Arcade Fire- Ready To Start

Analysis-

In this video, they're using a live performance of there song. This isn't unusual for a music video, so it doesn't stand out as much as others do, but is still interesting in many ways. Live performances are popular for artists to use as a music video for lots of reasons. It makes the audience feel involved, like they're just as important as the artists themselves. This creates a sense of loyalty between artist and fan, which makes their fan base stronger, but doesn't necessarily get more fans. I think this video was so successful as it showcases two important things. These are the amount of fans they have, seen from the huge audience at their concert, and their talent. The fan base is important because if people see this video, they know others must really like Arcade Fire, cementing their popularity. As this band play instruments as well as sing, it shows how many talents that they have, in a vague way. In the video, you can see how much fun the audience have at the concert, as well as how much the band enjoy themselves, from their extremely energetic performance. This is a clever way of making even more money, not just from the song and video, but it also makes people want to go and see them in concert, because it shows how much fun you can have there. The video is different to other live ones in a way. because it's black and white, which makes it stand out to live performances that are in colour.

Secondary Research

Before we could begin making our own music video, it is vital that we done some research into existing Indie bands, to know what makes them so popular, and what their image is like. The band i chose to research was Arcade Fire. They're a Canadian band made up of 8 members, and don't just sing, but play a wide variety of instruments such as the harp, keyboard, piano and violin. They have won awards such as Album of the Year, International Album of the Year and a Meteor Music Award for Best International Album. They're popularity boomed when they recorded a song for The Hunger Game's soundtrack, called Abraham's Daughter.

Copyright

Before we could use Arctic Monkeys- Balaclava as the track for our music video, we had to ask for permission from the record label. We emailed them asking for this permission, and even if they don't reply we can still say that we asked, which is vital.

Questionnaires!

Questionnaire Analysis

After handing out 27 questionnaires, we analysed them as a group and got the following results:
66% of respondents liked Indie music, 100% of people rated Arctic Monkeys as either 'love them', 'like them' or 'they're okay'. This shows us that people all like Arctic Monkeys to a certain extent, despite the fact that they don't necessarily like indie music. From this, we could make our artists, who are indie, not appear to be indie. This would mean that people who don't think they like indie music will still listen to it.
The most common answer for the question 'What would you like to see the artist wearing?' was clothes which relate to the genre of music. I think this is because people don't like to see natural conventions challenged, and they're comfortable with what they know. If our music video, we will be focusing more on the use of props than outfits, and they don't play a key role. This means we will be using casual clothes, the actors were already wearing.
We also found that people liked music videos that were different and creative, the 2 most commonly used words in the question asking why Coldplay- Paradise won best music video. People said that they liked the music video because it's not what you expect to see, it had a story you could follow and enjoy. We've taken this on board massively, and ensured that our music video has a story behind it, which the audience could watch, which still relates to what the song is about.
 81% of boys pay for music, whereas 71% of girls pay for music, in the form of either Spotify, ITunes, of buying CD's. This show that boys are more willing to buy music, and this is especially good for us because they all like certain indie bands, such as Arctic Monkeys. Although the percentage between boys and girls is very close, we should still aim to boys, but not at the extreme end of the spectrum, so that girls will still be willing to buy it.
Also, 66% of people said that Gotye- Somebody That I Used To Know was one of the videos that they liked the most. This was a very quirky video, which was fun and unusual, it had a way of keeping people wanting to watch it. We want to reflect this in our video, by having interesting things going on. Also we want to have little things that people may not necessarily get the first time they see it, so that they're more likely to watch it again to understand more.
We got these results by splitting the questionnaires up into pairs within our group, the two boys analysed girl's responses, and the two girls analysed the boy's responses. We found that this was much easier than writing responses for the questions individually, as it would have been extremely time consuming.

Dates

In our lesson today we decided the dates we are going to complete our work by. We will begin storyboarding now and finish by the 7th, and film on the 11th.

Music Videos

Why are music videos made?

Questionnaire Page 2

Questionnaire Page 1

Questionnaire Problems

After I designed our questionnaire, our team dispatched them to around 8 people to see if they had any issues with the questions, or if anything wasn't explained properly. We found that Question 1, which was previously

How often do you listen to Indie music? 1 being always, 5 being never had a lot of remarks.

One respondent pointed out that it's impossible to 'always' listen to music, so we changed that question to the questionnaire seen on my blog.

Also, we were planning on sending 5 questionnaires to 31+ people, however when we tested them with our draft questionnaire, they weren't at all interested in music videos, therefore not useful in our research.

Finally, on question 7 we named the top 5 most popular music videos of 2012, and asked the  respondents to name their favourite. This was fine for people who listened to 'mainstream' music, but for people who actually listen to, and like indie music, they weren't likely to have seen the videos. This resulted to us changing the videos to different tracks from different genres, so we could find out if people who listened to different music wanted to see different things in the music video.

We then took note of everything, big and small, that people had said about our questionnaire and made significant changes to the draft, making the final copy of the questionnaire seen on my blog today.

Lyrics Analysed

Research Plan

Our group decided to send out 20 questionnaires, 5 each between different age ranges. I am sending them to 16 and 17 year olds; Harry is sending them to 18-21 year olds, Jack to 22-30 year olds and Tayla to 31+. We will then use two people from our age group to either participate in a focus group or interviews. We want to find out what people do and don’t want in a video, what type of people listens to indie music, and which artist’s music video style they like. We are starting by splitting up oncoming tasks between us. I am designing the questionnaires, Jack in doing primary research on indie music and artists, Harry is looking at indie music sales figures and Tayla in designing questions for focus groups/interviews.

Moodboard

My mood board represents the thoughts that came to me when listening to the song we chose to do for our music video. There are a lot of bright lights and young people being pretty reckless which goes with the feel of the song. it's basically just people having fun but doing what they like, no matter what the consequences are which is exactly what the song's talking about. Even though the images aren't specific to what i want in the video, like people actually blowing up cars and rioting, it more represents young people with their friends, doing whatever they like and making people laugh.

Arctic Monkeys- Balaclava