Ideas so far

Now we've got ourselves a pool of ideas, a collection of specific visual elements, such as rain and birds and other as-yet obscure elements, all of which are connected by some vague idea in common. The elements are, generally, a bit depressing, such as the considerations we made for blood, broken bottles, wet, rainy streets at night and suchlike, but we figure that the nature of the song - while not so musically soul-crippling as, say, Nine Inch Nails or Bauhaus, is nonetheless appears to be lyrically concerned with anxiety, and in many respects anxiety for much of modern, western life itself. Therefore, we have decided upon visual themes to correspond with this, attempting to make the video, aptly named 'The Science of Fear', as subtly on-edge as possible, without being gratuitous.

We haven't, as of yet, started filming - me and George haven't seen each other in a bit due to George's absence, but as soon as we get together again we can go over everything we've planned and consider the most important question to start the filming process off - where exactly are we going to film? Bury St Edmunds is easy and well-known in terms of where to go, but may come across as too familiar. However, since neither of us can drive, it's going to be difficult to find anywhere else to scout out for locations. In all honesty, the location doesn't matter so much as what we intend to put there, or film there, so really it's not such a big problem. It just would make things a lot simpler if we knew exactly where to start the filming. We need to get some hard storyboarding done.

Music Videos from our Target Audience

We decided to focus our efforts, at least in part, on the target audience of the song in question - which we guessed, from the style of music, to be around the mostly 15-25 indie crowd. So, taking this into account, we decided to take a look at other music videos from artists we believe to also hold this target audience, and see if we could take anything from these videos for ourselves, or at least get a good idea of the videos that deserve to be aimed at this demographic.

We started off by looking at the 'artier' side of the still-diverse 'indie' subculture, so we first turned our attentions to Florence and the Machine, considering their were vague similarities in sound between the artist. However, after watching a couple of videos, we were in many ways unconvinced that we could take anything from their general style, considering it too light and arty for the kind of visual style that we felt was more suitable for our particular song. Therefore, after deliberating what other bands fell into the category we were aiming for, we decided to look up for a few Pigeon Detectives songs. What we found was exactly what we were looking for - a music video that was intended for the crowd we also had to consider, and also contained many elements of the general 'style' that we intend to set out to achieve, including many visual motifs of cars, urban degradation, wet weather and the destruction of appliances.

The Romanek influence

Myself and Will were unaniomous in thinking that a combination of darkness and artificial lighting, would create an intriguing atmosphere reflecting both the pace and lyrics of the track. Consequently, we decided to explore the works of Mark Romanek and assess the ways in which we could instigate some of his impressive lighting techniques to our piece despite a vastly inferior budget of nil. The idea was put forward to use general every-day sources of artificial light such as lamps, porch lighting and street lights in order to recreate the extreme contrasting light effects that Romanek adopts.

On advertising

There is a notable problem in this module of our media studies course, in that we are required, in our music video, to create a product that is intended to advertise the song, album and artist involved. Therefore, we'll have to be considering this fact all through our task - that our music video is not just an artistic work, but should also be intended as the tool of a (hypothetical) corporate entity of the music industry. This is particularly true in the case of our other ancilliary task, other than the album art - an advert in a magazine, considering this is entirely a marketing product. I'm unsure exactly how we'll go about this, since we've only just started considering it, but I do think it's a better idea than to make a website, since neither of us have any idea how to go about designing that. At least with an in-magazine advert, you can be a little more creative in targeting the artsy, indie audience that would probably more appreciate the song in question.

ancilliary tasks

In today's lesson, myself and Will have sidetracked from the main task and have decided to take this opportunity to thoroughly plan the ancilliary tasks that complete the digipak.

We've concluded that an album cover and magazine article would be the best course of action for our piece. At this stage, we've been scouring through various album covers for appropriate design ideas to suit the song we've selected "science of fear." We were particular struck by the album cover of "Only by the night" by Kings of leon



The unique design of the album cover, with the lead singer split into several sections reflects the mood and atmosphere of the music, with some hihgly self-reflexive lyrics in many tracks. Perhpas the band are attempting to comment on a 'split' or 'confused' personallity.