Additional Research

As a group we chose to undertake some additional research, to ensure we could collect the most knowledge on our chosen artist, as this will help us to gain a greater understanding of the kind of things our target audiences would wish to see in our video, in relation to Jessie J.

One group member Amy Smith created an artist biography, detailing how Jessie J came to fame, and her previous work building up to her singing career. Below is a copy of the work Amy created for the Jessie J biography.

Jessie J - Biography.

Jessie J, real name Jessica Cornish, is originally from Seven Kings, Essex. Her first musical performance was at the age of 3 in a holiday camp where she forgot her words to 'Twinkle Twinkle'. She attended dance classes at the Wenn Stage school at the same age, where she started singing (the video below is of her playing Blousey Brown in Bugsy Malone) At age 11, she was cast in Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical of 'Whistle Down the Wind' where she played the part of Brat for two years.

After going through high school, and keeping her talent quite secretive, she attended the BRIT school at age 16. She studied musical theatre, exceeding in music, dance and drama, as well as doing the subject Art. While at BRIT school she joined a girl group as a campaign 'Mothers against guns.' They released a single called 'Why' which is about mothers speaking out for their children that have been shot. The video below is of the group, Soul Deep, singing their campaign song. 

After being in the girl group for two years, and recovering from a stroke when she was 18, Jessie was back singing again, and managed to get signed by Gut records, an independent record label. While she was with them she did support tours with stars such as Cyndi Lauper, Chris Brown and Girls Aloud. She was ready to release her first single 'Sexy Silk' and had an album ready. Unfortunately, the  record label went bankrupt before she managed to release anything. During the time she was there, she put up youtube videos of her singing to build her fan base. 

After Gut went bankrupt, Jessie had to run around and try and get herself signed before she lost all her music. After not being able to get signed in the UK, she went to the US and managed to get signed to Sony ATV as a songwriter. After writing hits such as 'Party in USA' for Miley Cyrus and 'I need this' for Chris Brown, she got signed to Island Records. Following the release of her first single, 'Do it like a dude' in 2010, she topped the BBC Sound of 2011 list and won the BRIT Critics' Choice award.

Her first number 1 was 'Price Tag' which was released in February 2011. Her debut album 'Who you are' was released shortly after Price tag and sold 105,000 copies in the first week, reaching number 2 on the iTunes album charts. Below is the album 'Who You Are'. 

Jessie's career has blown up following the release of another 5 singles: "Nobody's perfect, Who's laughing now, Who you are, Domino and Laserlight, all of which reached the top 10. This made Jessie the first British female solo artist to get 6 or more singles from one album in the top ten on the charts. 

Jessie became an ambassador for Comic Relief and shaved her hair off for charity on Red Nose Day. She helped raised 100,331,808.

In 2013, Jessie released her second studio album, called 'Alive.' Her first single, 'WILD' debuted at number 5 on the iTunes single chart. Jessie is currently working on a new version of the album Alive, which is the American version.

References; 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_You_Are_(Jessie_J_album)

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

http://www.rednoseday.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive_(Jessie_J_album)
http://youtube.com

                                                                                                                                                              

The next piece of additional research that was carried out is linking viewing theories with music videos. For this research Simran Takhar looked into Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze theory. Simran chose to create a prezi to depict the research into Laura Mulvey's theory of the Male Gaze. 

                                                                                                                                                               

For the last part of additional research, I carried out some investigation into the coming of pop music through the decades. All the way form the 1950's to modern day pop music, I decided to use Dipity to make a timeline that portrays the highs and memorable moments in the rise of pop music.

The coming of Pop Music on Dipity.

This activity was particularly useful, because it has given my group and I a greater understanding of why conventions are important to use, what kind of fans we are aiming our music video at, and how to create a music video relevant to the time period in which the song was made. This will impact our final music video, as it has allowed us to understand the importance of creating a music video that has all aspects of a pop music video that will please our target audience.

References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pop_music
en.wikipedia.org.wiki/1970s_in_music
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/billboard_hot_100
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_in_music
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_music
officialcharts.com/music_charts/

Final Treatment

Todays activity was to review our feedback and decide where changes need to be made. One of the main problems we realised, via peer feedback, is that Domino by Jessie J is not a song that has a narrative itself, so in turn it would be hard to create a video with narrative to a song with no narrative. Therefore as a group we have decided to focus more on performance in our music video. Below is an final version of our updated draft.

Final Treatment For Music Video

Outline of ideas

My music video will be focusing more on the performance of an artist during their music video, as opposed to a narrative concept. The video will open with our character who is representing the artist, performing her song (Domino) in what appears to be a studio. There will be a shot of perhaps studio lights turning on, to indicate the beginning of the song. As the intro to the song builds up, we will use a variety of shots, mainly close to the actor, that put emphasis on things such as make up, clothes, shoes and setting. 

As the lyrics begin the video will cut to the artist who will be lip syncing the song, the shot will be perhaps a mid shot that shows the top half of the artist and some of the location. The shot will change every time a new line is intorduced into the song. As the shot changes, so will the location, costume and possibly lighting. This will conform to pop music conventions as the shots will keep up with the pace of the song, making the video more enticing. 

For the stanzas just before the chorus, we will aim to make use of extreme close ups of facial features, particularly lips and eyes, to connote phallic imagery, which is conventional of pop music videos. 

As the chorus is introduced, as will a new location, for example when the start of the chorus comes is; 'rock my world into the sunlight, make this dream the best i've ever known...'. This location/costume change will often be referred to during the chorus parts of the song.

The character will continue to perform the song, dancing and lip syncing in rhythm with the beat of the song, up until the bridge. At this part of the song, the location will change to an unseen one yet. The setting will be low key lighting, so that the characters silhouette is emphasised. This footage will last for the most part of the bridge, interspersed with the shot fading in and out of black. This will connote that the bridge is a different tone to the rest of the song, and the song is likely to be ending soon. Toward the end of the bridge, the shots will speed up as the lyrics overlap. For example the lyrics include the note 'yeah' repeatedly over the top of the usual lyrics 'oh baby baby, got me feeling so right, oh baby baby dancing in the moonlight'. The shots will cut to the character lip syncing the bridge and the yeah's back and forth until the bridge is over.

The character will not lip sync the entire song, the shots of the character singing will be broken up with body shots, and shots of the character dancing.

After the bridge the speed at which the shots cut will increase, and all of the 'scenarios' will be used, and the cuts will include all the settings that have been seen so far, but thespeed at which they change will be considerably faster. This will indicate to the audience that the song is nearing the end.
As the video ends the character will lip sync the last lyrics, and will walk towards the camera and perform Jessie J's artist motif of pushing the camera away, before the video fades out the music and it fades to black.

During research I discovered that product placement in a music video is a typical pop music convention, thereore we will try to include some product placement in the music video, preferably at the start of the video.

Resources:
Technical equpitment - Tripod, camera, artificial lighting, Final Cut Pro (for editing) and a white screen for the character to perform in front of that will reflect the lighting.

Actors/Costumes - Actor to depict Jessie J, bright coloured clothes - mainly dresses or party clothes.

Locatons/settings - 'studio' setting, we will use our schoold 'oracy space' to film as it is well lit and big, yet also has a place where darker lighting may be used.

Justification for my ideas:

There are a number of reasons for chosing this concept. My group and I underwent a lot of research in order to determine what our target audience wanted to see in our music video. 49% of responses said they would like to see us remake the original domino video, which is total performance, so we will bear this in mind when making our video. A vast majority of our audience are aged 15-17, so this age group are more likely  to want to see a performance of their favourite artist as opposed to something more low key. Also when we asked our audience to describe Jessie J, some of the words we got back included; fun and confident, therefore this must be incorporated into our video. Although 70% of our audience said they would prefer to see narrative in a music video, we have as a group concluded that in order for the audience to enjoy our video as much as possible, we should keep with a perfomance based video. In further research we discovered that performance is a key convention in pop music videos, therefore this supports our desicion to create a performance based concept music video. When our target audience were asked what colour theme they would appreciate in a video of the pop genre, they suggested colours such as pink, purle, gold and blue, which is why we have decided to have a bright colour theme to add some colour to our lighting. 
                                                                                                                                                                   

This activity has taught me that it is important to get feedback on your ideas, as you may be blind to some flaws with your original ideas. Recreating this treatment has been useful, because it has given up a detailed guide to follow when we begin filming our music video.