Other media interests

On Thursday and Saturday our media group took part in filming to be an extra in a film. We thought this was a really good experience because we were able to see what took part in producing a film. It was good seeing all the things that were going on like costumes, make up, set design and of course the filming and directing. Below is the link to the description of the film on imdb.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706470/

Above are some photos with some actors that were there.
To the left is a photo of some high wasted trousers that I had to wear because of the time period being set in the 80s. The picture next to this is one of the all the equipment and someone accidentally walking in the way.

These photos are what we had to wear on Thursday and above are where the make up and costume design areas were.

The location was in Hackney Warehouse which I thought was quite a good location for the film because it was supposed to be an underground rave. There was lots of graffiti on the walls which gave it an abandoned look.

Email to Producers of Katy Perry

Dear Capitol Records,

We are writing to ask for permission to use your song ‘Teenage Dream’ by Katy Perry; our names are: Michaela, Jessica, Dominique and Emily.
We are currently studying media studies as an A level at Enfield County School, and as part of this we are making a music video for our coursework. We would very much like to use your song for this. We assure you that we have no intent to sell our video and there will not be any copyright issues as it will be solely used for educational purposes.

Please contact us if you have any queries or concerns.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email we look forward to hearing from you.

Yours Faithfully,
Michaela, Jessica, Dominique and Emily.

Music Video Ideas

We are thinking about filming our music video in Brighton along the beach and the pier because we think this is a good location to fit with our ideas. Our ideas involve an old couple reversing into a young couple so a reverse in time and maybe even a flashback. An example of this is Jason Derulo's video of 'What If'. However there is a limitation with this because it would then be introducing different time periods and this was what limited us in our first year of media.


Jason Derulo's video of 'What If'


We believe that the song is about the girl feeling like she is a teenager again because it is her first love and everything she wanted as a teenager hence the song title 'Teenage Dreams'. We are thinking of using a split screen of the girl looking at the boy and the boy looking at the girl. We also want this to show 'love at first sight'.

We also thought the girl could be dreaming about what is happening in the video we had ideas that we would film on the pier maybe on some rides. We also thought to show the romance that we would show him winning her a toy.

For the performance part we would like the girl to lip sync and dance around her room just singing into a brush maybe. Then we might have her looking in the mirror or jumping on her bed and maybe her brother walking in and laughing at her.

We have three possible endings to our music video:
1.Is a cliffhanger of him just walking towards her
2.Him walking towards her and he has a girlfriend walking towards him
3.Him walking towards her and looking as if he is looking at her and smiling when in fact he is looking at a girl behind her who is his girlfriend. Then the girl just looks upset because she thought he was smiling at her.

We like the sound of all these ideas and have not yet decided which one to use, so we may end up filming all the endings to see which one we would prefer to use. We may like the ideas now but then they could look different when we film them, which is why we think it will be good to film all three endings.

Teenage Dream Lyrics

You think I'm pretty
Without any make-up on
You think I'm funny
When I tell the punch line wrong
I know you get me
So I'll let my walls come down, down

Before you met me
I was a wreck
But things were kinda heavy
You brought me to life
Now every February
You'll be my valentine, valentine

Let's go all the way tonight
No regrets, just love
We can dance until we die
You and I
We'll be young forever

You make me
Feel like
I'm living a Teenage Dream
The way you turn me on
I can't sleep
Let's runaway
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

My heart stops
When you look at me
Just one touch
Now baby I believe
This is real
So take a chance
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

We drove to Cali
And got drunk on the beach
Got a motel and
Built a fort out of sheets
I finally found you
My missing puzzle piece
I'm complete

Let's go all the way tonight
No regrets, just love
We can dance until we die
You and I
We'll be young forever

You make me
Feel like
I'm living a Teenage Dream
The way you turn me on
I can't sleep
Let's runaway
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

My heart stops
When you look at me
Just one touch
Now baby I believe
This is real
So take a chance
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

I might get your heart racing
In my skin-tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight

Let you put your hands on me
In my skin-tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight

You make me
Feel like
I'm living a Teenage Dream
The way you turn me on
I can't sleep
Let's runaway
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

My heart stops
When you look at me
Just one touch
Now baby I believe
This is real
So take a chance
And don't ever look back
Don't ever look back

Where it says you think I'm funny when I tell the punch line wrong we were going to have the girl telling a joke in front of a group of friends and the boy (love interest/boyfriend) being the only one laughing. Again where it says 'my missing puzzle piece' we were going to have a puzzle maybe with a picture of the two of them and move it around and try to edit it so that it is moving on its own. Our inspiration for this was Kate Nash as she uses a similar editing technique in one of her videos.

Pop Genre

Pop music (a term that originally derives from an abbreviation of "popular") is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often aimed towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple love songs to make use of technological introduction to produce new variations on existing themes. Pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, but as a genre it is particularly associated with the rock and roll and later rock style.

Hatch and Millward define pop music as "a body of music which is distinguished from popular, jazz and folk musics". The term "pop song," is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal". Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country, blues and hillbilly music.

Genre Research

Genre

Genre is from the French words "kind" and "sort" and is originally from Latin, Daniel Chandler argues (2001). It is the term for any category of Literature as well as well as various other forms of art and culture, e.g. music. Genre is also a tool that helps us study texts and the audiences responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are abandoned. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

Sub Genres
All genres have sub genres which means that they are divided into more specific categories that allow audiences to identify them by familiar and recognisable characters (Barry Keith Grant, 1995). However Steve Neale (1995) argues that "genres are not 'systems' but are processes of systematization".

Jason Mittell (2001) argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well.
Industries use genre to sell products to an audience. Media producers use familiar codes and conventions.

An example of this is a music video which is a medium intended to appeal directly to youth subcultures.

Pop culture (from wikapedia)
Outside of the academic field, genre regularly affects societies' pop culture. The mass media uses genre to differentiate between classes of popular subjects such as music, movies, TV, books, etc. Favoritism plays an important part of distinguishing one genre from another; fans of Horror look differently upon Comedy than fans of Romance do. Genre has also been used to shape differences in cultural aspects of these popular subjects.

American comedies are distinctly different from French ones, as Country music is noticeably unlike Irish folk music. Genres sort subjects (such as movies, music, books, etc.) efficiently, especially when following trends set by society. From walking in to the nearest movie rental store to searching for music via ITunes, genres are applicable in everyday life as organized classification systems. Even in places such as grocery stores or clothing stores, genres are utilized to form an ordered flow to determine the differences between smaller classes within one particular subject, pointing out the differences between fruit and dairy, and punk to mod.

Possible Band Choices

The list of bands we were considering using and their songs are:

Example-'Fast Cars'
Lady Antebellum-'Need You Now'
30 Seconds to Mars-'Beautiful Lie'
Pink-'Runaway'
Beyonce-'Halo'
Christina Aguilera-'Oh Mother'
The Script-'For the First Time'
Florence and the Machine-'Dog Days are Over'
Katy Perry-'Teenage Dreams'

We thought all of these bands and songs had potential but we could not all agree on one to use. If two of us liked it the other two would not. However we all decided to use Katy Perry because we all agreed on it and we thought of lots of ideas when we listened to it. The band and song I wanted to do was 30 Seconds to Mars- 'Beautiful Lie' because I thought of lots of ideas to go with the song. I liked the way the song started of dramatic and slow paced and then when it was nearing the chorus it picked up pace and became faster than the verse. I thought this was good because it sounded dramatic and I thought it would give the music video a good storyline.

I also liked the idea of 'Halo' by Beyonce but I thought that we were too limited with this because it is a quite a slow paced song and there is not really that much change in tempo. We thought we would be limited in the amount of diverse camera angles we could use. We also thought that because Beyonce is a very popular artist and well known we would feel that we would be comparing our video to hers a lot and we did not want to do that.

This is the video 'Beautiful Lie' by 30 Seconds to Mars but a shorter version and this song would be hard to do because the original video is so good again we might start to compare our one to theirs.

Group Meeting

MEDIALL

Secondary Source Research

My mood board represents the genre Pop. I decided to use lots of different colours because I think it represents the lighthearted mood of the genre. I used search engines such as Google to find images to use for my mood board. I included an album cover of Katy Perry 'Teenage Dreams', as this is the song that our group has chosen to use for our music video. The colour of her hair represents the Pop genre because it is vibrant like the rest of the images in the mood board. I used images of sweets like bubblegum and lollipops because this is the iconography i feel that Pop represents. I also used images of popcorn and top of the pops again to really make my genre stand out so it is obvious that it is representing Pop.

The images I have used are quite similar to what appeared in the video 'California Gurls' by Katy Perry because this is the artist we are using. In this video she is walking quite literally on pink fluffy clouds with giant sweets. I think her audience would associate all the mise-en-scene in this video with the music genre because of the vibrant colours and random location which is why I tried to use all of the multi colours in my mood board.

Secondary Mood Board

Mood Board

Music Decision

Today we decided that we are going to use the song 'Teenage Dreams' by Katy Perry for our music video. However there were some disagreements within our group about doing this song because at first, we did not know if it would be doable. This is because we thought that it would be hard to follow such a recent popular video. It is also because we could not think of any initial ideas to use for the video or what location we would use. However, by the end of the lesson we all listened to the song and started to think of some ideas to go into our music video, so we all agreed that we wanted to use this song.