Planning & Research

Planning and Research

1. The artist we are going to use is Rita Ora and our target audience are western urban teenage girls, age range between 12-19, who like to have fun and live life to the fullest.

2. The music video that we are going to construct not only includes performance, but will also illustrate some parts of the lyrics of the song. For example when the lyrics read  “hot right now” we have the performer fanning herself, gesturing that she is hot. Some parts of our video will not illustrate the lyrics neither contradict it; for example at the start of the video, we have a girl getting ready in her bedroom whereas the lyrics describe a different narration:

"Got your hands up cause you think you've got it 
going crazy, we're not even started
eh oh eh oh eh eh, eh oh eh oh oooh
It's so funny that you think you're winning 

Cause somebody told you who was spinning 

Eh oh eh oh eh eh, eh oh eh oh eh eh”.

3.  Our video will have a narration about a day in a life with an ordinary urban teenage girl. We want to show the life of a young girl socialising with her friends and having fun therefore, we brainstormed some ideas and came to a conclusion of how we would portray this lifestyle. The video will begin with the girl getting ready with her friends which demonstrates the typical life of a young teenage girl. The following scene shows urban teens in a skate park riding BMX and skating with friends which illustrates pop/youth culture of having fun. It will feature tricks and break dancing. It is vital to include this because what the information we got from our questionnaire answers, we found out this was a big part of youth culture. 

4.  We are trying to create an urban, party, teen invironment, fashion conscious and mainstream culture. To create an 'urban image', we will use teen characters and various urban, youthful locations for filming for example south-bank skate park, bars/houseparty and high street shops. We will portray three different looks and personalities in our video such as tomboy, glamorous and punk. These different looks will have some relation to the locations. This will expand our audience as there are several different youth groups, and by illustrating some of these groups we will hopefully reach out to a wider audience. Different costumes will be used to display the different looks, for example the 'tomboy' look will consist of a tracksuit, snapback and trainers. 

5.   Referencing the notion of looking is done by either having the artist or other talent on sexual display, or by featuring screens within screens. We are going to use screen within screen in our music video. However, the artist is not going to follow or copy the trend of other pop mainstream music videos, where the artist is seen as eye candy by male the audience. We have decided our artist will be portrayed as a fashion icon and she is going to represent pop culture fashion, as this will reach out to our target audience. This video will go against postmodern videos that are sexualised. This will test whether a pop video will still sell even it doesn't include the norms of a postmodern mainstream female pop video.

6.  To inspire our work, and give us more ideas to show a representation from different teenage stereotypes, we will research other mainstream pop videos, and artist. We have picked three artists, Lady Sovereign, Katy Perry and Avril Lavign; and we will explore these artists work in dept. We chose these particular artist as their target audience are also teenage girls. 

•       Avril Lavign intends to reach out to teenage 'punk' girls. One of her music videos we selected to analyse is  “complicated”; which includes her and her friends crashing a shopping mall, messing around, skating, showing of bmx tricks etc.  Her music video will give us inspiration and ideas when filming in Southbank Skate Park, to create that kind of teenage atmosphere of having fun, being quite dangerous (skating), socialising with friends and messing around. We want the audience to differentiate between the personalities played by the artist as she moves from one stereotype of urban, to punk and glamorous.

•       We thought about using Katy Perry to aspire our video because one of her personalities we want to artist to convey is being attractive, glamorous and eye candy. This will support the idea of teen wanting to look 'hot', glamorous and modest. We researched more into Katy Perry’s video “California Gurls”, which is about a girl exploring a dream world where everything is made from living candy. The video is colourful and the artist costume is very bright and stylish. She wears a short rainbow dress, her hair is purple, she uses bright red lipstick and wears colourful tights. We want to create a glamorous, fun look for our artist when she is partying, we will perhaps enhance the light when editing to create a brighter background and keep an urban look on the artist. These features will be used when our artist is partying with her friends. We will use the style of costumes from Katy Perry's video and dress up our artist in a similar way.

•       The third personality the artist will be portraying is an urban tomboy. We looked at Lady Sovereign more because she displays a typical stereotype of a tomboy in her videos such as “A little bit of shhh”. The video shows the artist hanging out with her friends in an urban skate park, doing stunts, messing around, having fun in with her friends. Her costume is very different because its more street wear; baseball hat, addidas jumper, straight jeans, blue trainers, gold ring, hair tied back; unlike the colourful straighten hairdo from Katy Perry’s video. We want to take this kind of costume when we show our artist in this role. For the mise-en-scene, we want the artist and friends to wear baseball caps, hoods, straight jeans, trainers, rings, hoop earrings. We may want to include a car, cigarettes, alcohol to represent the urban teens as careless and rebellion.

    We brainstormed some ideas of the locations and costume we may use and the overall mise en scene. By researching different artist, we have gained a better insight to what costume will coincide with the location. These are some ideas we came up with:

Location 1: Female's bedroom

•      Female characters.
•      Low lighting, artist wearing night wear clothing, getting ready with friends.
•      Putting make up on, getting ready for party.
•     Party costume: glamorous, sophisticated, classy. 

Location 2: Skate Park

•     Graffiti, ramps, littering, drinks, wrappers,
•     Female and male performers.
•     Skate boards, BMX, mobile phones, fizzy drinks cans, cigarretts, spray cans, school bags, stereo.
•     Costume 1: spike bracelets, dark eyeline, green t-shirt, school tie, black converse trainers, Baggy  black ¾ lengths, black and white stripe socks, snap back hat
•     Costume 2; grey converse trainers, black skinny jeans, white small t-shirt, black sweat band, black wholly hat, lip rings, stud earring.
•     Costume 3; white and blue snap back hat, blue skinny jeans, black converse trainers, black hood, spike bracelet, spike earring, lip ring, spike hair.

Location 3: Basketball Cage

•     Male and female characters in this scene. 
•     The artist costume: pink tracksuit, trainers, baseball hat, trainers.
•     Male Costumes: straight jeans or tracksuit bottoms, hood, trainers.
•     Natural sunlight, girl plays basket ball with boys, males are dominate, basketball tricks.