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.

Directing Year 10 Music Video

Today we helped to film a music video for a year 10 band with Mr. Lawes directing. The class was divided into two groups, one filming while the other watching and then swapping around. I recorded creative shots during my turn and focussed on the guitar and singer the best I could, zooming in on guitars and jumping up on the stage to film the faces easier.

The event was fun to do and refreshed my memory on how I filmed my GCSE music video which I did in a very similar manner. At first the band were quite shy and did not turn in a very good performance. However the more takes we did the more confident they got until the 5th take, which was by far their best.

We had four cameras which each filmed from different areas with different tasks. A stationary camera, one for creative shots, one for filming the drummer and one that moves around the room filming the band from different angles.

Music Industry Fan Site - Alter Bridge

Black and deep red are the primary colours of their webpage.  This is very similar to most webpages of rock bands however in keeping with the hard rock style of music the website does not appear to be gothic and instead appears to be more western based in terms of things like font.

The primary target audience is mid 20s to 30s rock fans as we can see by the bands members and colour scheme. They use darker more mature colours to attract their audience as opposed to more vibrant colours such as Avenged Sevenfolds blue on black colours (during the Nightmare era) which may seem more immature and attempting to attract teenagers than the duller colours of Alter Bridge.

The home page has the hero shot of the band dead center of the web page with the eyes immediately drawn to it.

This shot itself is interesting however because Myles Kennedy, the singer of the band is in the background which is unusual at first glance as bands singers are usually put in the foreground. However it is also interesting to note that despite his unusual position the eye is still drawn to him as he succeeds in being both in the foreground and the background at the same time due to the positioning for his arm.
He is also positioned directly over the thirds of the photograph meaning that despite his position the eye is automatically drawn to his face.

Their web banner is interesting in that it is quite literally a banner. This gives the webpage a lot more of an artistic appearance than something like My Chemical Romance's very basic banner. It makes Alter Bridge seem a lot more artistic which could be seen as a reflection on their music.

In the centre of the banner there is the button which takes the form of Alter Bridge's logo. This gives the audience a clear and obvious way of getting back to the home page without making a button which says "home".

They have a FaceBook link which will direct the audience to their FaceBook page where the audience can read more about current events in the band. It also improves their interactivity with the band and they can offer their own opinions to be posted directly to the band. This is a form of convergence as we can access a different medium via a different webpage.

The band uses a basic arial font so that it is easy to read and mature throughout. This keeps consistency with the kind of image that the web designer has been showcasing on the web page.

Genre Research

We have begun to look at different music videos and have begun to create our survey and lickert for audience research.
Our aim is to find out what exactly people will expect from a hard rock music video.
However we have also been looking at music videos which are intentionally humorous with shout outs to other types of music in an intentionally satirical way.
Some of the pastiche music videos we have looked at have been:
Weezer - Buddy holly
Billy Joel - Uptown Girl
My Chemical Romance - Na Na Na/I'm Not Okay
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Dani California
The Hives - Hate to Say I told You Say

Lip Syncing Practise

I didn't find lip syncing to be too much of a problem when I tried it, I found that I could generally keep in time without much trouble and when it came to editing so long as I lined up all of the videos to be in time with the music the clips would always be in sync with the song.
I think practising this has helped me because I've got a slightly better idea of how to edit the clips together while making the cuts between the clips smooth. This will help me when I come to make the final music video later.