Music Video Media Studies Project: The Pre Production

Pre-Production

    When the project was assigned, our team was so excited to begin, yet a little nervous about the randomized genre that we would get (hoping we'd get anything but country), and thankfully we got "Throwback".

    This was quite confusing for us because it wasn't something we expected or had any clue what it meant. After speaking with our teacher about the definition, she mentioned how it was somewhat miscellaneous and that it was essentially songs that emulate old songs from different time periods, so our brainstorming began. We listened to each of our options multiple times, made a decision on which one we would be using for our music video, and then we found it would be most effective to think of any songs that had the same vibe as the songs given to us for the research aspect of our project.

Planning and Inspiration

    We wrote down some songs and inspiration and decided to take a step back from that section and now focus on the future production of our video so we discussed our schedules and set dates where we would all, or at least most of us, be able to film. We all came up with our own ideas and pitched them to each other. After some back and forth, a compromise was made and our idea was set. That was when we started listing the items needed, locations, wardrobe, actors, and an outline of the music video as demonstrated in the screenshot to the right. We created this google doc in order to keep ourselves organized throughout our pre-production and production processes of creating our project.

Storyboard

    Our next step was creating a storyboard and filling in our media research charts and so we decided the most efficient way to do this was to each give ideas for everything, however, each person in our group would write down one thing. With this process we were able to finish mostly in class, leaving more time to film at home. Our storyboard can be seen to the left with the time stamps for each cut since we decided to make our music video on beat with the song. 

Developing a Brand

    As we developed a brand for our artist and song, we did even more research on the genre, who the target audience is, what the target audience consumes, and what would be the best way to market ourselves in order to reach people who would enjoy this song. After debating it we realized that the audience would be a younger generation of teens who like the "vintage" energy and believe that they were "born in the wrong generation". Since the song we chose had an 80's vibe to it, we decided to keep the bright colors, highly saturated, fun theme and combined it with some modern choices in order to possibly reach some other audiences. 

    Overall, I believe our most beneficial aspect of the pre-production process was the research since due to its helpfulness, we were able to get inspiration for our project and a clearer picture of what we wanted; our planning definitely helped as well since our production phase of the music video has gone fairly smoothly so far.