Animatic

To give the audience a feel of our ideas, my group and I created a small 'animatic' - an animated storyboard with photographs. Our music video will be very similar to it, the shots used are all the shots we compiled in our shot list.

Drafts For Digipak And Magazine Advertisement

Magazine Advert:

 Digipak

Storyboard

As the process went on, our ideas and shots began to expand and become more creative. But at first, I simply put our initial ideas into the storyboard:

Contact With The Artist

Ed Sheeran is a relatively well known artist, and steadily growing in popularity, so we wanted to make sure that we would not be doing anything illegal by using his song for our music video. In order to make sure this was alright, we decided to get in contact with Ed Sheerans record company and ask their permission. They got back to us very swiftly and told us that it was completely alright to do to so. The pictures below show how exactly we got in contact, the email that was sent, and the email we received from them:

Audience Research

Ed Sheeran is not the most diverse artist, and will not appeal to all audiences. Sometimes the enjoyment of the music video can add to the audiences enjoyment of the actual song. The general target audience for our music video will be both males and females aged between 15 and 30, so we asked people around these ages to ansswer a few questions for us. If the audience do not like our music video, obviously we have failed our task. We went around our college and asked some students to take part in our audience research, hoping to gain some knowledge from them about what exactly they wanted to see in a music video, and what they expected. We asked the following six questions:
1) How old are you?
2) Do you watch music videos?
3) What genre of music do you listen to?
4) Who is your favourite music artist or band?
5) What makes a music video effective for you?
6) What type of media do you most use to watch music videos?

Weekly Updates Week Four

Week Four

3/10/11: Again, I managed to do many of the tasks in our fourth week of the course. I started the week by analysing my second magazine advert, which also featured in Kerrang magazine, and was advertising the 20^th Anniversary Edition of famous nineties band Nirvana’s album ‘Nevermind’. I then went on to analyse the lyrics of the song we were hoping to do for our music video – ‘Little Lady’ by Ed Sheeran featuring Mikill Pane. I also completed a moodboard for the song in which I outlined the various themes of the song merely through pictures. I also analysed a digipak for the band Tokyo Police Club’s album ‘Favourite Colour’, aswell as doing an in-depth study into the music genre of ‘folk rock’. My group and I also did our audience research this week, in which we questioned students from out college on various factors, which added to their enjoyment of music videos.

Genre Research: Folk Rock

Ed Sheeran’s music is generally put under the hybrid genre of ‘folk rock’, therefore in order to really grasp his style of music I researched into it more thoroughly.  By doing this, I will be able to understand more of the conventions of the genre and so our music video will be more fitting to the ‘folk rock’ genre.

Initially, the genre was started in the US, when Los Angeles based band ‘The Byrds’ began playing traditional folk music, but with rock instrumentation. US music press first used the term ‘folk rock’ to describe the bands music in June 1966, when their debut album was also released. Folk rock became hugely popular in the UK and US in the mid-late 1960’s, especially after The Byrds released their cover version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Dylan himself played a huge role in the progression of folk rock, especially with his various collaborations with electric rock bands and electric backing bands for many of his songs.

Folk rock has various subgenres; country folk, celtic folk, electric folk, medieval folk and British progressive folk. Each of them include their own music/lyrical coventions as well as their different recurring iconography features and themes. In a very general sense, folk rock is very simple instrumentally. Many folk rock artists merely have themselves playing the guitar for many of their songs. Artists who do this are; Bob Dylan, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) and even Ed Sheeran for many of his musical performances. The guitar itself could be seen as a regular icon for folk rock. 

BOB DYLAN - MR TAMBOURINE MAN

        

CAT STEVENS - PEACE TRAIN 

                           

ED SHEERAN - SMALL BUMP

Folk rock doesn't really have a particular 'fashion' style, the artists usually just dress in casual, everday clothes.

Ed Sheeran himself is rarely seen wearing anything but hoodies, jeans, tee shirts etc.

The lyrics are usually about everyday or relatable things, for example the song 'Father and Son' by Yusuf Islam, the lyrics of which is merely a heartfelt conversation between a father and son. 

Or even 'Be Like you' by Ed Sheeran, a song about somebody who realises too late they lost the love of their life, and everybody has lost somebody they loved therefore the lyrics are very relatable to for audiences.










The genre has had a long life span, and even now continues to be popular. Folk rock is easy to listen to and as I mentioned before, many folk rock songs are heavily relatable and so there will always be an audience for the music.