Planning : Music Video Pitch For Artist Name 'Song Title'

You need to be ready to pitch your music video to the group on Friday 2nd October.

The slides below, which we went through in class, explain what has to be done.

Planning : Creating An Online Mood Board

As the first stage of your planning you should create a mood board for your chosen song.

This should be made up of a series of words and images which reflect the genre and mood of your chosen song.

The main purpose of this is to ensure that you have a sense of what your genre and song are 'about' before you move into any other planning stages.

You can create your online mood board using GoMoodboard

Using and online mood board generator such as GoMoodboard will also allow you to refer back to this in your evaluation when discussing how you have made use of new digital technologies during the planning stages of your music video.

This is clearly referenced in the 4th question of the evaluation that you will have to produce. The questions are shown in the image below.

Your mood board will also act as further evidence to count towards your mark for Research and Planning.

Embedding Your Chosen Song

It is a good idea to embed your chosen song into your blog at this point.

This is useful so that I can listen to your song easily.

You should embed the audio only and Soundcloud is a good option for this. Do not embed the original music video.

I can show you how to do this so your song appears as follows:

Research : Lyric Analysis

We discussed the importance of considering an interpretation of your chosen song's lyrics today.

I showed you how to use Microsoft Word to add comments to your lyrics - here is the example that we did at the start of the lesson.

Your comments should be a mixture of observation, interpretation and questions. 

Think about how a mood is created in the song - a good way to do this is to make a list of all of the adjectives and verbs in the song and think about what type of picture they help to paint. 

Once you have done this, create a post title:

Research : Lyric Analysis : Artist Name 'song'

In this post, provide an explanation of what you have done together with screen shots of your Microsoft Word document.

You could also use a website such as Word It Out to create a word cloud for your song's lyrics. This could then be added to your post as further evidence of your efforts for the examiner.

Copy your lyrics into Word It Out and it will create a word cloud which alters the size of the words according to their frequency in the song. This can help to show where repetition takes place. 

Here is an example for the Frank Hamilton song, 'Summer'.

Research : Who Are The Target Audience For My Artist?

You now need to move away from your chosen artist and think about who their target audience is.

This is vitally important before you move forwards as you are producing a promotional package and you must know who you are appealing to with your music video, CD Digipack and Music Magazine Advertisement.

Most magazines produce media kits or press kits for prospective advertisers - these allow them to promote themselves and for advertisers to commission advertisements in the most cost-effective and targeted manner.

Looking at a media kit helps you to se just how much effort is put into the identification of a target audience.

Create a post titled Research : Who Are The Target Audience For My Artist?

Take a sheet of paper and create a pen portrait for a typical member of your artist's target audience that includes as much information about them as possible.

• What age are they?
• What sort of things are important to them?
• How do they dress?
• What types of music do they listen to?
• What do they read? Watch? etc
• How do they use social media?
• How do they spend their time?

Here is an example produced by one of our students last year. This student was producing a promotional package for the artist Nina Nesbitt and she is describing a typical Nina Nesbitt fan.

Nina Nesbitt : Initial Audience Research

Here is another example produced for the artist HAIM.

HAIM : Initial Audience Research

Research Into Existing Music Videos

Here are the slides we used in lesson this morning:

You can find an example of a music video analysis by another student by clicking here.

This analysis is for the music video for Biffy Clyro's song titled 'Black Chandelier', which can be watched below.

A2 Target Grades

The Focus Cards below show your AS mark, your A2 target grade and the number of marks you need to get in order to achieve this.

I will do a card for Rhys in due course.