs from each genre that already had videos so we could see what was expected from each.

Indie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuyNnm0lwBw
The Pigeon Detectives - Take Her Back
This is an upbeat song, but still has a love story theme. The video is fairly simple which really attracted us to it, we have noticed that it's quite in keeping with other videos from the indie genre also. The boys are dressed in smart casual clothing and are quite scruffy looking. We think this works well with the audience they're aiming themselves at.
There is a clear narrative with the lyrics and the video. The video shows a younger girl which he clearly gets on better with and is more attracted to, and then him with an older woman who he has no connection with. This ties nicely with the lyrics 'he's not sure what he should do, she's 17, he's 22. Is that too much of a difference? So instead look what he's done, he's found a girl who's 31'.
Most of the video is filmed in a taxi driving round London. We've assumed it's London, although it's not stated in the video, they use little things like a toy red London bus to show it. The taxi is a good way to show the differences between the two girls. The similarities between them and their situation actually help yous notice the differences. They're wearing similar clothes, have dark hair, in the same taxi, but what's going on with them and the man is very different so the spark with the young girl is even more apparent.

Rock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3y9llDXuM&feature=related
Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag
The video is quite cliche and has intertextuality references to films and videos which include the 'high school unpopular kid gets with the popular girl' story. This has been used in numerous films like Can't Buy Me Love and She's All That.
A big thing we noticed with the video was the amount of people in each scene. The whole thing is filmed in a school, but there's never a scene when there's not less than 10 people in the shot. This was a bit of a drawback for us as we could get a few volunteers but it might be quite difficult to get that many extras.
The video is strongly linked to the lyrics as it's all about a misfit boy lusting over a cool girl, this is true with the lyrics and the video. All characters are very stereotypical teenage characters (the jock, the pretty girl and the nerd) and quite humorous in its content.

Pop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98WtmW-lfeE
Katy Perry - Teenage Dream
We chose to look at Katy Perry as she is a popular star and we both enjoy her music. It's a happy upbeat song about being in love. After viewing the video a couple of times and seeing videos of the same genre we concluded that the video was a lot like other pop videos so a good indicator of what we would be expected to do.
The first difference we noticed with the pop video compared with the other genres was the focus on one person. Although Katy Perry is just one person it was still different from say Florence and the Machine where the focus is on her, but there is much more of a story. Katy is in almost all the clips using multiple closeups, if others are in the shot she's the only one looking at the camera or further forwards.
There is a sense of immaturity and naivety to the video which helps to reinforce the title and theme of the song: young love. There's cohesion between the lyrics and the video, for example when Katy sings "we drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach", before that line they had been in a car and after that they're shown on the beach.
It's obvious in the video that they have gone for the 'sex sells' motto as their are a lot of sexual innuendos throughout the video (e.g. the girl near the end licking the lollipop). This is a typical example of voyeurism. There's also more voyeurism with the man and Katy in the bedroom as we're watching their intimate moments. We think this could be quite difficult for us to portray and to find two people confident enough to be that intimate on camera.

After watching many videos from each genre, and analysing in depth these three, we have decided to go with the indie genre. Our main reason for this choice was because we were
We felt that the rock genre is sometimes too complicated and the stories involve a lot of effects or extras, as we saw with Wheatus, we found this to be the case with many other artists such as Foo Fighters videos. We felt that the demand of what should be in a rock video could be too difficult for us to incorporate and could therefore lose our audience.
The pop videos were good and could have been a contender if it hadn't been for the constant sexual connotations. We felt that this could be an issue, especially when some of our audience are only 14 years old. We didn't want our video to be inappropriate or offensive. Often lyrics from pop songs could also be deemed as inappropriate and/or use expletives (Rhianna etc.).