Target audience for our music video

DEMOGRAPHIC

Age; late teenagers (16-19), a lot of her songs deal with adolescent issues, they're very childlike and her album cover has a little girl and animals on it.

Gender; females, as it is easier for them to relate to  her, however not all of her songs have a specific gender as they are about issues that anybody could face, and so could also be aimed towards males. But for the majority it would be females as her album cover etc it very cute and girly looking, instantly giving it a more feminine feel.

PSYCHOGRAPHIC

Interests; she's very quirky with her music, i'd say the target audience is fun, vintage inspired females. the lyrics tell a story, so reading as an interest is good. She plays acoustic guitar in practically every song, so maybe a passion for the acoustic guitar and acoustic music.

What will they expect from our video?

As 'The Competition' is with an acoustic guitar, they'll most likely expect a cute looking girl performing with an acoustic guitar. also, the song tells a story meaning that they'll be hoping for a narrative video.

Typologies

PERFORMANCE VIDEOS

The most common type (Firth 1988) feature the star or the group singing in concept to wildly enthusiastic fans, the goal is to convey a sense of the inconcert experience.
Gow (1992) suggests 'the predominance of the performance indicates that a music video defines itself chiefly by images of artists ainging and playing songs.
Perofrmance videos - especially those hat display the star or group in the studio - remind the viewer that the soundtrack is still important.
Performance oriented visuals cut viewers that the recording of the music is the most significant element.

An example of a performance stlye video is 'Little lion man' by Mumford and sons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLJf9qJHR3E

NARRATIVE VIDEOS

Present a sequence of events, a video may tell any kind of story in linear, cause effect sequencing.

Love stories, however, are the most common narrative mode in music videos. The narrative pattern is one of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.

Action in the story is dominated by males who do things and females who passively react or wait for something to happen. (Schwichtenberg 1992)

An example of a narrative video is 'You belong with my' by Taylor Swift. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu7Ukg0666w

CONCEPTUAL VIDEOS

These rely on poetic form, primarily a metaphoe. Conceptual videos do not tell a story in linear fashion, but rather create a mood, a feelin to be evoked in the experience of viewing (Firth 988)

Conceptual videos contain the possibility for multiple meanings as the metaphor in interuppted by the viewer. 'the metaphorical relationship between the images are structured according to sounds, musical and viual rhymes and rhythms, which play a suggestive role for viewers/listeners' (Schwichtenberg 1992)

An example of a conceptual video is 'Ready for the weekend' by Calvin Harris. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO4msvIA7cw&ob=av2e

A given music video may actually have elements of more than one category (for example 'Ruby' by Kaiser Chiefs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qObzgUfCl28)

Interest and excitement is stimulated by rapid cutting, intercutting, dissolves, jump cuts, superimpositions and other special effects that taken together with different scenes and characters, make music videos visually and thematically dynamic.

Mind mapping

What does the audience expect to see from a typical music video for our chosen genre of 'indie folk'?

We had to make a mind map of things which people would expect to see in our music video, to fit in with other videos in this genre, things such as having the performer being in the story (and having a narrative video), having performance footage as well as a story running alongside, a female singer in 'floaty, gypsy looking clothes', usually natural outdoor setting/urban, and an acoustic guitar were what we came up with.
This lets the audience connect to the surroundings and get involved in the narrative storyline which the lyrics of the song match.

Reviews of Music Videos

Corinne Bailey Rae - Put Your Records On

From watching this video, we have decided we want to incorporate the idea of having the artist singing on her bicycle in our video as it's more unusual than having the artist simply performing in a studio, and the idea of the bicycle fits with the lyrics of the song. The lighting of the music video at the beginning is similar lighting to what we want to have in ours, with a soft yellowy glow to keep it looking quite vintage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkEeNpWMvgk




Kate Nash - Foundations

In this video, the performance is the narration, so Kate Nash is performing whilst she acting within the video. We really like this idea and want to also link the narration to the lyrics (for example when Kate Nash sings about lemons, she is eating lemons on the video). Kate Nash's videos are all very quirky and similar to Kimya Dawson, her lyrics always tell a story so the videos are often narration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryH5cga0yUI



Regina Spektor - Us

At the beginning of the video, the effect is slightly animated. If we can do it effectively, this would look good in our video as we're trying to make it as quirky as possible. Another element of the video that stands out is when she is playing the piano at the start (0.09) as it's various cuts to make it look jumpy. We would possibly want to use this idea in our video although it may not fit to the beat of the song, so we would have to experiment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fczPlmz-Vug



Taylor Swift - Love Story

Although we weren't very keen on this video, we did like the idea of having the peformance with constant flashbacks to narration. We would like to have this but maybe not as many flashbacks as it could get confusing. The different camera angles in this video are interesting, especially when Taylor Swift is singing, so we could try vary the angles of the camera when our actor is on the bicycle to prevent the performance from becoming boring and repetitive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xg3vE8Ie_E&feature=relmfu

We have thought about how our video could combine all three types of music video and we have come up with the following:
In terms of performance the main character will just be singing on her bike, singing in her flashbacks, playing the guitar in one of them. For narrative she will be riding past old haters throwing papers at them, representing her dismissing them from her life, part of the narrative also is when she has flashbacks and explains some of the situations.
For conceptual i guess the flashbacks however im not sure if they are classed as a conceptual element.

An idea we could use where the representation of the sound is contrapuntal to the video is where the main character is riding a bike rather than playing an acoustic guitar, as her and an acoustic guitar is all that feature in the song.

We have chosen to do a music video for the song The Competition by Kimya Dawson, to begin with it was a toss up between her and Regina Spector however Kimya Dawson is less well known and doesnt have any videos for her songs so we thought it more appropriate to do.