Questionnaire/Initial Ideas

Questionnaire

We have finished the draft for our Questionnaire, albeit much later than we had originally anticipated. The draft document is included below. From the questionnaire, we hope to learn more about the target audience for our music video. We will try to ask people of a wide range of ages, however we will focus more on asking younger people, as they are the target audience that we are aiming our video at. By learning about people's age and their favorite genre of music, we will also be able to establish the relevance of Keith Negus' theory of popular music, and whether younger generations listen to music made by older artists.

By questioning the target audience for our music video, we will also be able to estimate whether they will enjoy the style of video that we intend to make, which could be important in us establishing a "Hegemonic Reading", in terms of the Encoding/Decoding model.

We will hand out the questionnaire today, and collect the results and formulate tables/graphs as soon as we can.

Initial Ideas

Our original idea that we preliminarily finalised on was an idea that involved a stripping 'audition' set against a performance of "You Can Leave Your Hat On" by Joe Cocker. It would begin with a short sequence of acting without the song to establish the scene and then the music would begin and the performance would be used as a multi-strand narrative along with the comedic stripping audition story-line. In relation To Sven E. Carlsson's music video theory, this idea would have been a "conceptual clip" which means it integrates a visual story with a lip-synced performance of the song. We eventually had to pack this idea in because it required too many actors and where we may have been able to get willing victims, we did not want to be too dependent on too many other people because if they let us down, did not take it seriously or were simply not good at the part then it could have been detrimental to our finished product and grade.

Initial Photography

We next adopted a completely different idea. We went from a traditional music video idea to an artistic one. The video would have been set to a possible Coldplay record and it would have attempted to make the audience think and have an influence on them with its abstractness and subtly clever ideas. The video would have been about the solitude yet romanticism of isolation. It would have focused on solely one character throught. In terms of Sven E. Carlsson's theory, this would have been a "narrative clip" meaning that it would have been ultimately a short move set to a musical backdrop. According to Carlsson, a true narrative clip contains no lip-syncing or performance of the song.

Even though we really fancied making a comedy video because it was something we had not tried but had curiously wanted to, we were excited about the idea of a narrative clip because we believed in doing so we could use our film production skills to make a video that incorporated many technical and skilled elements of film production that would showcase the best of our abilities. We went out and took some initial promotional photographs as a means of inspiration and testing for the look of the proposed idea.

(Click to make full size)

We used a combination of effects of Macromedia Fireworks to create these images and we were quite pleased with the zeitgeist we had created for a potential film. Eventually however, the idea fell through due to lack of a rock solid plot-line and an improved idea regarding the comedy genre we had wanted to see if we could pull off.