Planning

PLANING AND RESEARCH FOR MEDIA A2 PROJECT

We gave a written note to the actors involved in our music video. This note included the date, time and anything else we needed individuals to bring or wear on the day of filming. This allowed us to avoid any unexpected mistakes such as the actor forgetting about the filming time or day. The actors were then able to negotiate with us if they had to change filming times, and were also able to give confirmation of the dates decided. This way we were able to manage our time efficiently and also avoid wasting time.

Mise en scene - Costume

As part of our planing and research task we have decided to dress our character in casual clothes typically worn by British girls in their late teens. This is to show that our character tries hard to fit in with the people around her. Although our theme is red and black we did not want this character to draw too much attention away from our main character who will be wearing red and black.

Props

We used our "Dance your cares away" posters to emphasise our motif, this is to ensure our theme is clearly identified within our scenes, and also to make sure the audience are constantly reminded of our theme throughout the video.

Location planning

We chose between two toilet locations, one being in our school College House building and the other in the Furzedown House building. The image above is a picture of College House building. The reasons for us choosing College House building was because we found this location allowed us more space to play with. The emptiness of the the area shows how the character feels - isolated and alone. This creates more sympathy for the characters from the audience, and is beneficial as it can be used to draw our audience into the narrative, helping them to relate to the characters.

The layout of this toilet also helped us in making the decision of using this setting. The idea of having our main character sitting above the toilet and looking out of the window, will show how she feels trapped in her "own world", as she feels misunderstood by the outside world. Having a our character sitting by the window represents the barrier between her and the others around her.

Motif

This picture will be used in our media video as our motif. This phrase "dance your cares away" is used to show the intertextuality between our music video, digipak and album advert. This phrase was chosen as it is the name of our song, and also because it gives the audience the impression that this artist has a positive attitude and enjoys life to her fullest. This phrase is used to help sell the product and attract more of our target audience by using a "catchy" phrase that is easy to remember. The song we chose for our media music video is very fast and upbeat, although we did contradict this idea of happiness by having slower paste camera cuts and actors slow movements. We found that having binary opposites of happiness and sadness emphasises the emotions in our music video, this then encourages the audience to relate to the characters shown on screen.

This pictures shows how we thought about the construction and designs of the digipak we created. We chose to draw out some ideas of how the design of our digipak could be, and this enabled me and my group to decide on a design that we all found best suits are music video and shows clear intertextuality between each product we designed.

We also used PowerPoint to settle on a background picture for our album advert. PowerPoint made it more flexible for us to change the background and font of our advert without changing too much of the layout.