Planning Setting & Iconography

The setting of something is basically where something is set. The significance of the setting is to go with the codes and conventions of the genre of the piece of media that is being produced. depending on what the purpose of the product is, the setting will change to allow for the specific appeal of different products produced. Iconography is part of Mise-en-Scene and it is seen as each item and object that is used in a scene. it could be a table or a chair that is placed in the scene but each piece of iconography isn't paced randomly, it will all have a meaning to the scene and are chosen specifically for its purpose. The main purpose to the iconography used and the setting chosen is simply to obey the codes and conventions of a specific genre, just as in a rap music video you would include cars, girls and money because these are what rappers rap about and it wouldn't make sense if they weren't in a music video. Also in rock music you might see dark places such as alleys, black studios and band members with long hair and dark clothing to show every important aspect of what this genre represents and it is also used to represent the artist how they want to be perceived by an audience. So mainly setting and iconography is used to lay everything around the music video creating a scene relevant and appealing to its own genre so what is produced as the final product actually has a meaning.

We will be using more than one setting as there are two vital parts to our music video and that is the performance piece and then the narrative part that is going to be included within the band performance that is displayed. For our performance we will be using the Drama studio in school and we thought this was perfect as the room is pitch back with black walls and curtains that wrap around the walls creating a perfect environment for the band to perform in as we wanted a large amount of space with nothing going on in the background so the in the dark environment the lights and camera would focus all on the band members and the instruments to add more depth to the performance rather the focus was spread to the floor and walls rather than on the band members where the action is actually taking place. This is important because we want for when the audience watch it that they aren't concentrating on unnecessary factors of the video and actually have all focus on what is happening.

The other part to our music video is going to be the narrative based segments that will be laid out throughout the music video in between the band performances to give the music video more than one perspective, also it is important that we want to get across the story to the song as we want to apply Goodwin's theory to our music video and base our narrative on the lyrics to our chosen song. We believe that if the actions in the music video reflect the lyrics so that there is some reference in between so we can make a story based upon this. So in our narrative segment we are going to base it in Woodford Green on the street above my house where Arthur also lives. We are going to film this part at night because we want to give that mysterious feel because we are going to have a drug scene and the dark elevates the dark acts as it is something illegal and the darkness adds onto its effect showing it is something very bad. We want this setting because Arthur's house has a wooden door gate which gives a nice feel to the whole backstreet look as there is an alley that goes all the way up the back of his house and his garden is a good part to have a scene in there too. Overall it was a good decision to use this as one of our settings is that it is perfect to what we want to reflect on the lyrics with the use of this scene.

Iconography wise for our performance part of the music video we are going to include a drum kit, guitar, bass guitar, a microphone with a stand and 2 amplifiers. This is very important that in the studio we use these as these are all the essential props to a complete band. We are going to use all these instruments because we at least one of each type of instrument to go with the song as these instruments can all be heard in the song. We are also aiming to use spotlights on stands to beam light directly at the band members because we want all the lights and attention on the performers rather than the setting so that conveniently they are the main part of the performance scenes. Then over to the narrative part of our music video there are a number of things we would like to include because we want to have references from the lyrics to the objects and also portray a bit of what we want to send across with the song itself. A scene in this is where there are drugs being passed on which we would use alternatives to give off the same impression. The lyrics mention how the singer listens to music thinking about this girl and we think that using a sort of music player and earphones reflects on what is being said in the song. Also stated in the song it is said that drink is spilled on the couch and this is important to use a glass while the primary actor is listening to music to give the same effect as him spilling water without meaning to.

Our settings and iconography are conventional to our music genre because it is a rock genre and the settings we are using are mainly just dark scenes and this is conventional because from our vox pops people mainly added that dark environments were the main thing people looked out for in a rock genre. One of the most conventional parts to the music video is the blacked out studio that we are going to use in our performance because this is used a lot in music videos that we have watched or even music instrumental covers that people do. Using a scene during the night is very conventional as we are going to set it in dark alley ways with a lot of mystery involved. Iconography we believe is very conventional to the rock genre because the main thing we are using in this music video is many instruments and the band performance is what makes the music video for a rock genre song and this is very good as it goes with the codes and conventions of rock because people who watch these types of music videos always expect an instrument based performance showing what the music is created by.

The best way in why this builds a relation with the target audience is that this product is being produced on the factors that appeal to them most and make them the happiest. These are the things that they want to see and i believe that if we create a product so specific to what appeals to our audience it will build a good relation with them because they get to see everything they expected to in the music video we have made for them. If this relationship can be built it shows exactly that we obeyed the codes and conventions of the rock genre because we have then created a correct product.

Pie Charts

Once all questionnaires were brought together we all combined them and collected all the results into an excel spreadsheet to input and process every piece of collected data to make sure the output to all the information is shown clearly and is visibly read without any trouble. We did this because we wanted to make sure this data was displayed so that the answers given were easy to read and analyse and this was important as we put all the opinions of the survey population together to easily see what aspects are looked upon greatly to make sure we made use of this information to make the   best of the final product we are aiming to create.

Questionnaire And Evaluation

When in the process of planning a product you have to firstly collect some research before you even begin to do anything, you want to find out who you are creating the product for and what is the aspect of the product that may appeal to them the most. When you have the product in mind you mainly have to think about the kinds of people that may actually want your product so you have to go out and find out what peoples interests are and this is a great way to provide you a path to follow in how you are going to generate such a specific product, for it to sell to the individuals you have to know what they want so that you can give it them. the best way is to create questionnaire and hand it out to many people of different ages and genders to get an even spread of preferences to find out averagely what people want or need. The questionnaire is very important as it gives you a target audience to consider as long as you ask questions about what you are making to see what people give in return to support your choice. When you think about a target audience it is just the best thing to really do and ask people only to make the best of each point of what it is you are making exactly.

This is the questionnaire we created to collect important data because we wanted to make sure that we were doing things they are meant to be by seeing what peoples standards and expectations are. this is good because once the information is collected we can put it all towards our music video. we made sure to look at gender and age as we are seeing what kind of age range our product is going to be made out and to also see whether the opinions of younger and older people are similar of different in any way.

We are a group of 4 and we made sure we surveyed and even number of people so we each took on the task of taking out 10 questionnaires within the local population of our school as there are ages from teenagers to senior members of staff and we thought that t was the best way to get a range of answers from people. Once we brought our data from 10 people each we overall had 40 pieces of information from each person we looked at. We also did this to spread the time management between ourselves so we was not relying on one person to go out and survey 40 people alone we wanted the information as soon as possible to process the information to get to the next stage of planning and how this collected data will have an input towards what we go ahead to create.

Evaluation

This questionnaire is useful for the fact that without research it is very difficult to create something for an audience so it is important to make a questionnaire for the audience to collect data vital and it will tell us how we should make this music video. asking questions to the audience allows us to find out what people like and expect from a rock genre music video and that what we make for them. 

When going ahead to create a product you need to find out what the purpose of this and with all the questions we collected we come to see that what age group the video should be aimed at, what content should be included and what they want to connect to within the music video. from the questionnaire we asked what music genre was the audiences favourite, rock music returned as the highest favourite and we went along with that to the sub genre of indie rock because now we know what people enjoy we can go to the next step of what will be included to indie rock in the music video. 

We knew we wanted to do an arctic monkeys song and the top two were R u mine or Do I Wanna Know and from the results it came back to Do I Wanna Know being the favourite choice of song so we prepared analysing the song and what aspects we can include into the music video following goodwins theory to relate the lyrics to the visuals.  Also we asked what kind of music video they would like to see and performance was the most common type of music video so we went with the performance/narrative style to portray the lyrics through the storyline set in the music video.

We also asked our audience to sea what kind of perception they had over the bands lead singer and how they expect them to look in the music video and what appeals to the audience. Everyone always appears to the lead singer as he is always seen as the leader and the main person in the band and his image in my opinion is the most important as he is literally the front page of the band. him being dark and long haired was the most selected features but as we are going for the indie look we wanted to stick with a slightly dark but smart look.

Vox Pops

Once we had created the questionnaires we decided to ask many people to answer a few questions, these questions were to get more detail on our topics of concern because we thought the questionnaires got into a wider aspect on what we wanted to find out so we made a few questions along the same lines the investigate more into detail on what we wanted to know more about and this was important as we are trying to find out as much as we can before startng the production of our music video so that we are creating something more specific to go by the theorys made by people and to follow the codes and conventions of the rock genre by see also what people know and think about this particular genre.

 Another reason we looked into taking this into consideration as a part of our research is because it was much better to be able to collect more personal opinions and what people thought about the rock genre in their own way. As a group we wanted to find out what people emotionally felt about the genre and it was important to see them portray their feelings on camera about what they thought about the rock genre and we beleived this will allow us to input their opinions with more energy into the final product we are going to produce making sure to obey by the conventions that will go best  with this genre itself.

During the filming process we used our camcorder to film several people from the population of our school and to ask them questions based on what we wanted to find out. It was a very good process in taking out a practical task such as getting out and doing some of our own filming physically. While filming we were carrying out simple procedures making sure lighting was correct, positioning of our surveyor and even making sure we filmed only the useful footage. 

It is very good carrying out these preliminary tasks as it gives us some starters to be re using our technical skills to make sure we are doing the filming how it needs to be done. This task will be very useful in helping us plan our music video because during the process of having the camera and thinking about how we are going to interview people we were making sure we set it all out so the we could have every one in their place and film it as we needed. It will mainly assist us by getting into motion of being on set and its helpful to be ready to film a readily planned set.