Work Experience Placement

Over the half term, I have been in contact with leading fashion magazine company 'Asiana' Magazine in attempt to secure a work experience placement. As a media student, I am not only passionate about the practical aspect including films and music videos; but also the written aspect such as 'Magazine Journalism' which I wish to persue at university.

To my delight, I have been offered a one week placement from 29th November where I will be fortunate enough to be working for the company alongside the production team. Asiana is the main high-end glossy fashion magazine, which also has additonal magazines such as :

• Asiana Wedding









• Asian Woman

In terms of advertisement, Asiana present the 'Asiana Bridal Show' which I attended a few years ago and consists of a fashion catwalk and a wedding fair.

By undertaking this work experience placement, I will gain an insight into the Journalism field of work and the magazine industry which is the industry I hope to have a career in. Next week, I will be attending an induction day which I am looking forward to and will later blog once I've attended.

Mike Posner-Cooler than me

During the half term whilst browsing through the music channels, a song by a new artist 'Mike Posner' with his debut single 'Cooler than me' caught my eye. The music video is strictly a performance video with no specific narrative and I would say it fits in with the 'Electro Pop' genre with an element of rap which our chosen song also has so I felt as though as an audience and a media student I could relate to this song.

At the point of 2:06 seconds the artist puts on his 'shades' and keeps on taking them on and off and as he does this, the video has been edited so that the mise en scene changes each time he looks into the shades.

Later on in the video, someone in the video slaps the artist causing his shades to fly off his face and this zooms into the screen and the shades are used as a transition to take us into the next scene which shows how the shades are a continuous prop used as it is relevant to the lyrics; 'You got designer shades just to hide your face'.

These are a few of the techniques in the song which I took particular interest to and would like to add to our own music video once we reach the editing process.

Starting to Storyboard

Over the past 2 weeks, myself and my group have been storyboarding for our music video. In order to practice for our own one, we chose to storyboard the first minute of a Calvin Harris song. This gave us an insight into what it will be like when we come to storyboard our own one.
Storyboards include; illustrations of what the shot will look like and a description of the shot including the duration of the shot, the shot type and the props and costumes we will use.

From doing a couple of shots, we found this task quite difficult as it needed in depth explanations and a lot of thought and decisions were needed within the group. Although it was a lengthy process to begin with, we realised that in the long run when it actually comes down to shooting the storyboard will be very handy and is also some kind of planning piece.

We are currently in the process of storyboarding which will include scheduling several group meetings during the half term. So far, we are well into the process and will continue to meet to ensure we finish the task.

Performing our treatment

Treatment Research

What is a Treatment?

• An outline of a media production which is designed to give an overview of what the production might include based on a brief and presented to a client/Production team.

• Included written descriptions and images to demonstrate the intention of the production.

• It is used to 'sell' an idea to a client/Production team and is an integral aspect of the 'production process'.

Mood board for chosen genre

Above, I created a mood board on our chosen genre being 'ElectroPop'. I included images containing flourescent and neon colours as they are part of the conventions for our genre. I also incfluded images of the relevant make up and costume used in this genre.

I inserted some images of couples as in a typical 'pop' video the storyline is usually about the theme of 'love' and as we will be conforming to this I thought it would be relevant to add to the mood board.

Final Band Brand Decision

During Wednesday's lesson we decided that we needed to confirm a 'Band name' as soon as possible. So we narrowed our down to our favourite ones which we thought would suit our genre and song the best. We came up with

• Paragon-meaning a model of excellence and we liked the idea of the term not being self explanatory which will attract an audience.

• Idest-The reason behind this name is based on the original artists name Example. The justification for the artist name is from the idea of his initials being E.G which is equal to Example. We thought of the equivalent way for E.G which is I.E. I.E stands for Id Established and we simply abbreviated and merged them together to form our band brand.

Personally, I am satisfied with our band brand as I think it is linked with the original artists name so we took an idea and experimented with it and developed it into an idea of our own. It also quite catchy and leads an audience to want to know the reason behind the name as it is not a proper word. It also sounds quite masculine which reflects the male protagonist in the video.

Treatment Slideshow

Example – Watch The Sun Come Up

Ideas for our Band Brand

We decided to create our own Band Brand and have come up with a few ideas. We decided to base our name on our chosen artiist-Example. We researched that the reason behind this name is because the artist's initials spell E.G so which is why he chose the band brand example.

From this idea we thought of the equivalent-i.e, but struggled to think of a name linked to this abbreviation. So we used example as a base and thought of different words associated with it. We also used thesaurus online as an aid.

From all this there were hundreds of similar words and after discussing them we narrowed hundreds down to a few:

• Exposure



• Prototype



• Illustrate

Personally, I prefer Exposure as I feel as though it has connotations of a camera and reinforces the idea of our music video being a home video and using the idea of a flip book and it as though it is now being exposed. However, the rest of the group were not 100% on the idea and during the next few meetings we shall discuss this band name further and come to a decision in which we are all satisfied with.

Wordles

We created another wordle based on our audience feedback from our treament. We picked out the main words from their written feedback and the larger words were the ones that were mentioned the most. I am very pleased with the feedback from the audience as it is very positive and I hope that we can make our music video so that it turns out to reflect these words.

Wordles

We created a 'Wordle' using http://www.wordle.net/ of our 'brand image'. As our genre is electro pop, we thought of different words linked and associated with our genre for example, upbeat as the music is upbeat. Words associated with our genre are affection and love which links to our storyline. We also included words which our video will be portraying for example, memories and flashbacks. We chose this particular one as we liked the pinky colours and flowy writing as it makes it appear quite girly.

Mindmap and Initial ideas

Above is a mind map of our initial ideas.

Our initial idea is to start with the music video acting as a home video and it would start off with someome putting into a TV a VCR with on the white label, "Watch The Sun Come Up". We would then zoom into the TV as if the "film" is coming alive which is when the music video would start.

We also thought of another idea of calendars and that we would green screen the calendar and have different events happening in different months. Also, to portray the theme of TIME we want to include an analogue clock ticking and then we'll speed it up when we edit it to show time passing.

The main concept is a young couple watching their home video of their romantic events and to make it appear more like a home video we will film with a handheld camera so it appears more authentic. We will also act out certain lines for example; ' You and that red dress'-the girl will be wearing a red dress and several more.