Emily Tedrake - Polydor records talk

Today we had a talk from Emily Tedrake from Poldor records, she is the video commissioner which is from a major record label of universal music video - Time Warner conglomerate. She spoke to us about the process of commissioning a music video.


Usually the budgets for music videos are set from 1,000 to  100,000. this is based on projected record sales, and how big the artist wants the video, for example James Blake's video was used as a pro,otional tool, and so it was apart of his marketing campaign, so the money would take longer than usual to regain, as a result of this the video was set to a lower budget than usual.

Once approached by the artist and given the rough idea, Emily picks a few directors she think suit the style and ask them to write up a treatment, this I thought was very interesting to look at as she brought in a few examples from Ellie Goulding and James Blakes videos, this gave us an idea of how we were to set out our treatment for out video. In each treatment the directors gives a brief outline of the music video, which is usually backed up by images and videos to help give a realistic feel for the style they want. they also use specific references for the location of the video, and the different shots used. As well as the styling and looks of the people they want to use.

Once the treatment is completed the directors sends it back to Emily and she shows the Artist and then they pick which directors ideas or style would suit the song and video.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydor_Records

Freak shows

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_show
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcasts

We were told to look into freak shows and outcasts to see if this would give us inspiration or direction for our video.

Our lead singer

As our chosen song is a female singer we decided that we want a solo artist lip singing, we wanted some who is strange but striking looking to sing the part. We have decided that we want the singer not to be doing anything abnormal just the dancers around her. Our lead singer must be visually interesting to look at, the girl singer in Die Antwoord is interesting as she is pretty but also very odd which makes the audience think, which is what we want .

Santi White, known as Santigold is from Philadelphia, she also a very strange and has an alternative style and look.

Response from presenting our ideas to Luke

Our general response from Luke was positive, we told him our song choice (Starstruck- Santigold) and that we wanted our video to be weird and twisted. We then went on to explain our ideas and that our influences are from Die Antwoords videos, they only problem he had with this is that our ideas seemed like they were just taken from Die Antwoords and that it is very hard to pull off weird twisted videos. we were told to look into freak shows and outcasts and it would give us ideas on what sort of way we are going with it as there is so many directions to go with our idea.
He told us to go away and think of a concept we want and come up with more ideas but overall we were happy with the feed back we good as it was pretty positive.

group work on ideas

Powerpoint for Luke

ARTIST/ALBUM/SONG- Santigold/ Starstruck/ Electronic

GENRE/STYLE- Alternative – Unusual/ Creative/ un stereotypical/ Wacky/ Likable

RECORD COMPANY- Epic record company

VIDEO/SONG-

INFLUENCES/ STYLE- Die Antwoord, twisted weird, weird, scary

IDEAS AND STYLES-- dancers, animals, children, twins, grandpa, malformed people, twitching, toes, face colours, weird contact lenses, teeth, masks colourful lights/strobe, rewind clips, flashing, interference bath in blood/dirt/beanie babies, throwing up paint, bugs, dirt, colourful maggots, dolls

Inspirtation

DIE ANTWOORD--

Our main inspiration the music video for 'I fink your freaky' this is mainly because it is a strange and weird video which is where we are directing to. I think it is generally visually interesting to watch and as there is so much going on.


From watching their videos we have developed a few ideas. Such as using a bath, we don't want to take their ideas completely so we have adapted them, we thought of using a bath full of blood (paint?) which is bubbling and steaming. We also want to use their ideas of having random animals and insects which they also use, I think this would keep the audience interested if we use them in weird scary way.

We found Die Antwoords website which directs straight to their videos as this a publicity stunt to make people watch it, and because their videos are so strange it gets the member of pubic and audiences to talk about them, which is what they want.
http://www.dieantwoord.com/
 

first brain storm of ideas as group

Our class has been split up into 2 groups of 4 and 2 groups of 3. For my group I have Alicia, Chessie and me, we decided to go together because I know we all have very similar music interests.


For our first lesson we started brain storming ideas of what sort of style and genre we want to aim for, as a group we decided that we want to aim for an alternative style of music, we have looked in to a few songs which we are interested in;

Ben Pearce- What I might do


Santogold- Starstruck


We have been looking at different music videos to give us inspiration as we decided that we wanted our video to be weird and wacky, one video which inspired us a lot is Die Antwoords video 'I fink your freaky'


For idea wise we have brainstormed a few things we want to have in our video such as, blood, random animals, bath, old people and so on.