Timeline

Oliver Allgrove of Passion Pictures

Today we have a speaker in class: Oliver Allgrove of Passion Pictures who is an executive producer and has been involved in a great number of music video productions. After his amazing speech about the movie industry in the United Kingdom, I was inspired and decided to research the creative company "Passion Pictures" as well as his own art projects.

Passion Picture:

• Small independent studio;
• Oscar winner;
• It has 50 years of professional experience in the movie industry.

First of all, I was fascinated by the web-site of "Passion Pictures" as it was extremely creative as well as very useful and organized. The animations which were used were simply incredible. 

The speaker - Oliver Allgrove is a proaction manager and assistant director in "Passion Pictures". He became well-known after such successful British movies as "This is England" (2006), "16 years of alcohol" (2003), "Somers Town" (2008) and "Sparkle" (2007). 

Furthermore, Oliver Allgrove became famous for the work with Gorillaz. During the talk, I highlighted that Oliver argued that the work with Garillaz became the most interesting project for him as it is very unusual to have animated characters in the music video instead of real people. He told us that the members of the production team have started with blank sheet of paper and the project was quite complicated.He suggested that this was also a very risky project as he and his colleague did not know for sure audience's assessment. However, it is fair to argue that the project was extremely successful not only in the UK, but in other European countries, America and Asia as well.

During the talk Oliver made some key points about the process of commissioning/making music video. Now, I want to write about these key points as I consider that this is very important information which definitely help us during the process of creation of our pop music video.

• Oliver highlighted that planning the process of creation music video is extremely important s it can safe time and help you to be more organized and well-prepared for the shooting day. Oliver emphasized that there are 5 key staged in the music video production:

Strategic Planning

Pre-Production

Production

Post-Production

Distribution and Marketing

• Oliver also suggested that there is no point to do something expensive as your sponsor/customer has a limited budget. If you do so, it may become a big problem not only for you, but for the quality of a music video as well. Oliver said that in the cases when your production team has a very limited budget, it is better to concentrate on the artist rather then expensive visual effects. He also showed us an example of such a video, when his team tried to concentrate all audience's attention on the band. As a result, there was only one quite complicated scene, which required balloons.

Overall, I found the talk by Oliver Allgrove extremely interesting and useful. I found our a lot of new information and professional key aspects about the production of music video. In the conclusion I want to say that I try to do my best to apple all knowledge which I gained during the talk.

Final Concept Statement - Treatment

Recently, we have changed the song after the discussions with Luke as our group suggested that the previous song "Love is a loosing game" might be to slow. This, therefore, may lead to some obstacles concerning our pop music video. So, our song is "Anything that's bad" by DealCasino.

I was also fascinated by the process of creation «Lost in Motion». I have learned through watching the video about the process of filming «Lost in Motion» that the dancer should have enough space for dancing. So, our group have decided to film our pop music video in the studio as it quite spacious. 

After watching the video called "Full Circle" by George FitzGerald feat. Boxed In we were inspired and decided to add some new concept in our music video in order to make it more creative and diversified.

Research into Special Effects

Today, we decided to research different special effects in order to find out ways to do our music video beautiful and creative. The first video we have watched was awesome as it combined different concepts: fire effects and amazing dance. Of course, professional dancers took part in this video. Fortunately, we have such people in our school and they are agree to participate in our pop music video.

The next video we have watched was not a tutorial which explains how to do these amazing fire effects, but it was a video which shows the most difficult fire effects. After we have watched this music video, we have decided that we do not want to do our dancer to be in fire, we want that the fire would be beyond our dancers.

The next video which I have watched was "Lost in Motion". My personal idea was to use fabric which would be attached to a body of a dancer. This allows to create perfect visual effects and as a result amazing pop music video. Furthermore, dance part in this video absolutely amazing and I have started to think how our music video should look like.

After we have watched this video, we have decided to use super slow motion. So, watching this video was also very useful.

Pitch Presentation and Feedback

Feedback:
Today Luke, the professional filmmaker, said that it is impossible to recreate our initial idea with casino. So, we should change all concept of our music video. So, we have decided to use the track called "Anything That's Bad" by Deal Casino. So, it can be argued that we have completely changed our initial concept. Now we want to include contemporary dance in our music video. Luke that that now our initial ideas for pop music video are really good and we can start the process of creation it. 

Some Changes

Today during the lesson we made some changes concerning our pop music video as it was impossible  to recreate our initial ideas in our school video. Namely, it was impossible to use green screen technique.

•  Green screen compositing, or more generally chroma key compositing, is a technique for combining two still images or video frames. 

So, in order to make our video beautiful and creative we have decided to shot a lot of close-ups of the casino which can help to represent our idea. Then we are going to shot various shots (e.g. wide shot, middle shot. close-ups, etc.) of the scene with Amy Winehouse.
Furthermore, we have decided that the lighting in the casino is going to be dar in order to represent the atmosphere of a casino in the mid1950s.

We have also created demographic and psychographic profile of our target audience.

Research into Music Video Forms and Conventions

Today our teacher rem mended our group to research different pop music videos in order to find out new creative ideas which we may apply in our own music video. It was extremely useful task as we also had the opportunity to learn on mistakes of other music video production companies.
So I want to demonstrate what particular music video we have analyzed.

• Florence + the Machine - "Spectrum"

Our group really liked the creativity of this particular music video as it has a great number of interesting and innovative ideas. Additionally, we really liked the lighting as it is bright and quite unusual.

• Adele - "Someone Like You"

Our group highlighted that this music video is quite boring. So, we have decided within our group that we need to create interesting unique narrative in order to get rid of this monotony.

• Jass Stone - "Stuck On You"

We really liked this amazing music video, especially the idea with the green screen and the mermaids who live in their fairytale world.This video was extremely useful for us as we are also going to use the green screen.

Research into Similar Artists

In order to be well-prepared I have decided to conduct my own research into real artists. I am going to investigate how the real singers of chosen songs perform and market their music.

• Ed Sheeran

He is an English signer-songwriter and musician. The lyrics of his song is usually about love and a relationship.

I can highlight that Ed Sheeran's website is quite innovative and made especially in regard with teenagers. I really like the function with regional identity. 

http://www.edsheeran.com

• Coldplay

Researching the British Band called Coldplay I primarily noticed that their website made in a very creative way. For instance, fans can observe the history of a band using an online timeline.

http://timeline.coldplay.com

I also enjoy the band's image. Group members prefer casual clothes in order to concentrate fans' attention on their music rather that visual image (e.g costumes, make-up, props).

I personally respect Coldplay because despite their worldwide popularity, the band has remained protective of how their music is used in the media, refusing its use for product endorsements In the past, Coldplay turned down multi-million dollar contracts from Gatorade, Diet Coke, and Gap, who wanted to use the songs "Yellow", "Trouble", and "Don't panic" respectively. According to frontman, Chris Martin, "We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves if we sold the songs' meanings like that."

• Rihanna

Public image: Known for reinventing her style and image, Rihanna's music and fashion sense are noted by the media. In 2009, New York magazine described Rihanna's early look as that of a cookie-cutter teen queen, noting she has the ability to shift looks dramatically and with great ease.

Our first 'real' ideas

Our group was inspire by the soft femininity of Christian Dior's "New Look" silhouette, with its sweeping longer skirts, fitted waist, and rounded shoulders, which in turn gave way to an unfitted, structural look in the later 1950s. ObviouslyObviously, we decided to place our video in the years following the Second World War. Additionally, we decided that in terms of music the most appropriate song is a "Love is a loosing game" by Amy Winehouse as her style represent chic of the 1950s which we are willing to represent in our music video.