Research In To Web Site

To look in to the design of the web site I though it would be best if we looked at Lady GaGas web site as well as other girl bands own sites such as the Pussy Cat Dolls and The Saturdays, I found a massive difference in all three- Lady Ga Ga's was very weird with strong black backgrounds
and all her pictures where in black and white, this contrasted greatly with The Saturdays who had a light blue background and it was more cute, girly and friendly rather then powerful and different. This is obviously because both different artists stand for very different things for example there are many different hypocriticial sides to Lady GaGa she is both : - Feminist - The picture of her in the out fit of raw meat to show the way that women are viewed by men and the way she empowers women to be different and unique and does not care what people say of her. - Anti feminist- The sexy dancing and skimpy out fits and the way she is half naked in most of her videos the typical way of some of her pictures and videos.
Where as The Saturdays are more family friendly entertainment they still try to look good but more 'beautiful' rather then 'sexy' which opens their music up to a greater target audience, they are more smiley and cute rather then pouting and using cliche items such as red lip stick a, where as Lady Gaga has a big picture of her red lips and the black and red theme of the website are also colours which are sexy and can also have negative conotations such as brothels which relates to sex, proof that sex sells in some way or another. The Saturdays have a nice light blue background, again a colour which is open to any target audience both male or female and of all ages, to make it more girly they have pink bits as well as loads of other colours to make it bright and attractive.

We also observed how other bands who are sort of in the middle of Lady GaGa and the saturdays like The Pussycat dolls and Girlicious, and they used pink colours and one uses a siloutte of the band members and other uses a close up picture of the three of them which we intend to use. Also commonly all the ones I have looked in to have links to other social networking sites such as Facebook,Twitter and Myspace as alot of these music artists have there own profiles on those as well and they have links to those.

Target Audience + Set + Costume Planning

As you can see from this still we took from the our recordings, we have two pink backgrounds we thought that the contrast of two different pinks was very affective and also girly which is what we were going for , so we painted the two flats and positioned them pointing in on each other slightly with the spot lighting centerd, also pink outfits we though would look really good against the background so thats what we went for. >>> THE PINK PAINTED BACKGROUNDS


Also the money we printed off our selves , although its not a proper print out of an American dollar as this would be breaking the law its a fake version that would be suitable for use in our music video so it looks real enough but isn't the real pattern and also some of them are in black and white to add a contrast to the piles.
A lot of fake money was used in both our video and Lady GaGas video as the main theme of the song is mocking these socialite life styles where they are filthy rich and money ain't an issue.

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Also we ordered a fog machine, to give our video that extra edge and add a special affect to the music video.


For costumes we planned to be as matching as possible whilst still looking different, we wanted a lot of wearing black and quite unique looking, and wearing heels always as well.


Target Audience
For our target audience I thought it would be for the best as we are this target audience for many people in the music industry out selves as to go for a young R'n'B and pop music. Similar to most girl bands the whole idea of getting the female viewers to admire and inspire to be like you and getting the members of the opposite gender to 'fancy you' was the typical r'n'b group convention we tried to follow. Also with song choose we thought by doing a song by a popular artist this also reaches out to the younger generation of teenagers.

Recording + Editing 2nd March

AGAINNNN... although to be better prepared this time we booked the Northwood Campus Dance Studio we went to use it and there was still exam desks out :-|. To save time we used the Drama studio again but this time on the Northwood Campus, which is slightly better as the lighting is really professional and the spot lighting is powerful, also there was mirrors for us to practice our routine together and yet again black floor and carpets to give the blacked out background illusion we desired originally.
The camera seemed to be a lot clearer and more precise pictures when used in this room, I believe this was due to the lighting used- We set it up so it was spot lighted for where we were to perform the choreographed routine which we had previously made. We recorded the dance scene from three different angles all though it turned out it was all looking best on the face on scenes so this is what we found we used most of during the editing process. One member of the original actors couldn't attend as she had been in an accident, but we managed to carry on as it had to get done and had been planned previously! And it still looked as good with just the three actors so it was not a major concern.

Again we was all dressed similarly in black , although I wore grey leggings instead of black because for the first part I was doing the miming and was in the middle so it looked quite good for one of us to be different and also broke up the background.We also did small solo parts to add in which we found was quite popular amongst other girl groups videos.

During the editing we found it most difficult to get the track over the top fit perfectly to the words and stay in sync to the words our mouths were miming although after carefully cutting and trimming each clip individually we made it work and looked very professional.

Recording + Editing - 18th Febuary

On the Eighteenth of February we planned to record the first part of our music video.
Although we faced a problem the Dance Studio which we indented to use initially was being used for exams on the Northwood Campus, thankfully there was a drama studio we could use at the Foxley Campus this similarly had dark curtains which could be drawn around the room to give the black background affect which we first planned of.
The room lead to our advantage as there was four podiums making up a stage in there which we though could be useful and look more professional if we separated them and staggered them to give the impression of separate podiums for us each to stand on. We had a few practise runs as it was slightly different to how we planned with the small stages in place we had to account for getting of those within the small set routine of the poses ( which we felt were very stereotypical of a girl band which was the genre we aimed to conform to! ) and also a slow walk of the stages to wards the camera in typical girl band style. It surprisingly took us about two hours just to get that tiny pieced of filming, which we hadn't planned for because we had to keep doing retakes as we saw on the first scene some of us were out of time and not in the cameras view as much as the rest, we sorted this issue by moving the camera and actors further apart. Also for lighting we turned of the lights within the drama studio and brought of six really large strong light lamps and pointed it on the scene and put two in the background, we found that we had to put the bulbs in these two pointing outwards as it was washing us out because of the contrast settings on the camera and the power of the bulbs. Also black blankets were used to cover the smart board in the background which didn't have a black curtain covering it like the rest of the room, the setting wasn't perfect but after alot of thought and moving things around we managed to get it all to work and to the standard of which we first intended.


After we finished recording we took it back to our class room and we uploaded the footage we had recorded on to the Apple Mac computers and on to iMovie, we though this was best to to our editing with because after researching and using trail versions of other editing soft wear such as Studio 14 and Adobe Premier we realised that iMovie suited what we were aiming to gain best, and after having used it previously in our AS Unit I felt I had more experience within this programme then starting fresh on a new one and not having a clue where to start :).
As originally planned we wanted lots of flashing colours and slow motion for the start section (20 seconds or so) of the video. Also the saturation is edited and a grainy effect
was added to the video for the start as it made it look more rustic and as the quality on the camera wasn't perfect we though it would be better to go in the total opposite direction and have the first scene more grainy and rugged effect, also iMovie enabled us to slow down the clips so the walking was more to the beat and slow motion affect.
Also when we are 'posing' in our positions when we first go to change we added a jumping affect so we moved quite a few times, which I felt looked quite professional :-D

Story Boarding

Story boarding was the best option for us to plan our video as we already had the may key themes and ideas of what we wanted in the video for example we knew that we wanted close ups , and dancing from different angles. Also featuring alot of money for example setting it alight similarly to what Lady Gaga does in the actually Beautiful Dirty Rich video and the location of a black background which we would use the Northwood campus's Dance studio- Also the lighting in there was convenient as we had dimmer lights and spot lighting.We don't exactly have any artists within our group so stick men where our best bet to give a basic depiction of what we need to do within the shots there was also information boxes such as lighting , duration of the clip , sound and mise en scene.
Below I have scanned the Story Board pictures. how ever some may be different from what you may see in the video as things may not have worked out or looked correctly at the time :

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Prezzi For Beautiful Dirty Rich

A2 Media Presentation. Video Consepts on Prezi

I CREATED THIS PRESENTATION TO EXPLAIN AND ENPHASIZE OUR REASONS FOR THE VIDEO WE HAVE CHOOSEN TO DO. TO SEE IT IN GREATER DETAIL . CLICK PLAY THEN ZOOM IN TO READ OR WATCH THE VIDEO :-D

Laura Muvleys Theory The Male Gaze

The theory of the male gaze developed by Laura Muvley is the concept of how an audience may view the people.( for example casting in films , models or music artists)The three different prospectives on which it can be seen is a males view on a woman, a woman's view of her self or even the way one woman views another.
The features of the male gaze includes cameras and lighting lingering over females body's emphasing curves and other things which represent women in a way of which a male would view them or view parts of the body which he would prefer.
This from a feminist point of view makes women appear like objects and are over sexualised as 'Sex Sells' in music videos and films or even on the cover of magazines men will be more likely to watch or purchase if there is a picture of a sexual woman posing on the front or a gorgeous actress in the film and sometimes these women and pictures have very little to do with the product its self.
The theory shows that some women indeed enjoy being looked at for there beauty and can be admired both by other men and women for this for example models or in beauty pageants in American society's. The gaze can change directions as women can also look at other women in this same way for different reasons for example for comparison of clothing or there body image.

In terms of a music video the Male Gaze is present in the form of conformity in our video, we tryed to dress as pop stars similar to that of the Pussy Cat Dolls and from our view we are using the theory of the Male Gaze as we can see that this look is admired and works for alot of famous people, bands and singing artists.
We used black clothing which in its self is quite a sexual colour as it is the opposite to innocent with both tight fitting clothes which maybe could be seen as revealing - however this look works for all girl bands as men fancy them and me as a female I admire them so this is the approach we took.

For example in this picture above which was taken from a lads magazine, as you can see she is portrayed as a sex symbol - the picture has even been edited to great lengths her body is completely changed from what the original picture looked like to make her more appealing to the male eye; although we have conformed to the gaze we haven't gone to the great lengths like this and actually changed the way we looked to appeal. I disagree with pictures like this as it makes normal women with normal body's feel insecure as know one can ever look like that but males have such high standard as pictures like this are used for advertising and threw in their faces every single day in all adverts as well as the music industry.