Shoot preparation

Ahead of our shoots on Thursday and Friday this week, I have made a list of everything I individually need to bring to the shoots:

• All clothes + accessories for each shoot
• Makeup bag
• Pink blusher for Charley's hair
• Colourful socks for Josh
• Stool
• Paint trays x2
• Paint rollers x2
• Paint brushes
• Glitter (silver + gold)

Potential Outfits

As one of the band members it is important I get my costumes right. Here are some potential outfits I found for the performance part:

This outfit is quite glamorous, but I'm not sure if it's a bit too sequinny  - is it rocky enough? 

This outfit it more casual but with jewellery, the high heels and the short length with only tights, it is more dressed up. The black and white lips with fangs and blood are slightly gothic and quite rock-chic, and it could mean that I was the slightly more casual one who prefers retro-looking t-shirts to glitzy dresses.

These are the heels I am going to wear - suitably high, velvet, and grey which goes with everything.

Here is what I will wear for the painting scene - a baggy white t-shirt with a Marilyn Monroe print, navy dungarees, fishnet tights and the same grey heels

I will wear a black and white headband to complete the look.

Target Audience

By viewing the YouTube statistics for our song 'Stripper' on YouTube, I found that teenage girls were the most frequent viewers of this video. 

Because the song was used on Gossip Girl, this further proves this fact as the show's viewers are primarily teenage girls and young women.

Here is an average target audience member:

She is 17 years old and loves going to concerts and parties.
She listens to a mixture of pop and rock music, and listens to different radio stations depending on her mood, but mostly Radio 1.
She also loves fashion, and reading music and fashion magazines before ripping out pages and putting them on her walls to make collages; she is creative and easily inspired by music artists and fashion icons.
She is looking for a positive female role model in some of the music she listens to, but not necessarily someone as clean-cut as Taylor Swift, which is why she loves The XYZz- they are edgy but also relatable to girls her age, as she wishes she were in a band like they are.

Musical Influences

Now that we have decided that we are doing a female rock group, I have started to look into similar artists for comparison and inspiration.

The Veronicas

The Veronicas are an Australian duo made up of twin sisters Jessica and Lisa Origliasso. They are mostly classed as pop-rock, as well as electronic and pop-punk. This makes them a great band to compare with our potential band, as fellow female rockers.

Their website is quite girly, suggesting their core listener market, and is very interactive.

They also have an edgy, quite glam-rock look, similar to what we are going for.

Their album covers are,  in contrast, girly like their website, making them both edgy and feminine. They feature lots of pink and purple, plus lipstick marks. However, on 2 of the covers the girls themselves are shown dressing quite sexily, appealing to male listeners too, whereas their debut album (centre) is quite clearly aimed at girls, suggesting that they have matured throughout their career and possibly changed their image.

VersaEmerge

Although VersaEmerge are not a girl band, they do have a female lead singer so their sound is comparable. They are an American rock band currently consisting of vocalist Sierra Kusterbeck and guitarist Blake Harnage. It is hard to find entirely female rock groups, which is why I have chosen to look at VersaEmerge too, as most female-fronted bands, like them, tend to have male musicians. This is why we want to break the trend and create a band of girls who can play instruments.

Their live acoustic EP shows both members looking very cool and laid-back. Sierra looks attractive but isn't sexualised, and it is clear she has her own style.

Their debut album cover is very different and features artwork instead of the band themselves. This is a brave move for their debut, but shows that they are more focused on the music than their image, and the vulture is a reference to one of their song's lyrics. Although I like the way that the lack of photo means they seem to be all about the music, for our band I think image is very important as we are going for quite a strong look, and I think we should put ourselves on our debut album cover.

Here is the video for one of their singles, Fixed At Zero:

The video is entirely performance-based, but their is enough going on and the cinematography and mise-en-scene is exciting enough to make up for the lack of narrative. There are lots of close-ups of the musicians playing their instruments, a technique we will also use to show our hands playing guitar and bass. However, it is clear that the lead singer is the focus of the video, a common feature for bands, as we see lots of beauty shots of her and she gets most of the screen time. Her style and makeup is slightly gothic with heavy dark eye makeup, but she also looks pretty and quite glamorous, so girls will aspire to her yet she still looks attractive to males, especially those that prefer slightly less girly-looking girls with a more edgy style like Sierra Kusterbeck has. That is also an effect we intend to create with our girl band members.

Group Proposal

Ahead of pitching to the teachers with our treatment next week, we had a group meeting to develop our music video idea.

We are going ahead with our initial song choice - Stripper by Soho Dolls.


Listening to the song again, we decided the genre was more glam-rock with a hint of gothic-rock, so we started looking at styling for the group, as our video will feature a studio performance as well as a narrative.

We are going for the "glam-goth" look, so here are some inspirational pictures I like in particular that I think we should base our image on:

As you can see, I am taking inspiration from gothic styles but making it more grown-up, elegant and fashionable; this is what I think our band should look like.

Gender Representations - Females in Music Videos

We chose to look at feminist or empowering music videos that portray women in a more positive light than the typical rap/hip-hop videos where women are objectified and heavily sexualised.

In Paramore's Playing God video, the female singer (Hayley Williams) looks typically girly, with bright pink hair with a bow and a cute red dress. She is also carrying flowers and driving quite a feminine car - she is fulfilling the typical female stereotype. However, when she goes indoors it takes quite a sinister turn and we realise that she has the male members of the band tied up on the floor, giving her all the power and going against the stereotype of women as weak and vulnerable versus men as dominant and powerful. The fact that this one woman has been able to entrap three men, rendering them helpless, is empowering to women. This also keeps with their band image, as they are known as a male band with a feisty lead singer.

Jessie J's song is all about how girls can do whatever boys do, maybe even better. The video shows lots of women, including really good female dancers, dressing in masculine ways (but still looking cool and not completely androgynous). The women, especially Jessie J, look very aggressive and powerful, and they take control of the video. 

 

In No Doubt's song, Gwen Stefani is satirising how people think she is 'just a girl', patronising her. She is put into a separate room to her male bandmates, in a pretty, bright room with lots of flowers under the watchful eye of two female nurses. The men are put into a dirty, dull room with lots of instruments for them to play. Gwen is joined by other girls who play up to the stereotype by experimenting with lots of makeup, whilst the men make music, but in the end they all join up for one big party, showing how the whole gender divide is pointless and that they work much better together. Gwen is also dressed in a sporty, tomboy-ish way, breaking the stereotypical girly style.



Some women in music videos are empowering but still attractive, appealing to both male and female audiences.

This was a helpful topic for me to research as our coursework will involve a female rock group, meaning the way we portray women is very important. As girls, we definitely wouldn't want to show women in a negative light.