What percentage of people listen to country music?

According to a music marketing survey in 2002 about 42,000,000 adults listened to country radio stations nationwide. Another report from the CMA that came out in April 2009 said that 2 or 5 adults age between 18-54  'qualify' as country music fans. About 20% of people listen to country music.

Process of editing my music video...

These past couple of weeks I have been doing lots of video editing which is very close to being finished. During this process I have learnt a lot about using colour correction, sometimes the difficulty of trying to get my 'singer' in sync with the music and sometimes scenes that I had originally planned to use didn't fit in after all.

Using Colour Correction

As my choice of song is a sad one I didn't want the emotions shown to just be from the character. I wanted the atmosphere to be sad, so I used colour correction to help me do this. I changed the saturation so that some of the colour and 'life' was taken out of the footage to give a more mournful and cold feel. However, when I went to editing and changing the colour of the clips where the 'artist' sang I did not use  such depressing colours. This was because I wanted to separate the character from the artist as though they were two different people. I used colour correction to make so that it was brighter and used an effect called 'Indie Red' as it was ideal for the style of my video but also helped to distinguish the difference between the artist and the character.

Some of the footage that I took wasn't all planned. Like this clip here, I had planned for the actress to walk through this historic house towards me but without me knowing the camera lens went out of focus and blurred the whole clip. Although not planned, this worked to my advantage as it fitted in with the dark feel and gave a nice effect as different to some of the other clips. However, throughout filming and the making of my music video the camera did play up and although started filming in focus would blur so there was a lot of re-filming different parts to try and get a more professional look.

This photo is at Kirby Hall, one of my main locations, here I have used colour correction to help give off the sadness feel. Using this location has helped to create this as well. I feel it reflects loneliness and sadness due to it being a ruin, how isolated it is and left for plants to grow on it so perhaps not as loved and cared for as it would have been in the past when there were servants to tend to it daily.

A couple of weeks ago I finished filming my music video and have just finished uploading it to the Mac for editing. It has been very important to keep the consistency up e.g. clothes, make-up, hair. In doing this it has made filming quite difficult due to showing two different people so that will mean two different styles and locations to film at.
My actress has also had to show different emotions depending on who she was representing. What also made filming quite difficult as the weather. As the majority of my filming is outside the weather has played a huge part in when I could film and when I couldn't e.g. too windy or raining really heavy. However, the weather has helped in some aspects, when it has rained it has helped to reflect the mood of the song. It especially worked well as it was during the 'story' filming part of my music video. When I filmed the singing scenes it started with the sun out then finished with the sky going dark which I feel gives a good impression as the song has just finished.
I have used a number of different locations so that the audience doesn't get bored and I have tried to use a range of shots.

Playing a country female singer..

Lyrics are not the only conservative view of a female country music artist. Appearance is also very important.

They must be beautiful and appear sweet and not to self-confident or sexy. They shouldn't show too much flesh either. Both male and female country music artists are also considered to come across like they have 'ordinary' jobs, perhaps to relate with the audience more and the situations and topics that they sing about, such as the values that are found in a  Christian home. If the rules are stretched too much  they will find it difficult to go much further in this genre.

                                                  However there have been artists who have challenged the traditional women's  role but have achieved success, such as Shania Twain.

Tropes of country music...

As my music video is based on love and loss I feel that my video is most likely to link in with the Earnest Reflection and Sentimentality area rather than the other three sections.  Although, the song that I chose to use by Carrie Underwood was not one of her most famous country songs the story within it affected a lot of people and it pulls at the heart-strings.