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.).