Online Audience Survey

Above shows the online questionnaire we created on the online website of Survey Monkey. This will help us to identify our target audience for our music video and particular genre. After we have posted it around on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and have received some feedback, we will analyse the results from the survey and identify various audiences.

Audience Questionnaire

I decided to ask the members of my family on their opinions of the Indie genre. This will help gather together some audience research from a detailed sample of people from two age ranges, 50 and 20.

Person No.1 - Jill, 51
Person No.2 - David, 54
Person No.3 - Sam, 20

What do you like about the Indie genre? 
- It brings an upbeat but a soothing, catchy feel. I like that it has a different style and I know it won't disappoint But I particularly enjoy listening to Indie Pop, to artists such as Florence and the Machine and London Grammar.  
- I like the different sounds from the guitar, particularly enjoying Indie Rock with the likes of the Arctic Monkeys and The Vaccines. I like their upbeat tunes and how they suck you into their music. 
- The guitar solos mostly, I play guitar myself so I find that I can relate to the genre as I like to play some of their guitar parts. Although I do enjoy listening to Indie Pop, such as Bastille where their music is more electronic or drum & bass. 

Do you ever listen to the sub genre, Indie Acoustic at all?
- Yes occasionally, I think its very relaxing to listen to around the house. I enjoy listening to the likes of Lucy Rose and Daughter where they tend to use interesting sounds in their music. 
- Not at all.
- Not really.

How would you describe generally of an Indie Music Video?
- Natural feel, outdoors, love narrative, lip syncing to the camera.
- Happy, reminiscing over a relationship, natural.
- Cutting rate in time with beat, love story, natural scenes, showing something different to other music videos.

When listening to our song choice, what are your first thoughts for the music video?
- Close up of the guitar scenes, lip syncing sometimes avoiding camera, natural surroundings, showing times when the relationship was present.
- Guitar present in most scenes to help represent the indie acoustic, love story shown throughout, lip syncing, gradually a build up towards an ending.
- Strumming of the guitar, love story, good times. 

Meeting 13/09/2013

In the lesson today we discussed  one of the songs that we are considering for our music video. One of the music videos we are considering is I'll Lie Here by Mike Dignam which presents an indie acoustic style. Mike Dignam is an English male artist who is known for his upbeat tunes and attraction to girls that are fond of the typical songs about love.
We think by choosing this song we can create a good music video that will involve many techniques.

Our ideas include:
- A narrative throughout the video
- Some lip syncing to the camera which will draw the female listeners in
- Narrative featuring a love story which corresponds to the lyrics of the song
- Natural environment with some picturesque and urban locations
- Guitar as one of the main features of the video

Star Theory

I created this presentation on Powerpoint and uploaded it to http://www.slideshare.net/ to depict what the meanings of the Star Theory by Richard Dyer and how a Star can be represented in various ways.

Goodwin's Theory

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics:

This long shot from the the Ben Howard music video Keep Your Head Up shows genre characteristics such as the naturalistic effect of the background with the trees and the sun rising. This supports the genre he portrays which is Folk Indie due to the acoustic styled music and natural characteristic. In this screenshot from the music video, they have used a orange coloured filter over the shot to create a warming image to match the sound of the song and the filter has also made the background of the trees more bold which helps the listeners to focus more on the artist in the video.

2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visual:

This medium shot from Kanye West's music video Good Life ft. T-Pain shows the artist as well as the lyrics of the song being in the centre of the shot. This shows that the music video is all about him and his lyrics . The visual representation is also shown throughout the video which allows the audience to know exactly what Kanye means in the song. This particular video helps to demonstrate a relationship between the lyrics and the visual representation.

3. There is a relationship between music and visuals:

In 'Ed Sheeran- A Team', there is a definite relationship between the video and the music. The video is of a girl who has reached rock bottom and is selling herself to pay for her drug addiction. This goes perfectly with the music as it is essentially about drugs and the video helps to portray the emotion that the music is trying to get across. Indie music tends to have a video that goes perfectly with the music, as the music nearly always has a meaning behind it. Creating a relationship between the music and the visuals helps enhance the meaning of the music.


4. Demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work:

This music video for the Gorillaz song Feel Good Inc ft. De La Soul shows how record labels want close ups on the artist to show their motifs. This is shown especially on this close up shot of one of the characters of the band. This is especially iconic for the band Gorillaz due to them being all about the animated characters and not having an image of them individually. So this makes the record label portray an iconic image for the band.


5. They frequently reference to notion of looking and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body:

In the music video Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams & T.I, women are portrayed as the centre of attention throughout the video demonstrated by close ups on the female's faces. This makes the audience be drawn to the females also due to the men in the video having a voyueristic effect upon feminism as their eyes are on the women.

6. Intertextual reference of other artists products and texts

One example of intertextual reference in a music video is in 'Lady GaGa - Just Dance', where Akon another pop artist is featured in the video sitting on a sofa. This refers to the fact that he helped produce the music with Lady Gaga. Intertextual reference is used often with a variety of different artists, it helps associate artists with different genres and different types of people. 

Song Choice

Having earnt the permission to recreate a music video for song 'I'll Lie Here' by Mike Dignam, we would therefore like to use this song as we think that selecting a song from the acoustic Indie genre would be a good route to go down as we can relate to the young style of the music. I think this song will work well as the lyrics are quite understanding and it provides a fairly simple storyline to translate into a music video.

Including the lyrics in the video below identifies the meaning of the song and how we could interpret the lyrics into a narrative for our music video. Due to the acoustic indie song, compared to other genres such as pop, we believe we don't have to show the artists' image throughout the video and lip syncing them to the music as it's more about the meaning of the song.

Permission for Song Choice

We have contacted an artist over the use of a song called I'll Lie Here originally by Mike Dignam. We managed to find this artist through Spotify and compared to other similar artists such as Ben Howard and Daughter, Mike is less well known. His genre is represented as acoustic indie but along with an upbeat tune which relates to the genre of indie pop.



To try to contact him, I emailed his management team through Gmail in which they replied to confirm we could use 'I'll Lie Here' by Mike Dignam.