My Band Frankenstein

I have created this band frankenstein to work out how we are going to represent our band in the music video. I have chosen to have the band represented as people who do not take themselves too seriously as people, able to poke fun at themselves but serious as musicians. 

Examples of bands like this are Green Day, Steel Panther and Blink 182 who despite often making lighthearted or comedic music put a great deal of work into making their music mean something to them and in the case of Steel Panther using a large amount of musical skill. This is why I have given my Frankenstein a suit to wear, to represent them as serious musicians but holding a clown flag as they are not serious as people.

As our song is played similarly to 1980's rock music I've chosen to give my Frankenstein long 80's hair similar to the members of Motley Crue. 

The Frankenstein wears cowboy boots as their music has a western undertone to it which I will carry through their webpage as well.  A theme of westerns is a lack of law and authority which I have also conveyed with the bands megaphone, they have little respect to authority and are unafraid of it.

I will have to look back at this Frankenstein when it comes to representing our band. As this will be useful to us in the future.

Researching our Target Audience

We have created two similar but different surveys to gather extra information on our target audience. We are hoping to get a good idea of how to market our band towards that certain target audience and get ideas of what to put in our music video.
These are the links to the questionnaires:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZX336C

In addition to this we have organised a focus group for Tuesday afternoon where we can pitch out ideas fully. As mentioned in one of my previous blogs we are using a focus group made of a mix of age ranges between both staff and students. This will give us a wider range of information to use as a source for our video and our band as a whole.

We are hoping to gain information:
How to represent the band
How to market the band
What to include in our music video

Richard Dyer's Star Theory - Marilyn Manson

Richard Dyer's Star Theory - Marilyn Manson

The reason we looked at Richard Dyer's star theory was because we needed to know how stars images are constructed as many bands have their image decided by a mixture of themselves and an actual team.  We needed to understand what stars are and are not constructed. I used Marilyn Manson as an example because he is largely atypical of what we expect to see in music artists.

When we work on our band we need to develop some kind of image for them and Richard Dyer's star theory will help us decide upon it.

Blog Update: 10/11/12: Band name and logo designs chosen

We have chosen the band name "Lift Off". Now that the name has been chosen we are working on different concept designs for the band logo. All of which make use of an eagle in some way shape or form. I've worked on two logo's in particular the first of which has the eagles wings wrapped around the name, the second has the eagle carrying a banner with the bands name.
We have chosen this in keeping with the bands western desert like iconography similar to bands such as Guns N' Roses and Motorhead.

(UPDATE WITH IMAGES FLIPPED ROUND)

Target Audience Data Gathering

We have created a questionnaire including ten questions one of which is a lickert scale. We are using these to get an accurate idea of our target audience.  We need to know what their musical preference is, and what they expect to see from that said genre. Our questionnaire asks about musical preference, artistic preference, what music channels they listen to and what music magazines they regularly read (if any) this will give us a good idea of how we should market our band to its target audience.

In addition to this we are also gathering a focus group made up of 6 people. A mix of teachers and students. This is so we can get a mixed age range and see the differences between the ideas and feelings younger people have towards music as opposed to older people.

Here is a link to our Questionnaire:

Music Video Pitches

The video starts off with a view of the bass drum, the bass drum begins to play showing only the vibration of the drum. Soon the audience see's the singer sitting in a stool (possibly holding a guitar) with a microphone on a stand in front of him. The video cuts between the band performing the song as themselves and them playing the song as various a well known band of the past.

The video starts with the same basic idea as before. However instead of their being cuts between the real band and them cosplaying as a well known band. The singer of the band is stalking a woman watching her from afar with photographs of her on his wall. He follows her throughout various locations hiding just out of sight from her until eventually he "wastes away."He is invisible to the woman he is stalking.  "can you see me". It is not too obvious that he is stalking the woman until the end scene in which we can see the wall layered with photos of her. We wanted to avoid the generic stalker idea of the woman looking around and not seeing anyone there. This is because we do not want to appear cliche in the video. We have come up with the idea of him being completely invisible to her at most points in the video except for a few shots where he is being helpful towards her.

Mood Board and Test Band Homepage

I chose a western motive for my mood board as Wolfmother are rooted in Hard rock (as will our band) and these bands quite often have a western motive in their iconography. This is why I've chosen more dusty looking colours, imagery of dusty roads, eagles, roses and mexican bulls to connote heat, sunlight and passion.

For my home page I've tried to create quite a professional layout with a skyscraper up the side. I want to give our band (under the working name Lift Off) to have the appearance of a band who are in touch with their fans. This is why we've given buttons to their various social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter, in addition to their blog. We have a hero shot of the band (represented here by Opeth) dead centre of the page and should be one of the first things that you see when you look at the webpage.