In order to attract my perfect audience member, I am going to play to what I know they want from my research. I will use the editing to put a strong emphasis on the beat, as well as have movement in the shots themselves that is concordant with the beat of the music. I will appeal to male viewers by using female dancers and while they will dance tastefully, they will have a certain alluring air. People are getting tired of the 'in-your-face' nature of many music videos nowadays, especially those that focus on 'booties' etc.
The dancing in my video will impress those that watch it, especially since I will have two people who are teenagers as the dancers, inspiring them to be like the dancers. The focus on lighting and the colours black and gold in my video will make it gripping to watch as the lights should look magical.
While this song is quite jazzy in some ways, it is still a dance-pop song that featured in the charts and therefore it has a mainstream audience.
My perfect audience member would fall under either the Mainstream Townie category or the Urban Stylers.
Townies
Stylers
My perfect audience member would be your typical young adult. A person who likes going out dancing with their friends at the weekend and are pretty stylish in their approach to life. They like songs with a heavy emphasis on the beat but don't just want a song that has no meaning except to allow you to shake your butt and dance provocatively! When watching a music video, they want something passionate and intense but still classy and easy to watch.
When my perfect audience member goes out, they go to restaurants like Pizza Express and Zizi's or out for sushi or Starbuck's if they are feeling more casual. They shop in Zara and River Island, use Apple and Beats products and enjoy dressing up to out for the night. When they hear a good song, they all start dancing.
In day-to-day life and then when they go out, they dress like this:
I asked some people questions about their music tastes, whether they thought that a music video changed their views of a song or artist and what features they thought were good or bad in music videos...
From this research, I think I need to rethink some aspects of my video. Originally I had planned to focus on the dance in the video but now I feel that I need to involve a story-line in the video.
My video is going to have a central focus on lights and the dancers. My video will have a very definite colour palate of black and gold with small bits of white (eg. shirts etc.). The style is very classy as I feel that the combination of black and gold has connotations of wealth and luxury, hence the tailcoats, waistcoats and ball gowns. However, the song has a jazzy aspect to it with its tempo and strong beat and therefore i have put up images of gold fringe dresses that will catch the light and move with the dancer. I felt it was important to have dancers because the dance-pop genre tends to have dancers in their music videos and as they have strongly emphasised beats they come across as being provocative and sultry. As well as my main dancers and backing dancers, I want to have a person lip syncing, either into a mic with a focused light or backlight or in various locations. The singer is male and in order to attract a male audience to the video, I will have female backing dancers and while they will not be 'scantily clad', they will look attractive, as will the leader female dancer. The male dancer should also look sharp to attract a female audience, similarly the male singer.
The
music video for Madonna’s song Vogue
was directed by David flincher in 1990 and was shot entirely in black and
white. To accommodate this, the dancers and Madonna wear monochrome clothing,
especially black and white so that the colours are bolder and contrast each
other more. Similarly, the majority of shots are taken in front of a black
backdrop with low and soft lighting.
The
main focus of the video is on the dancers and Madonna although there is also a
maid and a butler cleaning a grand house, giving the impression of luxury. This
idea of grandeur is strengthened through the costume style, with the mean
wearing sharp suits and Madonna wearing fancy and stylish dresses and a suit
too. Madonna is the main focus and she is a sexualised woman, wearing clothes
like the iconic sheer lace blouse and cone bra. The dancers are all male and
their dancing puts particular emphasis on their hands. This is known as voguing
and is a style of dance that ‘is a highly stylized, modern house dance that evolved
out of theHarlemballroom scenein the 1980s and was
invented by gay black and Latino Americans’. Madonna came across this dance and
felt that it needed mainstream exposure and from that decision, ‘Vogue’ was
born. Voguing takes the model’s poses from the magazine Vogue and puts them
into this stylised dance as shown in the first scene of the music video where
the male dancers strike poses in time with the beat of the song. This theme
runs through the whole video, along with artwork and statues that put emphasis
on holding rigid poses. During the song, Madonna is lip synching while she
dances and while she walks and poses around different sets. There are about
five different locations in the video but the watcher gets the impression that
they are all in a grand house, furthering the idea of luxury. Madonna’s style
changes throughout the video too, as she does impressions and mentions
different celebrities (eg. Marilyn Monroe)
The opening cross-cuts between the
men voguing and a shot of Madonna from the back dancing sultrily in a glamourous
and bejewelled dress using a cross-fading effect. The shots of Madonna are
stationary but the shot of the men is following along the line in a tracking
arc shot. The editing varies between fast and slow edits, often being edited to
the beat in a way that draws attention to the beat of the song. Towards the end
of the music video, there is a shot of a man dancing that has a fast fade
in/out to give the impression of strobe lighting and this may also have jump
cuts.
The cinematography puts a lot of
focus on the hand poses and Madonna’s face as she lip-syncs. To keep the shots
dynamic and interesting, the camera zooms slowly and there is a variety of
close ups and mid shots as well as different camera angles between shots.
The
video for Rolling in the Deep by
Adele was directed bySam Brown
and premiered onChannel 4on 3rd December 2010.
This video shows Adele as the singer who is lip syncing, a ‘faceless’ dancer
and a ‘faceless’ drummer. By faceless, I mean that you never see their faces
close up like you do Adele. She sits alone in a large room that has some
scattered furniture, peeling wallpaper and a crumpled sheet of paper taped to
the wall behind her. This makes the room look abandoned and deserted while Adele
is dressed in a classy dress and nice hair style.
A lot of the mis en scene focusses
on destruction and decrepitude in terms of both locations and props. A more
obvious example of this is shots of a town build from paper which, as the video
progresses, is set on fire by sparks and burns to ashes. Also worth mentioning
is the staircase location with a hanging board that has a pile of smashed
crockery at the bottom and has a continuous stream of plates and cups being
thrown at it. Apart from this running theme, the director has decided to put a
large focus on the video’s lighting, making it interesting and dynamic in more
static and stationary shots where the subject doesn’t more or do anything eye
catching. Most of the lighting looks simple and just convenient however, the
use of fluorescents in the dancer’s room makes the white powder stand out and
makes a very contrasting colour palate to the shots in the room with Adele
which uses warmer lighting and the room is a warm colour too. This contrast
makes the video more interesting to watch and will hold the attention of
watchers as the shots won’t all run together.
By using visual aids, they bring
focus to the beat of the song. They do this with a light above the drum kit
that flashes every time the drummer plays the strongest beat and they also use
a floor covered with glasses of water that ripple when they are hit by sound
waves at every beat.
To make the shots of Adele sitting
in a chair singing more dynamic, the camera is always panning and the edit
displays various shot angles too. This technique of always having the camera
panning and/or zooming makes the video flow better and the shot more animated.
The beat of the song is a strong
focal point for the video and as well as the previous methods I have mentioned,
the director also has the shots edited to the beat, meaning that the edit
becomes quicker at the climax of the song. The fast edit really builds up the
song and grips the audience. The shots have also been chosen to contrast each
other by cutting between different locations with their contrasting lighting and
shots that are in real time and ones that are in slow motion, like the dancer.
I feel it is important to have lip syncing in the music video as it is a form of performance. Sam Sparro is white, however he has a tone of voice that means people often confuse him for being black. I plan to have a black boy called Niya Clements-Hickson lip sync for me. I think he will be able to sing along while he is being filmed, ensuring his performance is more authentic because his mouth and throat will move like a singers. It is also important that he is in time with the song lyrics.
Because the song itself references the colour gold, I feel that colour is a necessary thing to include however, the rest of the video will stick to monochrome colours. I think this will make it look jazzy and classy. Therefore, a black background/black, white and gold costumes etc. Colour is good in music videos with continuity, eg. Meghan Trainer's video for All About That Bass and the use of pastel colours (ie. baby blue, pastel pink, soft yellow etc.)
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