CD cover to 'Spooky' - Dusty Springfield.

Here is the CD cover (front and back) to our preliminary task music video. It's quite plain as it's set in the 60's not many artists had 'fancy' backdrops, it was just plain and simple which I feel this is. It shows how the consumers full attention should be entirely on the singer and no one/nothing else.

Preliminary task - Dusty Springfield - Spooky.

Here is our preliminary task of 'Spooky' by Dusty Springfield.

Places to film our preliminary task.

We watched several different 60's video's to influence our ideas on what to do for Dusty Springfield's 'Spooky'. In some of Dusty's other videos she uses plain backdrops like flowers or trees etc. For ours we chose a retro style and went with a plain black backdrop with a single spotlight on the singer. We also decided to edit it adding sepia on to give it that crackling effect/ and older look to the video without actually damaging the footage. This works well with the era.
We just used a frame and a black sheet with a spotlight to film this and to get the look right, we filmed in school for convenience but in our real video we won't film in school as there are many things that complicate it like signs, classrooms etc. Here is an example of how our video should look after we have been through the editing process.

Voyeurism within a music video.

Within a textual analysis, you note down things on camera, mise en scene and editing. Something else that I have been noticing in quite a few music videos is voyeurism. It was first notice in Dead or Alive's, 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)' as the lead singer stands in a frame/canvas which gives the impression that we are looking into someone's life and someone elses perspective of the
canvas.
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Another video I noticed this in was Nik Kershaw's 'Wouldn't It Be Good'. The main character in the video has another story happening within the person. It's really bad editing because of the era (80's) but the effect is quite good as it gives the impression that other things are happening behind the persons life other than what is actually happening in the video.


I feel these are two great examples of voyeurism and the effect it has on an audience as a whole.

Discussion of gender within a music video.

Previously, I explained how Morrissey the lead singer of 'The Smiths' showed feminine signs even though he was male, e.g. swinging flowers, wearing chains etc.
However, it has come to my attention that I have missed one of the biggest music videos when discovering different genders in a video.
Queen's song 'I Want To Break Free' shows the complete gender swap as he waltzes round in heels a tight top, a skirt, fish net tights, a wig and a moustache.
All the other band members also took part in this complete gender swap almost as if a protest with Transgenders on how they 'want to break free' from their bodies and become the real them.
This, however is just my perspective onto the video, Freddie Mercury being a gay man himself fully supported all rights in that respect and this seems to be the only logical solution.
However, as this kind of behaviour was looked down on even in the 80's it may have been a hidden message below the ridiculous idea that a man would want to change his body to be seen as a woman.
But in today's modern day society I see it as a way for people to break free as shown in the video, which I personally feel is a very noble thing to do by Freddie and as that I believe this video is worth the watch.


Including this in our preliminary task would have been interesting and effective for the audience especially for the time of the song release as being gay, bisexual etc. was frowned upon in the 60's and is only just becoming acceptable in today's society.
However, Dusty Springfield came out herself as lesbian, including this in our preliminary would have been an interesting thing to include purely for the audience effectiveness.
Unfortunately, we did not include this in our preliminary because our storyboard was already complete at this stage of the process.

Our preliminary Storyboard.

We decided to do the song 'Spooky' by Dusty Springfield, here is our storyboard we have created for this task. 

Our Preliminary Ideas.

We wanted to do something that wasn't mainstream or overdone, using the examiners tips from a guide he has given to students (Pete Fraser's steps to making a music video). He states not to do something that everyone does and to not copy the original music video used.
For this reason we chose a 60's song and a song without a music video, this will most likely create a good impression to the examiner, we are hoping to do something similar to this for our real task, maybe not 60's but nothing that anyone else is doing and make sure it's original.
We had original ideas about using a Whitney Housten song for our real thing, which we may do but we haven't fully decided on a final idea yet as we have all of summer to decide this.
Here is the song we have chosen for our prelim task.
For this we will use a plain back drop and a spotlight creating isolation on the singer so all eyes will be on her, we are going to try and wear 60's clothes and make up to give it that 'groovy' but unique style and we will attempt to get out hair into the iconic beehive do but it may be quite difficult. We are going to change the effect of the video into black and white to again bring the 60's feel in the video.

Textual analysis of Dusty Springfield's 'Son of a Preacher Man' & Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black'.

For our preliminary task we have chosen Dusty Springfield's 'Spooky'. Therefore looking at one of Dusty's other hit songs is beneficial for us based on the mise en scene, i.e. the costume,the backdrop & the makeup.

Dusty has the stereotypical beehive hair do, she wears long sweeping beads around her neck and a dress that's not fitted so it's straight down past her hips. Her make up is iconic and represents the 60's style, with winged eyeliner, big eyelashes and a bronzed face.

The backdrop is set in a jungle/somewhere with trees. It's not too distracting keeping the main focus on the singer and not on the backdrop.

For our video we need to try and get this look to make it seem like a 60's video. We have decided to go for a plain backdrop with a spotlight on the singer, almost making her isolated away from everything else.

In Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black' she uses similar effects and the mise en scene is almost identical to the iconic music video's from the 60's.
She has a beehive hair do, black winged eyeliner, big eyelashes & a slinky dress that fits straight down. In addition to all this she camera effect is in black and white making it have a 60's feel to it. We intend to do the same with our music video to Dusty's 'Spooky'.
The old car shown in the wide shot of the video proves the era the video is set in as them types of cars are very rare nowadays but were extremely popular in the 50's/60's. The two close up's in both Amy's and Dusty's videos show almost identical images of the two female artists.

4 Recommended Music Videos.

The song 'Hold Fast'- San Halo is an alternative dance song with a video which is fast paced with images in time with the beat. The video set seems very plain with a white cyclorama making it look very boring and depressing. There is a gallery set out, this creates voyeurism and makes it high brow because it is related to art and intelligence.



The song 'Robbers' - The 1975 is an indie slow ballad, some may class it as a pop or mainstream song. The video is classed as low brow in contrast because of they trashy image it's portraying. The video includes sex, drugs, baggy shirts, jeans cigarettes and mildly explicit images of breasts. The video almost glamourises the use of drugs.






The song 'Don't look down' - Martin Garrix is a dance/pop song, this is definitely classed as a mainstream song, it uses bright colours which makes the video seem upbeat and links with the theme of summer. There is humour within the video which makes it an easy watch for every viewer.


The song 'Riptide' - Vance Joy is an acoustic/ pop alternative song. The words in the video match the images that are seen on the screen, every time the word is repeated the same image is repeated like a montage of images.

Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer'. (mini textual analysis)

This video was probably one of the most complicated but unappreciated videos of the 80's.
Peter Gabriel spent hours of taking photos and montaging them together, there wasn't one shot of the video that was actual video footage, it was all just photos merged together to create a moving picture. Many people still don't know about this work of art , yet it is still (of 2011) MTV's number 1 played video EVER. It was produced by Adam Whittaker who funnily enough created Wallace and Gromit, yet again a huge success for photo montaging moving images. 
Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time.
This shows true dedication for a song to become globally well known and did he succeed? Of course he did. This amazingly inspirational music video would be really good to try and adapt or even attempt. However, the task we are being set is far too time limited to take on such a massive task, it is also very risky which isn't good if it goes wrong leaving no time for changes etc. 
Here is the great video that is 'Sledgehammer' by the wonderful 'Peter Gabriel'.