Planning the location

In Justin Timberlake's music video he had a very nice big house and a flashy car in the scenes which made his video look posh and classy. So we decided that we wanted to stay along the same lines as this, by making our video look classy as this would make the video look more professorial if the mise-en-scene was appealing.
I wanted the video to look colourful and pretty so that it would make the video look more attractive to the audience as mise-en- scene is a very important thing when constructing music video's. The water gardens in Harlow Town Centre looked like a beautiful place to film, so we decided that we are going to start the music video with some footage from that area. Also, there is water and ponds there which is a bonus because at the start of the music video you hear the sound of rain.

We might shoot some night scenes here because when it gets dark, the water gardens light up with beautiful lights.

 Justin Timberlake did not really really re-in force the idea of stereotypes so we are going to try and identify this in our video through our location. We are going to have two young black character's acting out the main  parts in the video and there is the stereotype that black people or people from an ethnic background are not as wealthy as other races. So In the video, we are going to try and show the couple in deprived, run-down places so that it gives a negative representation and makes the audience think that they hardly have any money. The mix-raced character who is the dancer, will be shown in  more  nice places and his scenes will be very colourful to show the difference between white and black races.


Another location which I thought would be beautiful to film some scenes at was outside the playhouse in Harlow. This is a nice location because the council have recently just invested in different colored lights to shine against the wall in the evening,
We decided that we would film some parts in a bedroom as we need a place to show some good times of where the couple used to chill and the bedroom is a popular location for couples.

Research- Christina Aguilera

Christina Aguilera's music video 'Cant hold us down' Featuring Lil Kim is a similar genre to Justin Timberlake. The video relates to Andrew Goodwin's Theory because there is a relationship between the lyrics and visuals. Christina is speaking about how men do not respect women and how men think that women should be seen not heard. It is an attack on the double standard in society where men are praised for their sexual prowess while women with the same habits are looked down upon. She tries to get women to stand their ground and to not let men hold them down. So the lyrics and visuals link together because in the video, she gathers all of her female friends together to have a dance off with the males. The females give a lot of attitude to the males to show that they are brave, powerful women. Although, the visuals do contradict the lyrics as Christina and Lil Kim are wearing very little clothing, but yet, she expects men to treat her with respect. If she wants to be treated with respect, then she could possibly have worn more appropriate clothing.


The video uses various voyeuristic treatment of the female body. This helps to attract the male audience.
Voyeurism is also used in favor of the women. there are appealing shots of the males as well as the females.



This shot is a close up of the one of the main singers. This shows the emotion of anger on her face. This can also be voyeurism as the singer is wearing minimum clothing.

This is an R&B song, with elements of hip hop and dance-hall  The genre characteristics are shown through clothing. The females are dressed quite 'hood' wearing a lot of jewellery, hooped earrings and tight revealing clothing.

The characters are in a sub-urban area surrounded with various different black ethnic groups.

Research- Craig David.

Criag David is a similar artist to Justin Timberlake because the both produce a similar genre of music which is pop and RnB. I will be analysing Craig Davids video 'Seven Days' using Andrew Goodwin's theory to see how it does and does not relate to his theory.

In the song, Craig is speaking about when he met a woman on the way to meeting his friend. He talks about all the things that he would do with the woman on each of the seven days of the week. He met her on Monday, took her for a drink on Tuesday, they were making love by Wednesday, till Thursday, Friday and Saturday then they'd chill on Sundays. There is a link between the lyrics and visuals as the video shows Craig's journey through out the day. The video shows him talking to his friends in the Barbers, and the lyrics have questions in them as though he is speaking to his friends. This is what I mean by questions in the song >>> 'What was the deal? A pretty girl aged 24. So was she keen? She couldn't wait. Cinnamon queen? let me update.'

The video uses many close ups of the Craig David to establish who the main singer is. 

Multiple close-ups were used to put emphasis on Craig's facial expressions.

Voyeurism is also used towards the end of the video. This helped to attract the male attention a bit more as there were not many voyeuristic scenes in the rest of the video.

The lyrics link to the visuals as Craig talks about when he meets a lady, and the events that happened on his way to meeting her. So the video shows Craig as he goes through the journey of his day. It shows him waking up, going to the barbers and talking to his friends, meeting the woman and the different events that happened whilst he met the woman.






The genre characteristics are shown through the background of the scenes. The artist is in his local barbers a lot having chats with his guys. This gives the audience an idea that this is an urban type of video.

How I intended on targeting my audience

My target audience is aimed at young people aged around 16-27. The reason that I have chosen this age group is because Justin Timberlake produces a mixture of pop and R'n'B songs and young people normally listen to a lot of pop music. This song has a good upbeat rhythm and the words are very catchy, so I think that this will entice the audience to listen for longer and it will allow them to catch onto the song. This music video will attract the male and female audience. It reinforces stereotypes by showing that it is not mainly men that cheat, but women are also capable of cheating as well.

Firstly, I intend on targeting my audience by having a lot of different cuts. This will make the video more interesting for the audience to watch as the scenes will seem more action packed. Young people tend to have a lower attention span than older people, so this will help to keep the audience interested in the video so that they do not stop watching or occupy themselves by doing other things. Secondly, I will try to have a lot of dancing scenes to make the video entertaining to watch as it can be boring for viewers sometimes to just watch the same old people singing on camera.

We have established the idea of genre characteristics in our music video. We have have chosen to use a male and female for the main scenes, followed by a male dancing as this gives the video more of a Rn B/ urban look as the character will be hip-hop dancing.
We are also going to use a link between the lyrics and visuals. We will  do this by making the characters act out the things that the singer is singing about.

Justin Timberlake's Music Video

In Justin's song, he is singing about his ex- girlfriend Britney Spears who had cheated on him. In the song, their relationship ended after she cheated and he was very hurt, so to get his own back on her, he recorded a video with him and another girl having relations so that his ex could find out that he has moved on with his life. The girl gets upset and 'cries a river' because he makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with her anymore and she realises that she has made a big mistake and lost Justin forever.

For our music video we have decided to do something along the same lines of Justin's video by showing a couple who are in a happy relationship, but then the girl cheats on him, he finds out from his friend and he then dumps her.We will portray this by showing happy times of the couple together at the beginning, then revealing her meeting another boy in the middle, and then having the girl begging for forgiveness and saying that shes sorry at the end.

Lighting Problems

As it is winter time and it gets dark very quickly, every time we managed to make it to the ideal location of which we wished to film at, it would be dark. As a result to this, some of the scenes in our video are quite dark and you could hardly see our character. So we have had to film most of the shots again in the daytime; so this has delayed us a little bit. My partner did want to just use the scenes anyway and try to edit them to make them brighter, but unfortunately that did not work as this just made the whole screen turn a bit white and the contrast was not very good quality. Also, if we did choose to use the dark scenes then when we had finished making the video I don't think the quality would have been very good as it just would have turned out very distorted.
Although, this is going to delay us, I am happy that we have to film it again as this will enable the video to be more of a higher quality.


We have decided to film some of the scenes of our video inside- which was not our original idea as we wanted to film outside. Mise-en-scene is very important when filming, so after thinking of where to shoot so that we have a nice background we came across these boards which are used to create different scenes in drama.

 

As it is too dark outside, the brick wall is the closest thing I could find to the outside. As the song is called 'Cry Me A River' I think that having rain in the video will suit the title of the title of the song, so after the video has been taken, when I am editing it i can then add water/rain effects to this background to make it look more artificial. 

 

 

 

 

 

Change Of Plans

When we was researching similar artists to Nelly Furtado, we found Justin Timberlake. So we listened to one of his songs which was called ' Cry me a river' and decided that this would be a more fun and interesting video to record instead. As it is winter time, we thought that the song would suit the weather at this time because it was raining quite a lot. The artists which are similar to Justin Timberlake would be artists such as Neyo, Christina Aguilera, Daniel Beddingfield, Craig David and JC Chasez. Craig David is quite similar to Justin Timberlake as they are the same age and both have various different collaborations with different artists.

This music video will be targeted at a young audience aged from around 15-27. I think that the video will target this audience as they are young and experiencing relationships, so they may have been heartbroken before or can relate to the song as most young girls normally have crushes at these ages. I intend to target this group by making the video look quite attractive by having some colourful scenes in the video and to make the characters in the video young so that they can be similar to the age group of the target audience. I also intend to have some dancing to make the video more interesting to watch so that the audience doesn't get bored of watching the same thing for a long period of time. The song is quite a sad song so the video is going to be a bit emotional. Young people tend to have a shorter attention span than adults, so by having scenes with dancing in it, hopefully it will enable my target audience to be able to focus on the video for longer.