Group Meetings: Intro and Early Stages

We meet as a group twice a week after school, for two hours each time, totaling 4 hours a week, allowing us to share ideas and make progress on our project outside the standard amount of lesson time. We discuss the stage we are currently at in the project, from researching videos and artists inspiring our ideas to forming consensus on what type of artist and video we aspire to have, then set an agenda and act on it. Anything we don't finish in meeting time we subsidise using break and lunchtimes, plus occasional shared free periods.

This post will roughly lay out the process and content of meetings, whilst separate individual posts will highlight the details of our resulting decisions.


During the latter weeks of September to mid October we got our ideas down to pitch and hopefully get approval of them from our teachers. We focused on creating an animatic, a steal-o-matic, and making 4 key decisions:

• Artist
• Record Label
• Audience
• Track

Track
We had finalised our track before completely breaking down our ideas for audience, record label, and artist, although we had a decent idea of audience as our group would be considered part of it. We knew the type of sound we wanted (see early ideas and inspirations post) so to decide, we listened to a series of songs, and pitched the best handful with our teachers.


Record Label


Having a general idea that we would have similar music, branching off slightly into related genres, we researched other labels and who they had signed on.

Some evidence of our meetings on record labels, written out on A2 paper plus logo design progress on A4:

 

Artist

We researched similar artists and identified a good gap in the market:

Audience

We spent some time brainstorming sections of our audience, looking at consumption habits and listening tendencies

Steal-o-matic

We researched videos that could inspire us while creating this at the same time - we browsed 'related' music videos on YouTube, 'favouriting' ones with parts we liked, and put the individual parts onto a Premiere Pro timeline.


Animatic

Similar to above but without spending meeting time on finding what we wanted to include as we had already decided. Some time was spent taking photos and finding photos on the internet to represent parts eg some of our narrative.

Creating a storyboard in one meeting gave us the ability to move shots around and plan an initial planned order. The key at the bottom and colour-coordinating our shots on post-it made it visually obvious if we they were two repetitive in shot type/distance prior to making it.


This leads on to the next stage - planning for our actual shoots