R+P Post 25: Costumes, props and make-up

Our costumes and make-up will hopefully connote the genres of UK R&B/garage and house music that our song falls into. We have attempted to make the costume for the singer and the extras on location based around casual, streetwise clothing that is popular primarily in the UK, with brands such as Adidas and Nike. The costume for the DJ is based off of what the most popular and influential DJs wear, and it is fairly similar to the rest of the costumes - it's usually streetwise and dark in colour. The only major addition is headphones, which seem to be omnipresent among DJs.

Our final costume is shown below:

Our props are different depending on whether we are shooting on location or in the studio. On location the only specific prop we need to use is a phone, for several shots as part of the narrative section of the video. In the studio we are planning to use:

-A sofa, as this will give the video a casual look and is also more interesting than just having the singer sing in front of a coloured background.
- A table, soundboard and laptop for the DJ, as this will make him seem professional and also connote that he is a DJ to the audience straight away.

R+P Post 24: Planning my digipak panels

To plan our digipak panels we took our inspirations and I drew up some designs based on them.

This is the sheet showing all of our initial ideas for the cover of the digipak. We decided before we started that the design would focus on the lead singer of the duo.

These designs were inspired by the covers of Adele's albums, which have tasteful black and white photographic portraits of Adele's face on their covers. However, we decided this didn't fit with our more electronic genre, so we discarded this idea.

This is an idea we liked much more, as it shows the singer and the DJ, which signifies the genre much better. We also like the idea of the artists standing back to back, although we are thinking of having this position be photographed in a way where the singer is facing more towards the camera, with the reverse image on the back cover which would focus more on the DJ. 

This is a demonstration of this idea, although the image above is a design for the inside of the digipak.

When we asked our target audience which of these designs they preferred they said they liked the idea of having the female singer, as the main draw of the act, having a portrait on the cover, and they also liked the idea of having the back cover being more focused on the DJ.

R+P Post 23: Planning my web pages

We designed our website pages using hand-drawn documents, and using the inspiration from several different existing websites.


We first asked our target audience what they usually looked for on websites for artists, and the main areas that came up were a merchandise shop, information about the artist and tour dates.

Based on this and websites we had looked at for other artists, we have planned our website to have 6 distinct sections, a home page, a page for the music of Cruze, a tab on the status of the duo's current tour, an about section giving information on the artists individually, a merchandise shop and a tab labelled 'More' that will contain news about the artists, as well as a picture gallery and information about Nimbus records. We also worked on finalising our ideas about what to put on the merchandise available in the web store, where we decided to mainly focus on putting the logo on various items of clothing and accessories.

Our website was inspired by the websites of artists like Rihanna and Ariana Grande, which we thought were intuitively designed and easy to navigate. Ariana Grande's website is linked in the image below, click to access it:

R+P Post 22: Planning my promo shots

Our promo shots will be a mix between studio shots and location shots, and will be used on our digipak artwork and website. Our ideas are for shots that focus on the singer primarily, but also contain some focus on the DJ. We are planning for the location based shots to be spontaneous and casual, in order ot maintain a gritty, independent feel. We have planned out the studio shots in more detail.

This image shows the final position we want the singer and DJ to stand in on the cover, and also shows some of the coloured backgrounds we are thinking of adding in during post-production.

This image and the image below it are some ideas we have for other shots we would like to get in the studio.

R+P Post 21: My key shots storyboard

Our storyboard was a vital tool in our planning process, as it was the first time that we were really able to visualise our project and compare each others visions of the video.

Our storyboard was created mainly to show the different set-ups we want to use in the studio and for the narrative shots on location.

It was really helpful to make a storyboard, as it was the first time I had thought about the framing of my video, which is a vital element any music video. It also helps you to really get a feel how the video will look when it's finished.

From our research we realised that most music videos use extreme framing that switches quickly between intense close-ups any long shots, contrary to the general rules of film. We tried to emulate this in our storyboard, as it makes a video much more exciting and attention-grabbing.

This close-up shows a specific shot we have planned for the location shoot of the video, included here to give an idea of the individual detail of each post-it note.

R+P Post 20: My Music Video Timeline

A very important element to our planning process was the music video timeline, which made us think about the structure and timing of our music video and about how the lyrics might affect the video.

The whole timeline. There are two main parts to the timeline, the lyrics in the bottom third and the timestamps/ specific shots in the rest. 

This 

R+P Post 19: My influences and vision for the project

To show our influence and vision for the music video, we produced this video made up from clips from other music videos to try and show what shot types, locations and moods we are going for.



Some of these shots feature effects we want to emulate in our own video, such as the cycling coloured lights at 0.19 in the video, and the projected background idea shown at 0.24. The urban locations seen at 0.26 and 0.11 are the kind of places we want to shoot in, and putting this video together showed me how effective shooting on location can look. It also made me consider costume, and about how it should fit with the surroundings.

My vision in summary is to make a video which takes these familiar elements from garage and R&B music videos and transforms them into something which is stylish, confident and cool, that will appeal to our target audience of R&B fans and young people.