Gwen through the ages.

'It was such a turning point to find that I had a talent and I had something to contribute, somewhere.'- Gwen Stefani

In 1986 a band was founded that catapulted Gwen Stefani into a world of Celebrities and the rock star lifestyle. No doubt weren't an instant success and it wasn't until the 90's that they really started to make waves. With hits such as 'I'm just a girl' and 'Hey baby' and the band stayed strong, until 2003 when Gwen made a suprise decision to go solo,
'I never for one minute thought that I'd go solo.'
Gwen had an eight year relationship with band member Tony Kanal, with a break up that inspired the songs 'Dont speak.'
Now a solo artist Gwen, determined to make it big collaborated with stars such as Eve for 'Let me Blow your Mind', Akon for Sweet Escape, Pharrell for 'Can I have it like that' and Damien Marley for 'Now that you got it' and has since released Two Albums L.A.M.B(2004) and Sweet Escape(2006.) In 2002, Gwen married band member of Bush, Gavin Rossdale. Gavin already had a daughter, Gwen's Step daughter, Daisy Lowe with British fashion designer Pearl Lowe. They have been married for 7 years and have two children, Kingston,3 and Zuma,1.
'I remember when I was in school, they would ask, ''What are you going to be when you grow up?'' and then you'd have to draw a picture of it. I drew a picture of myself as a bride.'

Other Projects

The album Cover L.A.M.B (Love Angel Music Baby) inspired many new projects. The four Harajuku girls that Gwen brought over from Japan are her backup dancers that she constantly has with her when it comes to music, in her videos and on her tours. She gave them new names; Love, Angel, Music and Baby, referring to her Album title.
L.A.M.B is also the name of Gwen's popular Clothing, Shoe and Accesory range and her newest product Perfume. She has branched out from being just a singer and it has paid off, as Gavin and Gwen were in the top 20 forbes list of Richest celebrity couple in the past years.
In 2005 she expanded her collection with the less expensive 'Harajuku Lovers' line, which she referred to as "a glorified merchandise line" products include cameras, mobile phone charms and underwear at affordable prices.
'L.A.M.B. is a fashion line that - fingers crossed - will just get more and more sophisticated. What's different than what's out there is the way I put things together. And, if you look inside the pants, you'll find secret details in there.'
The newest result of the 'Harajuku Lovers' range is the perfume in bottles shaped like herself and the four harajuku girls them self with their L.A.M.B names and her own being 'G.'.

Gwens Appearance

Gwen Stefani has made a lot of changes through the years. She has gone from a band member to a successful solo artist, she has gotten married and become a mother, but the most severe change is her appearance. It may be due to the constant media coverage of her and the pressure on her to fit in but Gwen Stefani changed from a geeky, pink haired, braced Individual to a glamorous, chic lady. Before anybody could influence Gwen on her style she seemed to have an air of ‘I Don’t Care!’ about her and chose to wear whatever she wanted. But nowadays it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between her and all the other clone celebrities, with blonde hair and flawless make-up. However she has still kept her own twist to her style and is often seen in something outrageous to remind us that she is still as kooky as she ever was!

Storyboarding again...

We continued our storyboard drawings today and we still haven't finished but we have made great progress but we did discuss the ways in which we will continue with storyboarding and hoping to stick at the same level as we have maintained so far.

Location, Location, Location.

The setting is almost equally important as costumes and although most of the video will be filmed in domestic situations there will be scenes outside of that. We decided as a group that those places should be specific for the characters;

The gym would be a good location for the 'Hunk' as it is a place for show off's, and since he is supposed to be arrogant- strutting his stuff in the gym seems appropriate.


The Geeky guy gets to go to the library since that is the image mostly associated with geeks in the media so the audience would relate to this setting.


And where else for the 'Goth' then what could be considered goth central- Camden. Its where you are most likely to find a heavy eye-liner-ed, dressed in black goth/emo and it would be foolish not to put our goth character there.

Costume Design.

We have looked at the costumes for the four main characters; The Girl and the three dates as they will be important if we want to get their image across. We discussed how they would have to be quite stereotypical when it comes to the date to make sure that there is a noticeable difference between the guys.
Reena Chadee came up with these character montages;

For the Girl;
'Through the study of semiotics, the personality of this character is apparent. This is shown by her casual clothing which reflect her cool attitude. Moreover, like a majority of female teenagers it is obvious that this character is interested has interests in fashion. '

For the 'Goth' Guy (me);
'This character pursues the role as a punk. The black garments embrace connotations expressing a sinister appearance. On the other hand, the heavy make up acts a disguise which suggests that the this character is not confident.'

For the 'Geeky' Guy;
'This character would be categorised as the 'geek'. This is because of his old-fashioned style, which mirrors his personality and lifestyle. Nevertheless, these traits change throughout the video as he is motivated to be more confident, hence the Superman costume.'

For the 'Hunky' Guy;
'At a first glance this character appears to be similar to the female protagonist, this is because of their fashionable clothing and modern style. However, the various designer items have connotations of an arrogant attitude.'

Whose in it?

The decision of who is going to be in our video is based on factors such as; the ability to stay in role for a long period of time, availability, and general image but then also we have decided that as a group we should all make cameos in it, with that in mind and the fact that the characters should be aged between 10 to 19 in order to relate to the audience this is the list of characters;

1. Female - Reena Chadee

2. Boy Date (Punk) - Me- Robyn Oliver

3. Boy Date (Hunk) - Mike

4. Boy Date (Geek) - Krishna Mootoosamy

5. Young Boy- Cameron

6. Devil- April Mckay

7. Screaming Girl- Laura Fredericks

Even More Storyboarding...

Now we have the timings for our video we needed visuals, by using a storyboard template we began drawing the 'Blink182' and 'Powder' inspired beginning.
As a group we have decided that any information relating to the camera angles, movements, transitions and timings should be written last just in case we decide to make changes, it will be a lot simpler to change them if we haven't got them recorded for permanent referral.

The storyboarding continues...

We have finished the outline of the storyboard, so now we know exactly what is going to be filmed for our video, obviously allowing for changes, since we have already made minor changes to the plans we did yesterday.
Here is the rest of the timings;

The storyboarding begins...

With a lot of random ideas our group discussion started as a mess of everyone's personal opinions of what should be in the video, it didn't seem like an effective way of getting our storyboard done so we decided that we should go through the song and decide what should be happening in measure of seconds so that we have accurate and precise shots.
By doing this we know exactly what should be filmed for every second of the video, however it is a very tedious job and it takes a long time to go through a 3-4 minute song second by second.
Here is what we have done so far;


We will continue and hopefully finish the storyboard when we meet tomorrow. (20/10/09)

Further inspiration for our video.

Blink 182- Always
This video constantly is changing images, splitting up into three parts and showing three versions of nearly the same story but just with a different guy each time.
This would be a good idea for when we want to show the three dates that the female character goes out with to show how different they are, for example; concentrating on the Goth's lip piercing or on the Gangster's heavy jewellery to get their own personal identity across and to allow the audience to recognise the characters.
The actual video has a similar idea to ours as well, since there is one girl and three guys and they are all in the 'same' situation, however the song is a lot more negative then our song and the point of view of the narrative is from a male which is the opposite to ours.

Inspiration for our video.

Powder- Up here.

This video is very 'Superhero' themed, the band are dressed up and in character as they're own personalised superhero with special outfits and stereotypical features of heroes. However its not very relevant to our 'Superman' video as we plan on having realistic situations and we are going to follow the narrative.
Apart from the last scene where the boy is reading the comic book, as a group we liked this idea and want to use it in our video.

Superman by Barrie Gledden Lyrics.

The lyrics to our song are as follows;

He struts his stuff like his the Mac daddy,
He's one of a kind, invincible and ready,
To take on the world, He's got sex appeal
The man is a dream, the devil did him a deal,

Unstoppable, incredible, irresistible and powerful,
The one and all number one,
He's Superman [superman], he's Superman,

That man's got style, that man's got flare,
Try to compete, oh don't you dare,
He's got the moves, he makes me shiver inside,
And he knows it, yeh he knows it,

Unstoppable, Incredible, Irresistible and Powerful,
The one and all, number one,
He's Superman [superman], he's superman,

He struts his stuff like his the Mac daddy,
He's one of a kind, invincible and ready,
To take on the world, He's got sex appeal
The man is a dream, the devil did him a deal,

That man's got style, that man's got flare,
Try to compete, oh don't you dare,
He's got the moves, he makes me shiver inside,
And he knows it, yeah he knows it,


Unstoppable, Incredible, Irresistible and Powerful,
The one and all, number one,
He's Superman [superman], he's superman,

Superman[superman]
Ehhhhhhhhhhh
C'mon Superman [superman]
Yeah he knows it [superman]
He knows it [superman]

Superman by Barrie Gledden.

The song we have chosen is called Superman by Barrie Gledden. After looking through a suggested website for a song that the whole group liked we decided on this catchy, rocky girl ballad. We liked the Lyrics and we all had great ideas that we could use in our video to make it humorous and fun as the lyrics are very metaphorical and exaggerated.


As a group these are some of our initial ideas for our video, all different features that we thought would go with the narrative;

* Female looking for the right boyfriend.

* She goes on dates with a number of different boys from punks, to gangsters to
geeks, in the same restaurant, at the same time on different days!

* The scene in the restaurant remains the same but the boys change, and the
roses seem more wilted in each scene.

* But of course she chooses the best looking boy, but he ends up to be the most
big headed boy, and doesn’t really care about her.

* However, the Geek that she dated really likes her and is the ‘real superman’.
(He is seen in the background of most scenes wearing a baggy superman t-shirt)

* As the video goes on, the geek appears to be better looking.

* The girl begins to notice him again.

* After a number of awful dates with her new boyfriend she is bored and leaves
him, he doesn’t care as he is too busy looking at himself.

* Finally she gets with ‘Superman’!

* I also want the video to also include animated shots, which have been
influenced by legendary comics and Superman cartoons. For example, speech
bubbles and signs that stress the sounds.

Lily allen: LDN

The 24year old Pop singer Lily Allen has had several number 1's and a whole bunch of top 10 records. She's not only famous for her singing, she temporarily had a talk show, she designed a clothing range for New Look called 'Lily Loves...' and has recently launched an expensive jewellery range. Her comments about other celebrities means that she is rarely out of the newspapers and her feud with Katy Perry has made her reputation as outspoken and not afraid to speak her mind grow even bigger.




Her videos often reflect her 'gobby' persona, In this video for her song LDN the narrative is of her on her way to meet up with her friend and the way that her happiness distorts her image of London.

'When you look with your eyes
Everything seems nice
But if you look twice
you can see it's all lies'

CLC : Garage Band Training.

The whole class visited the City Learning Centre for a training course on the Apple Mac programme 'Garageband'. We were taught how to make music from all different genres, how to add several instruments and vocals to make a song. We used pianos that were connected to the Mac computers and all made our individual song with our own loops or ones that have already been stored in 'Garageband.' Overall I think that we all learnt skills that will help us to make a song that we are all happy with and are willing to make a video to.



http://www.centralenfieldclc.org.uk/

Choosing a song.

Before finding out that we had to use a song that had no copyright or write and make our own song, we picked songs that we would have liked to have used. They are;

Save the World get the girl by The King blues;


And
The Day I Died by Just Jack;

I think the appeal of both songs is that they both have a narrative meaning that the video would be relating to the song and in The King Blues video it would have been fun to make as the lyrics are jokey and things that could be filmed easily. The video above isn't the official video but it is entertaining because the pictures reflect the words.

Questionnaire.

As a group we have composed a Questionnaire that includes questions on image of Album covers and personal views on what attracts them to a video and what puts them off completely. We will give the questionnaire to 20 randomly selected people. The answers to this questionnaire will help us when it comes to making decisions about our album cover and video.

Genre.

In our group there are a wide range of music types so for our music video we needed a Genre that we all agreed on. After a discussion about what genre our favourite singers/bands fall under our group decided on the Genre 'Pop-Rock.'

Pop-Rock is a mix of pop music and rock music utilizing a catchy pop style with light lyrics, and (typically) guitar-based songs. There are varying definitions of the term, ranging from a slower and mellower form of rock music to a sub genre of pop music. Scholars have noted that pop and rock are usually depicted as opposites; the detractors of pop often deride it as a slick, commercial product, less authentic than rock music.

Some examples of artists in the Genre Pop-Rock are;
2000's;
Pink
Metro Station
Avril Lavinge
Paramore
The Veronicas
Kelly Clarkson
Boys Like Girls

1990's;
Blink 182
Green Day
Robbie Williams
Alanis Morissette
Shakira
No Doubt

Media A2. The Media A2 coursework involves three tasks they are;

Main Task- Produce a music promotional video.
Task Two- Produce a website homepage for the band.
Task Three- Produce a CD/DVD cover for the release of album as part of a digipak.

This blog is the alternative to last years Scrapbook and will contain all details to the development of these tasks.