The college’s drama studio which we planned to film in (shot numbers numbers 11, 12, 13, 14 & 32 of the storyboard) so that we’d have a black background and could control the lighting has vanished under the rubble of the current alterations being made to the college. Instead we’re filming in a classroom, with black paper on the wall. Sounds tacky, but that’s all we’ve got.

Anyway, here’s the emails excahnged between our teacher and CIS whom you must book classrooms through(We can’t email CIS ourselves, I presume because by the teacher doing it it guarentees we’re actually using it properly); click for copy of email

Preparation for filiming

Lots of lovely forms have now been filled in; Hazard assessment, the call sheet, and our music video proposal.
In addition, Tricia made some phone calls in regards to gaining permission to film the park near our college. Go to her blog for further details.

Storyboard

5/11/09
AM
We brainstormed ideas for the music video today. Mostly we’re practising using Final Cut Pro for editing though at the moment. We’re getting somewhere with it. Where exactly it’s difficult to say…
PM
When I got home I begun to take the song as sections – one for each change in tune – and think of/match the brainstomed imagery to it. This eventually led to [da da da da da da daaah!] a storyboard. I considered the other music videos and jazz music video trends and Billie Holiday’s image throughout.

6/11/09
Amy and I have began taking photos of how shots will look with some mock video clips too. . Amy & I being in the locations were able to get  more an idea of possible storyboard flaws and potential hazards (geese; they swarmed us like something out of Dawn of the dead).
Bought some props today; white flowers £2 and a red clip-in flower £5

Over the weekend I need to get all the storyboard shots that we couldn’t get today.

New song – You let me down REMIX

After our target research (the interviews) due to our T.A. demanding quicker pacing and the want for an attractive sub-culture (so we’ll attach our artist to an existing one) we decided to choose instead a remix of one of Billie Holiday’s songs.
The remix we are thinking of doing is one of You let me down by Free the Robots.

Analysis of interviews data (Charts)

15/10/09

Listened the edited interview clips through, sadderning myself everytime I was able to know what was next to be said (having heard it over and over so much in editorial), and now converted all that into charts. [Click the pics for said charts + annotations] 

 

Collecting target audience (primary research) data

08/9/09
Chosen the question we want to ask people for target audience feedback; [click] Tomorrow shall begin interviewing with dictaphone & maybe camcorder.

09/9/09
Been collecting some qualitative, primary research today on our target audience. By this I mean we went around college in search of people to interview. Tricia and Alexandra filmed two on camcorder and Amy and I matched that with two on the Dictaphone.
Alexandra is working on getting our Q/A onto the internet for some quantitive data. [click]

12/10/09
Managed to get lots of interviews from our T.A over the weekend. Need to edit them & then I’ll upload.

15/10/09
Finally, here’s the edited Interview clips: PART ONE & PART TWO
Additionally Alexandra has put her survery results into charts on her blog now. I shall now analyse our collective results.
From this information we will get some ideas of how to present our artist and create the three products for the coursework (music video, CD cover, website)

And, here is my textual analysis powerpoint.

Analysis of convention findings

7/10/09
ANALYSIS OF ARTIST WEBSITE STATS

 

Our target audience will be mainly an even split of male to female, however with a slight more focus on females.

These artists websites seemed to appeal more to the older audiences (30+). However, Joss Stone had a strong younger audience too. This means Joss Stone is our main basis for representing our artist. Although, these stats may not be a reflection on who likes the music but what age groups tend to use artist’s websites. Therefore, we must research into our T.A to find out this later on.

The audiences who listen to these artists are fairly well educated. We may need therefore to design our coursework to suit a more sophisticated audience therefore.

There isn’t much diversity in who’s listening to this kind of music as the majority of them are Caucasian

 

Researching conventions + more detailed look into T.A

SPLITTING TASKS
Right here’s the break down of who’d doing what;
Amy: Emailing (above name’s) sites for Media packs + browsing forums to get an idea of what the T.A. are like + gotten site statistics; Mica Paris & Adele & Amy Winehouse & Duffy & Joss Stone
Alexandra: Looking at artist’s websites (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to look at style, layout, colour etc
Tricia: Finding Jazz magazines to look at conventions of portraying jazz artists and getting more an idea on the area of jazz. Her analysis here [Need to talk to her about placing a tag so I can link directly to her entry]
Me: Finding CD covers to analyse and find conventions to guide us in how ours should look.

CD COVER ANALYSIS 

Amy Winehouse 1 [click] 2 [click]
Duffy 1 [click] 2 [click] 3 [click] 4 [click]
Adele 1 [click] 2 [click]
Mica Paris 1 [click] 2 [click]
Joss Stone 1 [click] 2 [click] 3 [click] 4 [click]

 

6/10/09

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE RESEARCH (MYSPACE.COM)

*These pictures are of the relevant bits of the artist’s Myspace pages edited into one for convenience when analysing. Background colours used are representative of those on their Myspace page so are relevant to artist image & style.

(*though first check Myspace stats for context) Mica Paris, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Duffy, Joss Stone 

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Target audience

TARGET AUDIENCE

Amy did some research into the target audience for Jazz music. She looked at the Audience profile for Jazz.fm. [click to view]. As you will see the problem is the audience profile is aged 35-49 An audience that doesn’t generally watch music videos. I also doubt they use artist websites often. For this reason we have chosen to try and re-invent Billie Holiday’s image to appeal to a younger target audience (16-25).

Bringing old-fashioned artists to a youthful audience is one that has been done before. An example of this is Daniel Merriweather who actually made two-top-ten hits! This was a result of association and direction from the already popular Mark Ronson, well-known for working with people such as Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen. Then there was the legendary Johnny Cash, a country and western singer who made it into the charts as a result of working with Rick Rubin (pioneer of the Def Jam Label) and covering modern songs in his own style. [click for info] This resulted in a new generation of people listening the country and western music!

Both these above artists used modern, contemporary artists and producers to help them out. From this we learnt that we could look into artists who have been influenced by the famous jazz artists, perfably Billie Holiday, and see how their marketing and presentation makes them a success. We may also consider finding perhaps a remix of one of Billie’s songs by a modern artist. 

Artist’s influenced by Jazz thus our basis for Billie Holiday; Adele evidence 1, evidence 2.  Amy Winehouse (+ an interesting article comparing Amy to Billie Holiday).
Another artist we thought would be a good influence is Joss Stone as she actually headed a jazz festival. Furthermore I decided to use Amazon in search of what kind of reccommendations I got from typing the mentioned names; my results show a common theme; the artist Duffy. Therefore Duffy we’ve also claimed as a basis for our artist.

New genre/artist/song

JAZZ
Recently I’d come across the famous jazz singer Billie Holiday and it struck me as an interesting direction to take a leap in. We’ve been worrying about with Mika being in the pop genre that there are certain conventions expected that we can’t deliver on. Pop music videos often involve big budgets and professional editing and animation skills, as well as SFX. Furthermore, they often have clever, flawless dance routines. The genre of jazz does not demand these impossible aims and so it is a better option.

 IDEA PITCHED TO GROUP
My group looked terrified back at me. “But we know nothing about jazz! It’s gunna be hard.” Though they went with it in the end. One problem is one member of the group was absent when we decided to go from Mika to Billie Holiday. That’s gunna be quite a shock to come back to. Anyhow, already done a bit of research into (mainly) modern Jazz musicians [click here] (but with a few old) to find conventions.

 NEW ARTIST/NEW SONG!
So the artist now is Billie Holiday, the song ‘Summertime’. Alexandra has researched into the genre of Jazz genre & Billie Holiday. Got to her blog to check it.

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