Ed Sheeran's director

Emil Nava is a successful music video director who has directed two of Ed Sheerans videos and all of Jesse J's music videos to date. At school he knew he loved music and drama but only discovered his true talent when he picked up a video camera. He's worked his way up through lots of hard work and determination to become one of today's most sort after directors. We look to take some of his concepts used and convey them in our own way in our final video.

Genre | Representations | Narrative

Genre
The Indie genre - this was decided when we chose are song as its the genre of the song. Indie pop is the genre we will be concentrating on and is a branch of alternative rock music that originated in the UK in the mid-1980s. The term 'Indie' has been used for some time to describe artists that are on independent labels and/or the labels themselves. It has now branch from a genre into a lifestyle and many people strive to be Indie.

Representations
Our video should be quite mellow and should be applicable to all our target audience. The Talent that we will use will be people that the audience can relate to and won't be like front cover models. Saying that we will try to make the talent attractive as this is something that the audience look for and would prefer to see. We will convey positive representations as otherwise we could offend viewers.

Narrative
We want to try to portray a story of a boy and girl being together and then not. We will try to use montages of images of them then and now, not necessarily creating continuity but instead displaying the difference of feelings.

Digital Technology

When creating our video me and Claudia are going to have to use a lot of different technology. Firstly and most obviously, we are using blogger. This is an effective way to present our work and means that we can access it almost wherever we are and not just at school.

Once we begin to film we will be using video camera's from our schools resources. The most likely camera we will use will be a Panasonic HC-V500 which is a handheld or mountable HD camera that records movement and still shots.

After all our filming is done we will upload it to apple macs at school and begin editing it on Final Cut Pro which is an industry standard editing program.

As mention above we use apple macs which is what most of our work is done on although we would sometimes use home computers or mobiles if we wanted to do some work outside of school.

AUDIENCE - sagel

Socio-economic group - students, quite typically average waged with a large friendship web

Age - around 14 to 25

Gender - both males & females

Ethnicity - mainly white Caucasian as this will mostly be who's in the video

Lifestyle - out-going, fun people. May have part-time jobs, and will most probably be full-time students who are interested in music more specifically indie music. They will spend a certain amount of time online or watching the TV which would be where the saw the video

We've chose this audience as they are the kind of people that would be interested in the genre of music we're doing and therefore he kind of people that would want to watch the video.

The kind of people we would expect to watch our video could look like this...

...though they would probably look a lot less photoshopped!



Conventions of Music Videos

In order to make our video as realistic as possible we will try to take teh conventions from the videos we have studied and use them in our own way. When looking at conventions they seem to be quite particular to the genre.
The indie genre is mostly a mixture of narrative and performance. Sometimes the whole band will be performing and other times it will only be individual members. The band will be wearing quite casual comfy clothes and not extravagent outfits like those that can be found in many pop/dance videos.
The tone of the video changes depending on the lyrics and tempo of the song. It can be bright, fast, dark, slow, etc.
The video is edited quite simply normally in general time to the music. The clips themselves will sometimes be edited with different themes, for example black and white or sepia. Special effects can be used but aren't an extremely common thing.
The narrative is typically symbollic and will match the meaning or general jist of the song. Although sometimes it was have no relevance at all.
These are the kind of ideas that we will be using and developing on when creating our video. We'd already discussed that we were going to use a mixture of narrative and performance and luckily this idea was supported by the research we found.
We also looked at some pre-existing videos from Ed Sheeran and found that his are much more narrative than performance and some of his videos he doesn't even appear in. This is obviously unconventional but has given us some new ideas to consider.

Director? Colourist? Producer? HUH?!

When researching the Directors of the videos I noticed some other job titles that are used in the video production industry, a lot of which I didn't really know the meaning of. This lead me to look into this further and below are some short definitions of the job titles:

Director - A person who is in charge of an activity, department or organisation
Producer - A person that makes or causes something
Director of photography - A person photographing with a motion picture camera
Production designer - The person in charge of the overall look of a filmed event
Editor - A person who is in charge of and determines the final content of a text
Colourist - A person that ensures all shots within each scene match each other by balancing colour saturation and illumination from shot to shot

Good Time - Owl City & Carly Rae Jepsen

For the last textual analysis of an existing text I decided to go for quite a new, popular song. I looked into the background of this sing and found that the director also directed one of my newest favourite vides, Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, this lead me to think that this directors taste was very good.

Director: Declan Whitebloom

Declan was born and raised in London and was brought up with a family that were obsessed with film. He went on set a lot with his older brother and this is where he picked up the process. After earning his BA he hopped on a plane to LA to realise his dream and after spending many years in different aspects of the job, which included many years in editing, he got behind the camera and that's where he's stayed. From there he's directed videos for Owl City, Taylor Swift, Olly Murs and many others.

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• The idea of the video is quite simple. Its a big group of friends meeting up for a camping trip
• The video begins with Carly and her friends and Adam and his friends driving along in separate cars, we see them singing along to the song which you could assume was playing on the radio
• Both cars then pull up in front of a 'woodsy' cabin and we see shots of the two singers both narratively and then lip syncing
• We then see the group walking into the woods and setting up camp. The evening comes around and so the shots are darker but they use light from a fire to be able to see. 
• The group are then dancing around the fire with the two artists still occaionally singing
• Everyone is dressed in summery fashionable clothes, this portrays them as role models and allows the audience to both idolise them but also connect with them through similarities 
• The cars used are quite 'indie' and 'cool' cars, the roofless one is something that seems to make an appearance in a lot of indie pop videos

Keeping On Without You - This Providence

I decided to analyse this video as well as it is quite a mellow indie sing like the one we have chose to do and so I wanted to look for similarities and conventions in these videos. I also think they are both quite good videos and have some ideas in that Claudia and I would be able to transfer into our own videos.

Directed by: Luga Podesta

Production company: London Ally Entertainment

Producer: Christian Heuer

Executive producer: Luga Podesta

Director of Photography: Tom Banks

Production designer: Sarah Lauson

Editor: Luga Podesta

Colourist: Lauren White

Label: Fueled by Raymen

Release date: November 10, 2009

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• This video is set in two main places; a sandy wasteland and an abandoned destroyed house
• During the video there are a lot of close ups of things such as a photo, feet hanging down, a clock, quite random things but then all things that add to the story of the song
• Quite a narrative video as you can tell the meaning that the girl has to the band members both through the song and the images on screen
• You see a lot of shots of the main singer lip syncing to the song, but this isn't too frequent and is interspersed with shots of other band members and landscape shots
• The timing of the day also progresses throughout the song in that its like early afternoon/morning when it starts and by the time it finishes its around dawn
• The broken down house really relates to the lyrics of the song as it seems that it symbolises the broken down relationship

Tonight Tonight - Hot Chelle Rae

Directed by: Luga Podesta

Production company: London Alley Entertainment

Producer: Christian Heuer

Executive producer: Luga Podesta

Director of photography: Rob Witt

Production designer: Phillip Boutte Jr.

Editor: Luga Podesta

Director's rep: Yell Productions

Colourist: Bob Curreri

Label: Jive

Release date: April 26, 2011

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• Uses montages of images from all scenes. The office and garden party are shown at the beginning of the video and then as the song progresses the band and party begin to be shown.
• The video is fun and the pace of the video is fairly relentless. The video uses lots of bright colours and high key lighting. This all matches the feel of the song.
• Whilst the narrative parts of the video are showing the band will occasionally sing lines but you don't see them singing the whole song. This is because this may become too repetitive, even with a change of location
• On the roof you see the whole band with all of their instruments playing the song. Its fairly dark and the atmosphere is very much party-like
• The band all have similar way of dressing, this helps to signify that they're all quite similar and marks them more together as a band

Research Methods

Primary research involves the collection of data that doesn't already exist.
Secondary research involves the summary and collection of existing research.
Qualitative research is that which involves words or a persons personal response.
Quantitative research is research that can be measured and evaluated to show trends or patterns.

In order to collect both a substantial and useful amount of data I will have to use a mixture of all of these methods. Each has its advantages and disadvantages when looking for different things.

Primary research can be useful when wanting to gather opinions or new information. A more typical method that is primary is a questionnaire, this allows you to collect whatever data you need, it will also be unique to you as no one else will have it for obvious reasons.
Secondary research is most probably the easiest research to get, it can be found on the Internet or in books and is anything that is readily available. It can be useful to find out things that you wouldn't really be able to find out yourself, such as specific information on celebrities or companies.
I will need both Qualitative and Quantitative data as they both have different uses. You will need qualitative data to find out information such as backgroud information. Quantitative data will be needed when looking at, as said above tends or patterns, such as viewing figures on videos.

ED SHEERAN

Ed Sheeran is an English Singer, Songwriter and Producer. He learnt to play Guitar at a very young age and began recording in 2005 and in 2008 he moved to London to pursue his music career. He played hundreds of gigs and was finally given mainstream attention in 2011 when he was signed by Asylum/Atlantic Records. He broke through commercially in June 2011 when 'The A Team' debuted at number 3 on the UK Singles Chart. Ed is currently touring in America and will be touring England again very soon after.

History of Music Videos

A Music Video is a short film or visual clip that accompanies a song or piece of music. More recent videos are used as promotional gimmicks and to enhance the enjoyment of the listener.
This first music videos were released in the 1950's but even as early as the 1920's animated videos were accompanied by musical pieces labelled 'visual music'. For example the early items from Walt Disney such as Fantasia were based soley around music.
Through the years videos have obviously changed a huge amount, in the beginning it was largely just simple videos of the artists singing with some variety. Nowadays there are many types of video such as narrative, lyrical or performance. The genre that our chosen song is from more typically has a narrative mixed with performance video. These are known as hybrid versions and many examples of these can be found on youtube like the couple below..
Love Drunk - Boys Like Girls
Tonight Tonight - Hot Chelle Rae
Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen

A2 Brief

"A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

• a website homepage for the band
• a digipak for the album's release
• a magazine advertisement for the digipak

I have chosen this as my brief and will be working with Claudia. The song that we have chosen to do is 'UNI' by Ed Sheeran. My two ancillary will most probably be the digipak and the magazine advertisement.

digipak: a digipak is a fairly recent type of packaging for CD's, its typically made of a heavy cardboard material and will normally open like a book or be in three parts with one opening to the left, another to the right and the CD in the middle in the more traditional 'jewel CD case' stuck onto the card background. They are most frequently used for special edition releases and allow for more information, including lyrics or information on the band and more graphic display.

If Only - Mine and Claudia's short film