CD Digipak Research

The first digipak i am going to analyse is 'The Kooks - Inside In The Inside Out'.
The front cover of the cd is very simplicistic on plain white background with an image of the band all playing instruments clearly indicating that they are an indie band. It also has standard font that doesn't particularly stand out however they use an orange colour for it which makes it stand out to the rest of the cover.
The back of the digipak is the same as the front, plain background with another shot of the band playing instruments. The writing of the names of the songs are quite small therefore emphasising the picture of the band showing how important they are.
The disc is also orange and shows the bands name is bold writing across the cd and part of the album name is on it. Also on the left handside is the first picture of the sleeve which is another pic of the band but this time you can see their faces without instruments making the inside more intimate for fans. On this they aren't posing for the camera and they are wearing casual clothing and leaning on a wall showing that they don't really care about their image. Also showing the working class theme that most indie bands relate to.
In the sleeve it contains pictures of the band chilling out and playing their instruments giving them a really laid back look about them. It also makes them come across as quite a fun band as some pics are of them laughing and joking about, making it appeal more to the teenage age group.

The Second digipak I am going to analyse is 'The Arctic Monkeys - Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not'.  The first image we can see is the front cover of the CD. The mise-en-scene of the cover is a man smoking in a baggy white t-shirt which gives it the working-class image that the arctic monkeys have. It's very basic (black and white with nothing other than the person and band name) showing that indie genre is all about the music and not the image. The picture is quite immature which shows that they are appealing more towards the teenage age group as this is when smoking is seen to be 'cool'. The only thing that stands out slightly is the font of the band name which draws attention to who the CD is by, however the name is still in black therefore still not advertising a fun, pop record. 
The disk itself is covered in the image of cigarettes which represents the cool guy image of the band. It is all still in black and white. It also makes it look grimy and dirty which the band gives an 'I don't care' feel to it. The band also give this feel in photo shoots and concerts etc because they wear casual clothing and just sing their songs with no other performance to it (indie genre).
The back of the CD is the same man from the front cover but this time he is rubbing his head, blocking his face with complete emphasis on the cigarette again. The font of the names of the songs is white, placed in the top left of the CD and is in a basic font.



By Hannah Cockerton

Mood Board

By Jade Shepherd

Textual Analysis

One textual analysis we did was on 'Artic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down'

The second analysis we did was 'The Maccabees - First love' 

By Hannah Cockerton

Research

Visual Styles:
Here is the spider diagram we did in lesson for the visual styles we are going to use in our video.

Original Ideas:

For this spider diagram we were thinking of ideas for our original song choice 'Work - by Hockey'. Even though we decided not to use this song, we still used several of the ideas such as the use of bright colours and make-up and the use of a school. 

Rock Genre:

Even though we chose to do indie style genre we did a spider diagram of what is expected in rock videos.

First ideas:

Here is the first ideas we had for our chosen song 'I Like A Boy In Uniform - The Pipettes'. 

By Hannah Cockerton

Test Shots

We have filmed some basic shots which we hope to include within our video, we also have shots of different emotions. The beginning of the video is a basic sample of our video. The second half of the video is just an arrangement of shots showing emotions and other scenes we would like to include, this section isn't really in a music video style it is just to show several test shots.

The performance throughout is suitable for our genre as all the behavior i eccentric and lively, there is a lot of movement and exaggerated emotion which indie genres need. The framing of the shots are appropriate as they shows plenty of surroundings and costume but also focus on the emotion on the actors face which is important in our video because the exaggerated emotion shows how unusual the character is.

The lighting is a lot better in the second part of the video because we didn't have a lamp for extra lighting in the first half, we also filmed at night time in the first half which we wouldn't do on the real filming days. We realise we need a lot of lighting if we are wanting to do an indie video because the scenes need to be very clear and the colours as bright as they can be. The setting in the first half is what we would like however we have a different house in mind which is more appropriate and looks less like ordinary life. However the majority of our video will be in a school setting or outside. We will most likely use the corridor shown in the second half as it has good lighting and bold coloured walls.

We used a variety of shots including medium, close up, long shots. We also experimented with panning. We have tried out some different editing techniques by including transitions in our video. We have used a lot of different ones to test which will be appropriate for our genre and the ones we have chosen we will most likely use in our real video because they are unusual but also give off a light hearted feel to the footage.

The narrative is appropriate because its about a school girl, she gets out of bed to go to school and we as an audience follow her throughout her day where she experiences lots of different things. So starting in a bed seems suitable.

Our video is very basic but it has helped us learn how we need to experiment with lighting to make our video look more professional and we need to pick our settings carefully so they link with our indie genre and don't look like ordinary life in a very eccentric video otherwise it could pull down the excitable and unusual feel we want to give.


Video Editing and Analysis By Jade Shepherd

Video Footage Filmed By Hannah Cockerton, Jessica Holdsworth and Jade Shepherd

Costume Inspiration

These are how we would like to interpret the Poker Dot Girl image from The Pipettes into our video. We would like our main character to have a head scarf or some form of poker dot decoration in her hair or on her uniform. We may also we able to bring poker dots in else wear for example in our classroom scenes we could have the teacher dressed in poker dots like shown in the photo on the far left.

This is one way we wish for our main character to look. This is a character from St Trinians, a film based around school girls. This character has the wild image we wish for our main character to have. We want to use the pigtails and messed up hair like this character has and how her whole image makes her look a little odd but interesting at the same time. However we will make our character look more indie like than this character because she looks more how you'd imagine someone in a rock video to look.

This is another image taken from the film St Trianians, they are all wearing school uniform but all portray a different image. We want our main character to have an eccentric style uniform like the characters in St Trinians. However rather than all the characters in our video having different styles like in this image, we want everyone else to look very smart and similar to make our main look even more eccentric and make her stand out even more.

This image shows how we want our other characters to have very smart ordinary uniform to contrast with our main characters eccentric style. 

Written By Jade Shepherd

The Pipettes Research- Previous Video

This is one of the Pipettes previous music videos for a song called Judy. The Pipettes are also known as the Poker Dot Girls because they also wear some form of poker dot in their videos and in their performances. In this video they all all either wearing a poker dot ribbon or scarf and we wanted to interpret this into our video by having some form of poker dot. This video follows the conventions of indie with bright colours and an unusual cartoon book appearance. It expresses The Pipettes light hearted style in cartoon with a serious issue portrayed in the video (betrayal). We like how the video is fun and different to most videos and we want to have this element in our music video.

By Jade Shepherd

Research- Past Videos

This Video is The Great Escape by We Are Scientists, we wanted to use the theme of annoyance in this film and interpret it into a stalker style approach. The main character is constantly being followed by the other two men but we wanted to swap this idea around and have our main character as the one annoying and stalking another character. We decided to take the theme from our song which is Love and make it quirkier. We thought it'd be more interesting if we did an obsession story rather than a love story to make it more original. This video gave us the inspiration to make it more like stalking than love.

Written By Jade Shepherd

Time Grid

This is a screen grab of our original Time Grid of our video. It explains what will be happening at what time within our video and which part of the song it will correlate with. This will help us when filming, it tells us exactly what we are wanting to show within each part of the film and we will therefore work from this on filming days along with using a shot list. We had to do another Time grid as shown below due to changes made after our pitch. We had to take out some of the parts which our pitch audience felt weren't appropriate for the time setting we were wishing to film in (60's). We also discovered our song was too short and therefore we needed to increase the time with extra footage without music.

To the right is our official Time Grid, it shows exactly what we wish to happen in each section of our video. It has been adapted and now fits appropriately with our time setting and our genre. We have lengthened our video time from 1:45 seconds to 2:22 seconds.







Written by Jade Shepherd

Permission Letter

14 October 2010,

Memphis Industry Record Label,

8 Ripplevale Gro,

London,

N1 1HU

To Whom it may concern,

We are hoping to make a music video on your artist ‘The Pipettes’ songs ‘I like A Boy In Uniform’ for our college media project. Please can we have your permission to use this song to create a music video.

Yours Sincerely

Hannah Cockerton

Make Up & Costumes

This was one of the ideas we had for make-up, however after trying it we realised it was not the look we wanted and that it was too much. We did like the colour, so tried to interoperate it into other styles as it is bold and bright.

This look we liked a lot more as it fit the criteria that we wanted (colourful and noticeable). We then tried these colours on our actor in the music video but later found that we preferred bluer colours suited her more.

Here we tried the make-up on our actor. On her left eye is the colours we have decided to use, yellow and green as it suited her more and was brighter than the red colours used on her right eye. You can also see in this photo the hair style we are also using. Back combed pigtails to create the crazy school girl effect.

In this photo we can see the costume we are going to use. Shirt, tie, skirt and knee high socks. We wanted her to look quite young as during the video she is stalking the people she likes which is quite childish.

Written by: Hannah Cockerton

Feedback from pitch

After the pitch we received post it notes from the rest of the class stating what we could improve. Many of our fellow students liked our ideas, thought that the ideas were unique and said that our step outline was very detailed. However they did mention things that needed explaining or changing. They felt that we had good ideas, but we needed to similify them, as the song is rather short. We have been looking at the Step outline and have changed some scenes to make it more organised and easy to follow. A student wrote down that our conventions seemed more pop than indie, our band is presented as an indie band, but does not stick the conventions. We have decided to make the video more tongue and cheek than demonstrating any procative images. 

Written by Jessica Holdsworth

PITCH

Initial Ideas

Initial Songs: 
At the start we had several songs that we thought were good:
- Hockey, Work (we realised the song is quite slow, so had the potential to be boring) 
- The Maccabees, First Love & About your Dress (which we really liked but both of them already had videos) 
- Pink, Bad Influence (A strong contender but found she is too strong an artist and recognisable to try and immitate) 
- Avril Lavigne, Things I'll Never Say (Didn't think we would have enough ideas for a video) The Final Song we have chosen is.... The Pipettes, I like A Boy in Uniform!


The ideas for music videos of the previous songs:
Hockey, Work:
-- 80's style band, so we imagined a girl with back combed hair, thick red make-up going across her eyes & bright clothing.
-- We had the idea of everyone being sleepy and her trying to get everyone dancing, then we had a second idea of a man in drag fed up with his life (as for our video you need something more quirky)

Pink, Bad Influence:
-- Crazy, circus like video. Some parts sped up slightly to give it a goofy feel to it.
-- black and white part to the video
-- Looking at the camera, keeping audience involved.

Avril Lavigne, Things i'll Never Say:
-- Girl having thoughts so she holds up a thought bubble with a still of the next shot in it, which we zoom into and carry on with next scene.




Written by Hannah and Jade

Other Cast Member Ideas

We realise for the ideas we have we need several people to act in our video. The parts we need to fill are:
-Main female
-Main male
-2 boys in class
-2 girls in main females fantasy
-4 extras for performance, sport scene and corridor scene.

We have got several ideas for who we would like to fill some of these parts:

Anna Skeen is another option for our main character, she is confident and fun and will definitely be willing to carry out our crazy ideas. 

Michael is one of our possible options for the main male character. As you can see he is confident and we feel he will easily pull off the fun image we are wanting to portray.

 JoeC, Niall, Joe and Harry are all ideas for our performers and 2 of them may be the two males in the classroom scene too.

Alex is going to be one of our girls in the fantasy scene

All of our suggestions would be good in our indie genre, as they could easily be dressed indie style, they are also all young enough for it to look realistic in the school setting. 

Written by Jade Shepherd

Idea's for cast members.

Know that we have chosen our song, we know have to think about our cast, costume, make up etc. Kristina (image on the right) said she would be like to be in the video. I feel that she would play a good part as the main female. She has main of the characteristics in which our character would have. She is very unique and lively, and she wouldn't mind wearing colourful clothing and standing out from the crowd. Her character role would be a bisexual who fancies both boys and girls in uniform. This is the narrative in the song and will be the main structure for our video.
I have also asked friends who play instruments if they would willing to be a part of the video, both girls and boys.