Pop video directors

Syndrome entertainment is a company that designs and directs all sorts of different music videos within different genres. They are a well-known company and have produced music videos for world famous artists such as Eminem, The black eyed peas and Chris Brown.

Famous pop bands Syndrome Entertainment have created music videos for include The Saturdays, JLS, The black eyed peas. They created the video Notorious for the girl band The Saturdays which has heavily influenced my own music video. During the club scene to the video the screen is slit into different sections showing different clips. This is what I intend to do in my club scene.

  Their website:

http://www.syndromestudio.com/directing.html

Phil Griffin if a famous music video director who has worked alongside Girls Aloud as well as other famous artists. He has directed the Girls Aloud music videos Sound of the underground, No good advice and life gets cold. He has also directed music videos for other artists such as the late Amy Winehouse, Adele and Kings of Leon.

Griffin is also known for his photography, documentaries and commercials. His photography includes portraits of pop artists including Britney Spears and Mutya from Sugababes. Griffins’ commercials are focused mainly around the cosmetic and beauty industry, including Max Factor make-up products, Clairol hair products and GHD hair commercials.

These commercials show similarities to the pop genre as they are glamorous with bright lighting and focus on selling their product to enhance a person’s beauty. The pop genre focuses on the beauty of the artists to try to influence their audience. For teenagers they want to be as glamorous as the artist, whilst men are attracted to the artist, and so watch their videos.  

Key features of pop music videos

Pop genre music videos always highlight the youthfulness, attractiveness and what an ideal person is supposed to look like in the artist. Bright lighting is used in the videos to highlight the artist’s facial features and to make them look more attractive by removing blemishes etc. Look at my post on lighting in pop music videos for more information at http://hattiesmusicvideo.blogspot.com/2011/12/lighting-of-music-videos.html

Pop artists usually wear tight, revealing and provocative clothing in their music videos to gain male attention as well as still appealing to their target audience. The music videos focus heavily on the singers and their performance compared to the rock genre which tends to focus on the instruments played.

Musicologists often identify the following characteristics as typical of the pop music genre:

·         an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology.

·         an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal artistic qualities.

·         an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, over live performance.

·         a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments.

·         much pop music is intended to encourage dancing, or it uses dance-oriented beats or rhythms.

The shots of the pop music videos tend to be quick and sharp usually to fit the beat of the music. They don’t tend to use continues shots as the large range of angles and shot differences tends to suit the audience and music better.

Meet the Girl Band

Ella – (Cheryl) Colour: Pink

The girly and slightly prissy member of the group wears a large amount of pink including a necklace that has the Barbie logo on it. This suggests that she is very feminine and youthful. She is the more moody member of the group. We have included shots of her looking unhappy at the sleepover scene when she is woken up and hit with pillows.

Luisa – (Nadine) Colour: Purple

Luisa is the sexier member of the group, wearing provocative clothing and dark, heavy makeup. In a particular scene she wears tight sequin leggings with an unbuttoned blazer. This would be seen as not appropriate for our genre, however a large percentage of artists aimed at a tweenage/teenage audience have outfits/ lack of clothing being displayed in their music videos. E.g. Katy Perry, Britney Spears. Luisa is a more daring and cheeky member of the group provoking her friends and causing chaos within the group.

Lily- (Kimberley) Colour: Green

The sweet and innocent member of the group wears minimal amounts of makeup. Lily has a country style with checked skirts, denim shorts and cowboy boots. She is a very friendly character and is constantly smiling and dancing and having a good time.  She is much more forgiving than her best friend Ella and shrugs of any mischief that happens with group of girls.    

Kate- (Sarah) Colour: Blue

The cute and sweet member of the girl band is petite with long, curly hair and is constantly smiling. She takes on the role as the little girl of the group as she still sleeps with her teddy etc. She is a lot smaller than the rest of the girls and is seen as the little sister and is sometimes bullied because of this. She is cheeky and is always involved with the activities taking place, she is very confident and wears a girly, glittery crop top and skinny jeans.

Molly- (Nicole) Colour: Red

Is another sweet member of the girl band but also has a mischievous side to her, often influenced by Luisa. She wears a 60s type of style with large, puffy skirts, long pearl necklaces and red lipstick. She has jet black hair with pale skin which also suits the 60s look. She is a confident member of the band and along with Luisa has a cheeky side to her that likes to cause mayhem.

Discovering Photoshop tools

Photoshop elements is a program that I have used in the past for IT lessons at compulsive level (year 7-9), but never really experimented fully with. By creating my practise Digipak I have learnt a number of useful tools to enhance photographs and design.

These include:

·         The crop tool, a relatively simple function which resizes a photograph or image to fit the requirements necessary.
·         The cloning tool, which simple clones an image selected. I have used this to remove a mirror from a background of a photo, by covering the mirror with a colour similar to the background surrounding it.
·         The red eye remover tool, has been very helpful and effective by removing the red eyes of someone in a photo created by the flash of the camera.
·         The type tool, has also been useful by creating the text added to the Digipak. This includes the Digipak title, song listing and company information.
·         The shape tool, has allowed me to create what looks like an added sticker to the Digipak which is commonly found. Cutting out a circle of a section of the front cover and writing in it, gives this effect.

Other aspects of Photoshop include the layering options, which allow a person to add multiple images onto one document. The tint tool has also allowed me and Faye to change the tint of the girl’s photos so they have their own colour as originally planned. I haven’t explored the advance parts to Photoshop, and have mostly stuck to the simple tool. For the final design of me and Faye’s’ Digipak we hope to use more complex tools to get more professional effects.

Vodcast - Digipaks

Podcast 7 - filming bedroom scene

Digipak/behind the scenes photos

Digipak Photos

Backstage the ballon + sleepover scene

 

Podcast 6 - editing final sample scene