Names of the songs on the album

NAMES FOR SONGS:

Jane. - (name of band)
Mother Dearest. (Summons feelings of maternal longing)
Night Terror. (Children have them)
The Girl Who Ran Away. (Awkwardness, shyness, being scared)
T(ea) (British drink.. Um... British band... Identifying with british culture.)
Big Mouth Strikes Again. (Music video song)
Girl Afraid. (Smiths song.. Title could be equated to awkwardness.. Shyness.. Being scared. Etc)
To The Old House. ('Back to the Old House' smiths song)
Pick and Mix. (Sweets. Childlike. Nostalgic.)
Card House. (Reference to cards in music video and to the song 'happy house' by siouxsie and the banshees)
Unhappy Birthday (summons past memories of childhood birthdays. Also smiths song)

Digipak Draft

Comments by smiths fans on Big Mouth Strikes Again

Title

"Jane"  due to the fact it's a plain and ordinary name. 'Plain Jane'

Morrissey when naming the Smiths said; 

The band picked their name in part as a reaction against names used by popular synthpop bands of the early 1980s, such as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Spandau Ballet, because they considered these names fancy and pompous. In a 1984 interview Morrissey stated that he chose the name The Smiths "...because it was the most ordinary name" and because he thought that it was "...time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces." - Wikipedia 

Rebecca's Favourite Cover

Estelle's Favourite Cover

Hafsah's Favourite Cover

Album Cover Experiments 2

Album Cover experiments

adjusting the colour on picture manager

lettering on paint

Call Sheet - Thursday 1st November

Call Sheet - Wednesday 31st October

FB Comments on The Smiths and their song Bigmouth Strikes Again

This comment is close to what Morrissey said himself, that the media portrays him and the band as depressing when actually they are not, and that opinion is very superficial. What they really do is tell the truth.

Screenshots of practice digi-pak



What is a digi-pak?

Purpose of magazine adverts

Script

Stop Motion Animation

Shooting Days

Half-term seemed the best time to start, as well as finish, the entire construction of the music video: we thought we had all the props and equipment we needed, the background was deemed satisfactory by us (as we couldn't find anything better) and we had the time we needed to film on our hands.

The location we chose to shoot in was in my living room, though it is quite small (there were no other available locations for us, and we just couldn't think of any). We were able to block out the daylight pretty well, so no ambient light affected our shots. the artificial lights - we only used 1 Lilliput and one red head because there wasn't any more space to use a third light and place it behind the performer (so we didn't use three point lighting), and anyway, we didn't have enough arm strength to open the third goddamn stand - were placed in front of the performer, quite close to them, at 45 degree angles.

The background was an old duvet cover I found deep within my mother's closets. as we were influenced by the title sequence of the film Amélie (i once watched the sequence while listening to our chosen track, and the visuals and the song went well together), we wanted to create something with a similar feel, but we didn't want to copy it, and so we decided of not using a green background but something of a different colour. We noticed there were three colours dominating the sequence, which were red, green and yellow. Those colours complimented each other well, so we tried to keep to the colour scheme.
We also thought about the rule of thirds while filming, to make the shots dynamic, as music videos need to be full of dynamism.
We had drawn a rough storyboard to follow, but many of the shots we discovered by improvising and experimenting a little (we filmed a shadow shot that I liked but which didn’t make the music video). Me being in front of the camera instead of behind it (which was where I desperately wanted to be) Hafsah was the one who caught the shots.

All of us were busy in one form or another on various days and hours, so we couldn’t all film together every day of the week, but we were able to film on three days of that half term, from 9:30 or 10 to 12 or 2pm, depending on our time tables. Filming was long, as we didn’t have as many hands as we would have wanted, and we didn’t finish the filming in the end.
The footage and photographs seemed fine on the camera, but when we loaded them onto my laptop, they didn’t look very good at all.
We had to shoot the whole thing all over again.
By this time we were feeling very panicky – nothing was going right, time seemed to be against us – our hearts were losing faith. But we would never think of giving up; we already put so much work and effort into it.

We scheduled more shooting days – again we had to work around each other’s time tables – and filmed more shots. This time they looked much better (the colours were washed out in the previous shots. Of course we knew we could manipulate the colours during the editing process, but the original shots needed to be good, too) and we were pleased with them, as they were, we thought, the best we were going to get under the circumstances.    

The Smiths - Star Image

The cultural pessimists said that popular culture has been “dumbed down” and producers of the new media are making more of the boring and un-stimulating same things. Morrissey would probably agree – he stated in an interview that when writing his lyrics and choosing the album covers he assumed that his audience was intelligent instead of dumb, as most artists do. He also said that popular music should be used to make serious statements, and it is a shame that most musical artists sell millions of records but don’t give out a message, they don’t make the audience think, they don’t touch the people’s consciousness. Most media assumes the audience is dumb and gives them a load of meaningless rubbish to fill their lives with.

All of this is important to how Morrissey, and The Smiths, choose to portray themselves in the media.

This is a presentation about Morrissey and The Smiths someone has created, which analyses their sexual ambiguity and political messages and so on. The Smiths have been called an "intelligent" band by many. Everything they have done was self-conscious and thought through - they all knew what they were doing, especially Morrissey.

 http://www.debaser.org/mozskin/mozskin/ms01.htm 

Audience Research - Comments on Youtube

 Comments on the song Bigmouth Strikes Again by The Smiths on Youtube:

 

this comment outlines how important the new media is and how it has changed the way we consume and find out about new music - it's so much easier now!