Letter for copyright.

Dear Sir/Madam, 


I am writing to you to request to use 'When We Were Young' by Adele for my A2 Media Studies coursework production. 


Our task is to make a music video to an existing song. The song will be for non-profit educational purposes and only used for the purpose of educational assessment and will be transformative in that no copyrighted material (other than the song) will feature in the final music video. Furthermore, it will be clearly labelled as a production for this purpose. 


I hope that this request will be viewed by yourselves as fair and proper use under existing copyright guidelines. If you have any further questions regarding its purpose, please contact my teacher at welchch@tuptonhall.derbyshire.sch.uk 


Yours sincerely, 

Charlotte Howes.

Deciding on our audience.

This explains how we narrowed our target audience down and how we feel it's the most appropriate selection of people without being stereotypical or offending anyone by our decision.

Style of our video.

We originally decided to do an Ella Henderson song, 'Beautiful Unfinished'. We were undecided about the style of video with this, we knew we wanted it black and white but apart from that we were completely unaware of how we would style the video.

However, we changed the song to Adele's, 'When We Were Young'. This gave us a huge range of ideas for the mise en scene and camera angles especially. We felt, as the song was about memories and love we should reinforce this within our video. We knew we wanted to create an old fashioned style to our video, including footage of an older couple and a young couple showing the footage/memories they've made together.

This meant we could turn some footage sepia if we wanted to, to make it more effective for an audience to watch. The film would look something like this picture below. It shows the couple are in love and reinforces the idea of the footage being old even if it was actually new footage. To give this effect we will use Premier Pro or Photoshop giving it a vintage look to it.

The song and our ideas.

The song we have decided to do for our music video is When We Were Young by Adele. Obviously, we understand how popular Adele is which could make it harder to reach the standard of Adele's previous music videos but as of yet, Adele is still to make a video for this song so we have nothing to feed off for ideas which is useful as the mise en scene won't be influenced and our ideas will be our own and not based on her original ideas. She has one live recorded studio video which some may class as the music video but is still only footage of Adele singing on her own and nothing to work with again which is useful for us as it gives us chance to be creative with our song.

We feel that the song is all about remembering the past and capturing moments that you'd like to hold onto forever. To create an effective video we feel it's all about angles and shots to make the audience feel emotional. We have incorporated my nan and grandad to look at old photos of each other and used over the shoulder shots to show them looking at each other. We also feel that the mise en scene for this will be good as it's filmed in their home which will generally have an old fashioned theme running through it which also links into the idea of them looking to at the past and re-living.

We decided to include some photo projections, to give it an old photo feel this includes cracks within the pictures and sepia look to the pictures, it also makes the audience again feel involved within the family and feel as if they are included within the photos, looking back together.

We have decided to use Emily within our video in addition to this to show how it's a new generation and how time has passed. It could be interpreted that Emily is a younger representation of my nan within the video which would link well to the whole idea of love and relationships.

Here is the live version of Adele's - When We Were Young.

Storyboards.

At first we began to story board our music video and our ideas. We knew that we wanted the opening to be filled with photographs and memories to highlight how important to message of our video is, to always value the memories you have with someone. However, we knew that we wanted a singing spot for 15 bars of the music and it would be similar shots throughout so we were hesitant to draw this as it would be similar drawings throughout.

We knew the amount of time we wanted for each section. We want the performance to be near the beginning and occasional shots within and footage of memories and photos throughout the video will keep occurring. However, as we didn't know exactly what this would look like we were reluctant to drawing/writing it down so that if it didn't look exactly alike we at least knew in words what we wanted to do.

As Adele is yet to create a music video for 'When We Were Young' it is easy to create our own ideas without 'copying' her ideas and her style. There is one live recording/video of Adele at the studios. We don't intend to 'steal' this idea but we do feel it's important to include some lip syncing moments within the video, because of this we are including some performance clips where Emily will take on the roll as Adele and lip sync some of the song. This will take place mostly at the beginning of the song.





As of yet, this is the most storyboarding we feel necessary as we ourselves are still unsure of what we are filming. We know we would like over the shoulder camera angles focusing on old images and footage. We also know that we would like to film in an older generations home so the mise en scene shows an old fashioned look. However, we are still unsure exactly where and who we are filming.

Inside Booklets for CD's.

We looked through several CD booklets to see what was included i.e. pictures, messages from the artist, lyrics and more.
These examples could inspire mine and Emily's CD booklets depending on the theme and genre we go for, for our booklet. Our singer is simple and plain so we don't want anything that's lacking in uniqueness we want something unusual and hopefully shocking for the artist and the songs featured on the album. This way it allows the buyer to see that although the music is quite acoustic and plain the meaning and the way the singer wants to be presented is deeper and more intense than originally thought.