Initial Group Planning-Miss Georgiou

Initial Group Planning
30/09/2014
Vasil Nikolov

In this post, One will be discussing the different aspects of the videos we agreed to include or are thinking of including in our music video. The group is consisted of 3 people (Me, Lily and Aysha). We have already decided upon the roles that each of us will do and we are carrying on with the plan for special effects and other elements. Bellow will be listed the initial plans for the video and new information will be added to as we go along.

In our first meeting, we discussed using a mind map (the picture uploaded below) about which artist should we choose. There was a lot of haggling as my co-workers had decided to produce a song from the 1973 album. Meanwhile, I wanted our group to produce a video either for the Keiser Chiefs, Disclosure or Muse. In the end we agreed to produce a video for Lana Del Rey`s "Blue Jeans" under the condition that the song will be a remix. Thus we agreed to create a video for the "Blue Jeans RAC Remix" version of the song.
Following this, we started to annotate the lyrics of the song in order to achieve inspirations with what to include in the music video. Thus from separate elements of the lyrics, we managed to create a story about a couple in love for the different things (The girl likes the boy and the boy likes the girl, until he starts to drink more and gamble, becoming more and more obsessed with money. This leads to him leaving her and she takes pills+alcohol in order to ease the pain of being left). We also agreed that we would have a link between the lyrics and visuals as this would conform to Andrew Goodwin`s theory. An example of this can be portrayed by the use of the lyrics "made my eyes burn", which we will present in the video with an extreme close-up of the artist`s eyes in order to portray her affection towards the loved one and show how she is also a normal human being like her audience. This way, we can  also fulfil a segment of Dyer`s theory (she will be both a star and a normal persona the same time.)

We then went on to research into our chosen music genre  (the indie genre) as well as the dance genre as our chosen song is a remix. Our group researched into the codes and conventions of both the indie and the dance genre to consider applying within our music to appeal to our target audience. This is how we got together and created a appropriate film that contains camera angles such as a high angle shot. We will use this shot in order to portray our character as a weak. This is unconventional for the indie genre as usually, the artist is portrayed as being a strong character which tells the audience that the artist has a strong character.

We will also use 50/60`s style clothing with which, we should be able to continue with our artist`s portrayal. The reason for choosing such a fashion is because:
a) The artist looks more attractive as 50`s artists looked quite fashionable
b) The artist would look different, which conforms with the convention of the indie genre as this way, she will look different and intrigue more people.

We have applied for our music copyrights and feel very excited. The two companies that we are applying to are Polidor and another record music label. We are also aware that record labels are busy and we do not expect them to respond immediately. Nevertheless, we will continue to try and contact them in order to know that we have permission to film our chosen music video plan.

Overall, the story is going to be a love couple which is very happy in the beginning, however, as their relationship progresses the audience would manage to see the bad habits that the second character has but the artist does not as she is too deep in love with him. The story ends with him ditching her and she, taking drugs that cause her to fall asleep forever. 

Group meetings are important for the production of our music video as it allows the group members to display their ideas and come upon an agreement for the overall elements that we will include in the music video. All of our group meetings were kept upon several A4 sheets of paper which were given to me to keep and update for every meeting. Each element (such as planning the cinematography) surrounding the music video has been passed by our group members` votes. I believe that our group co-operated in best way that we could. We were all dedicated towards the planing of the music video and always tried to help our chief editor if they experienced a problem with the video. At one point, we had to add fillers in our music video, however, as we did not predict what they had to be, we had an urgent meeting and planned how to execute our plan. Overall, I believe that myself and my group have excelled at creating the music video and the different merchandise we had to create.

Over the entire filming sequence, we will add several segments that will represent the artist`s memomry. We will use a special filter as:
a) It will separate the actual time filming from past time events
b) It allows the user to be more interested as there is a different affect that is connected with the film

In Conclusion, I believe that this group planning should be helpful as I will know the overall idea and what we will have to do. Furthermore, If we do lose our sheets, the use of these blogs will aid us with what we should do.