Coldplay - Strawberry Swing Analysis

Coldplay’s stop motion masterpiece was filmed in LA with the mise-en-scene drawn on concrete floors to provide a background. The video opens with the producers drawing the set on their hands and knees and moving around to draw the full mise-en-scene. This technique immediately breaks what is known in the drama industry as the ‘fourth wall’ – allowing the audience explicit insight to the making of the set, connoting a sense of authenticity and genuineness.

Performer Chris Martin is positioned lying in bed, which is greater in proportion to his action figure sizing. The protagonist, all in stop frame motion, gets out of bed and walks downstairs to eat breakfast – portraying an ordinary modern lifestyle – thus, relating directly to the audience. It is then that the video takes a more original and eccentric slant when the protagonist gulps a fish wholly and creates a speech bubble reading: ‘HELP!’. In this way, the director explicitly appeals to the audience – giving them an active role, a generic convention of stop motion music videos.

As part of the mise-en-scene, the performer is costumed in a generic superhero outfit and flies through the clouds and in to outer space – creating a surreal and humorous image. Accompanied by a giant, cynical squirrel – the director depicts an extraordinary and vividly exciting narrative. The mise-en-scene is enhanced through Chris Martin flying over the seas and to New York, shown through the skyscrapers and lights synonymous with ‘The Big Apple’. The evil giant squirrel then begins to fire arrows at the performer which he deflects with an umbrella – further constructing an image which is surreal and unusual to the audience. In a cynical act, the squirrel then cuts the performer’s cape – allowing him to fall from the skyscrapers, supported by his umbrella acting as a parachute. In this way, the director constructs an impossible and fairytale-like image – reinforcing the surreal theme to the music video.

The video is made fluent and the performer undertakes a series of continuous events, making the continuity of the music video flawless and unrealistically fluent in a humorous fashion. The performer then falls into a lake and is eaten by the Loch Ness monster – a myth synonymous with Scotland. In this way, the director takes the audience on a worldwide historical tour, as superhero Chris Martin attempts to save a lady from being held hostage by the giant squirrel. The audience learn this from the snapshot which appears in the top left of the shot – showing the Queen gradually drowning. This makes the audience anxious and constructs an air of suspense, making the music video more of a narrative in terms of style.

In terms of colour, pastel primary colours are dominant in the music video. The mise-en-scene is drawn on the floor with paints/crayons – so the general emission of the video is sketchy and authentic, applicable to the scene of independent rock in this particular case. Blue is particularly dominant, for mainly the sea and the sky. By using deep shades of blue, an air of tranquillity is conveyed; this coincides with the fluency of the stop-motion, in a surreal sense. This surrealism is reinforced by the use of natural images on a surreal mise-en-scene, making for unusual viewing and fulfilling the gratification of escape.

From viewing this stop animation video we have decided that to create a video that captures our target audience we need to produce a storyline which provides a situation which our audience can relate too but also humour, like the coldplay video, to keep our audience entertained throughout.

Research into Main Product

Before looking in more detailed at animation videos we decided that we would look up all the different types of animation that there is to choose from and how it would be possible to create an animation video:

Research into main product

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Questionnaire Graphs

After asking our target audience to participate in a questionnaire we gathered the results and made a graph presentation so we would be able to view the data we collected more clearly. This will make it easier for us throughout the project to refer back to see what our audience wants to see so we know what to include to attract them to our video.

Media a2 graph ppt

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The results we found from this questionnaire data allowed us to have a greater idea of what our audience wanted to see in a music video. This information now means that we are aware of what to include to make our video fit the criteria for our target audience.
The data we gathered showed that our audience would mainly be in their mid-teens so we would have to make sure that the humour included would match their personalities.
We will be making sure that the story within our music video is clear as in the questionnaire it was the most popular answer out of five possibilities.

As the questionnaire continued we made our questions more detailed and targerted towards the type of music video we had in mind to create, so we asked what key aspects were most imporant in animation videos and what features they most liked in films they had previously viewed.
After viewing information we obtained from these questions we understand that we have to make our storyline orginal to keep our audience interested in what is going on and to make the colouring of the video eye catching - like every stereotypical house/electro styled music video.

Secondary Audience Research

To make sure that our music video actively includes the audience we are going to use the Uses and Gratifications audience theory by Blumier and Katz in order to make sure that our music video correctly addresses our target group.


We are going to include humour in our music video, which comes from the use of the barbie dolls, who will provide the entertainment gratification and will make our audience feel connected as we will understand the humor that our target group would have. This will in turn make them want to continue watching the film.
Supplying the target audience with a sense of escape from the real world and the things that annoy them throughout the day will allow them to be part of the different life in the story of our music video. The characters in the video may also be similar to people who watch it so they will be able to identify the actions carried out by the characters that they also have, which will enable them to learn more about themselves.


Our music video will also include the methods of Richard Dyer's 'Utopian Solutions'. Our video will provide the audience with a solution to the inadequacy in their lives. We are going to be focusing on two of the three solutions devised in Dyer's method within our music video. The inadequacy of boredom which many people face after sticking to the same daily routine will be replaced by excitement when they watch something different and creative which provides humor and a situation in which you do not know how it will turn out. By our group offering an animation music video we will provide the audience with excitement as animation is an unusual chioce in making music videos.

Goodwin's Research

In his book, 'Dancing in the Distraction Factory' (1992) - Goodwin studies music television and popular culture, and proposes a series of notions - he states:

- Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. For example, a boy band performing a dance routine. This is also true of our production. The genre of our video can be classed as electro pop/dance, we have storyboarded a dance routine and have based our video largely around a club scene. In this way, we are demonstrating the characteristics of dance music.

- There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals. This is somewhat true of our video. The track we are using does not feature many lyrics, but more synths and electronic production. However, when there is a female voice, we are using camera shots on the girl, and as the pace of the music speeds up - we have decided to use more frames per second, so that the video relates more closely to the music.

- The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work. Although we are not creating a music video to produce capital and broaden/sustain a fanbase - we are plying to be in-keeping with generic conventions of music videos today. Therefore, as part of the mise-en-scene, we will display posters of our performers behind the DJ deck. On a different platform, this orientates the viewer and is a reminder throughout of the genre and more closely, the artist/s.

- There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body. This is going to be particularly prominent in our video, as Barbie dolls in themselves are synonymous with a materialistic, and voyeuristic character. As well as this, the Action Men are just as voyeuristic to a female audience. We aim to shoot some of the video with one performer half-naked - the epitome of a provocative character.

- There is often intertextual reference (to films, TV programmes, other music videos etc). The brands of Barbie and Action Man are media phenomenons in themselves - producing films, songs and magazines. In this way, our whole production is an intertextual reference - paying homage to the children's toy figures.

Primary Audience Research

Before making our product we are going to conduct some detailed audience research. By doing this research we will be able to ensure that the product we make fits in with what our audience is interested in and what they would like to see in a music video.

Using more than one method of gaining research into our audience will provide us with more detailed overall data and we will be able to take all advantages and disadvantages into consideration when we are in the production phase of our music video.

Quantitative data is useful as it is numerical data and can be put into graphs, charts and percentages which may come in useful for summarising our research into figures.
This type of data is a positive method as you can produce data quickly and in a way which is easy to understand. To gain this data it takes little time and doesn't need much research into it in order to gain the information needed.
However, quantitative data has a negative side as it does not allow the participant to express their views entirely as they are restricted in their answers and means there are limited results so some useful data may not be picked up.

Qualitative data is when descriptive feedback is given by verbal or written responses to open ended questions related to the information you need to receive back from participants. This type of data allows the participants to explain their answers in more detail.
Using this method produces richer data which focuses on allowing the individual to write or say their individual responses and explain this. The researcher can then ask more questions if needed if they believe that gaining more information would be useful for the research. This can however, produce a large amount of written sheets or audio recordings, making the data very hard to group as each interview will vary.

Focus - Group will allow us to ask a small group of participants about their thoughts on our chosen production and to get their ideas on how to make it more attractive to our target audience. This is an advantage for our research as it is cheap and quick to do and we can gain rich amounts of data through the group coming together and thinking of ideas and responses that if a one to one interview had taken place. Through this method we will be able to use our focus group as a check on what was most commonly brought up when asked about issues we needed to address and fix and those we needed to accentuate and target to the audience.

Target Audience

Graeme Burton stated that all audiences can be grouped in two ways, social grouping and media grouping.

We are going to use the social grouping in order to target our audience. Gender is a really important part in finding our audience due to the humour our music video will include, which will be more appropriate for a male audience. The genre of our music video is based around ideologies that are stereotypically more appealing to males. This is shown through the original music video where women are objectified and portrayed as inferior to their male counter parts.

We will be challenging this dominant ideology as conveying both genders as equal in terms of status.

Hartley expanded on the social grouping by identifying 7 subjectives that can be used to identify the audience more specifically. We decided that using the subjective of Age would be appropriate as our video needs to target an audience of a certain age group. The age of our audience is important as if we don't correctly identify them then they will not see the humour we have included in our video which we have based our project on. We have decided that a younger age group of around 16-21 would be most effective in capturing our audience due to the genre of music, which is mainly listened to by those who go out clubbing, who the majority of the time, are of a young age. The song itself is more focused onto both younger boys and girls so we will target them by the use of familiar iconography such as Barbie, Ken and Action Men dolls. This will also appeal to an older audience who may find this ironic and amusing.



To successfully create our film we also considered the media grouping of our target audience.

From our primary research we know that our target audience are teenagers who prefer dance music in comparison to R&B.
We chose to create a setting which matched our stereotypical male audience, adding posters of girls from magazines like Zoo and Nuts that boys of that age read. By including cars and popular films in the mise-en-scene of our bedroom scenes it will attract our target audience to feel that the music video is made for their humour.

We have not included targeting our video to those of a specific ethnic background as we feel ethnicity plays no part in the humour our video includes.
The idea of social classification has been used in the media for serveral decades, however the idea of using the ABC1 social grouping idea, is not relevant for our music video as it can appeal to those of any class or status.

Introduction

In year 12 we looked at print for our media coursework and produced music magazines. This year we are focusing on film - with particular attention to music videos. We decided to choose this brief from a possible 8 because we feel it can exhibit our skills in a different light. Our portfolio will consist of a music video, a cover for its release and a magazine advertisement on the new song ( as well as planning and evaluating).

This year we have decided to work in a group of 3 so that collaboratively we can combine our skills and talents to produce the best final product possible. By working in a group, we can also gain the most from lessons and assign each other different tasks to ensure that the production is efficient and successful.

As stated earlier we will be producing a music video. In order to break the mould and generic conventions of music videos in modern society - we are going to focus on basing our music video on animation and still imagery. We feel that working on a topic that we don't have much experience on will expand our knowledge on a different platform of media.

As Jamie does Graphic Design he has experience in editing and can use these skills to take full advantage of the software available to us. Frankie has just completed an AS course in photography in which she has gained skills on lighting for photography sets and how to create still imagery using creative ideas which is effective for any project she is given. Michael specialises in sound and editing having taken part in a twelve week course at Kingston University in the summer.

Collectively we can bring these skills together to produce the best final portfolio possible.