Brainstorm

As part of our research into the promo video, we decided, after watching and discussing pre-existing promo videos, to produce a brainstorm of ideas for our own music promo video. We looked for generic codes and conventions within the promo videos we watched, which we can use and apply to our own promo music video. These included iconography, types of shot's used, clothing, camera style and many more factor's which make a music promo video. Our brainstorm is below:

First of all, we looked at the style of camera. This is made up of the shot's used, the style in which still's are taken, the editing and the zoom used on particular shot's. We concluded that overall the shot's we majorly built up with still shots, with quick cut edits, and some more iratic shot's with quick cut edits. There were the occasional cross fade edit's, and some other shot's, but these were the primary shot's and edit's used. Slides were also used quite effectively to display information about the band's. An interesting edit was implemented in one of the videos, which was a fade into black and white from normal colour.

A generic convention used was switching between an interview with band members to shot's of the band in a recording studio, or to live footage of the band playing. This seemed to work very well. The opening sequence of the video often started off with the band logo on the screen, and then a number of slides with information about the band on, I.E date, recording studio name, name of the band etc, basic information a reocrd company might want/need to know. Sometimes this convention was implemented at the end of the videos too.

Secondly we looked at what effects certain conventions have apun their target audience. This will help us greatly when we create our's, as connecting to the audience and gratifying them is the main aim of producing one of these text's.

After looking at the style and feel of the video we decided to look at the iconography of the video's. Iconography is very important in any media text as it creates a sub-concious opinion of the text in the audiences mind. Choosing objects, clothing and locations is a very important tasks as they must coincide with the target audiences beliefs and values. With this in mind we looked for generic codes and conventions within the promo videos we analysed and documented the re-occuring conventions. These were : Guitars, Amps, Drums, Mics, Studio equipment, Jeans, T-shirts and occasionally alcohol and ciggarettes. These iconic images and objects will be included in our promo video.

A generic convention which we picked up on was the use of slided at the start and end of the videos. By this we mean a screen with block colour, with writing on it, which normally had information about the band, such as the band name, band member's etc. Some slides at the start of the video had quotes about the band. The slides at the end of videos was normally when they plan to release their album or when they are doing gigs etc.

A convention used in nearly every music promo video was having the bands music playing in the background, which quietened down a lot when the band members were being interviewed, and was made very loud when they cut into studio and live shot's.

Quite a few videos has images of the band cuting in at points as well.