At the very start of the task to create a music video we obviously had choose our song that we were going to make a video of. Our choice was Bastille's single 'These Streets'. From this we had to carry out some research into the music genre that Bastille, and what the music genre has to offer in terms of their music videos.
The first artists we looked at made music in the same music genre as Bastille. We found out that Bastille were an indie rock band, however from the very outset, we decided that we wanted to have a solo artist. Taking all this into account we then searched for solo indie rock artists and came across Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard and James Blake.
From looking into these three artist we found out that in indie solo music videos there is a lot of focus on the artist. So from this we knew that the artist that we were going to create needed to be on screen for a lot of the music video. Taking Andrew Goodwin's performance theory into account.
One thing we found out about indie music videos in comparison to the pop industry or dance industry music videos is that there is very little male or female faze as you can see in these gifs below.
This gif as you can see above is snapshots from the house and dance song called 'Cleavage' As you can see it is exploiting males and females in a sexual way, enticing males and females to watch the video, following the female and male gaze rule.
Above you see another gif. This gif was made by taking screenshots from Ben Howard's single 'The Wolves'. As you can see there is a strong focus on Ben Howard performing his single. Following the theory or performance in music videos. Andrew Goodwin came up with a theory about music videos. This was that music videos either have a concept, narrative, or performance theme. The gif above clearly shows a performance aspect.
We then wanted our music video to use but also challenge the results of our research that we found. As James Couleur, the artist that we came up with, was an indie rock solo artist, we wanted to take ideas from some of the videos that we saw. However we also wanted to add our unique touch to the video, challenging the convention of solo indie rock artists and their music videos that they produce. To do this we had thought long and hard about what to include. In the end we came up with the idea of incorporating a paint party scene, and building our video around this idea. In dance videos you often see the use of bright, vibrant, bold colours. They are used in their music video to really get the dance nature and vibe across of the song. This is how we believe that we have challenged the genre of our the music genre indie rock, by using something that you will usually see and associate with dance videos in our indie rock song. I will show you this in the gifs you see below.
So above you can see pictures that I screen-grabbed from 'Avicii's' single 'These Days'. This is how we wanted to challenge our conventional indie genre. By creating our own images of these we were able to challenge the genre in our music video, which you'll be able to see in the gif below.
Here we have some images from James Couleurs single 'My Face'. You can see from this gif that we aimed to get the colour and paint theme into it, and it payed off. When we evaluated the video as a class, the feedback about the paint being thrown against the wall, and the paint party was really positive. As well as liking the shots they also said how it really went well with the video, just proving that with the indie rock genre, we were able to take ideas from the dance genre and incorporate this into our video, challenging the conventions of indie music videos, but coming out with a successful end product.
However as well as challenging the indie conventions of we also wanted to take some of the techniques or shots they use in their music videos and create our own shots of these. When researching into indie solo artists as I said we came across Ben Howard. I would say that he was the most influential as we yet again used his video for 'Keep Your Head Up' as inspiration for our music video. This video was driven with magnificent nature shots which were eye-capturing and something we wanted to use in our video. Here are some images from Ben Howard's single below.
As you can see above Ben Howard's video for 'Keep Your Head Up' that its filled with different nature shots, at different times in the day, capturing the sun setting and rising, with lots of other stunning pictures throughout the video. Even though you see that there is a main focus on the setting and the nature surroundings, you still see Ben Howard in the video. However you don't see him singing along to the music. We wanted to take the ideas of the nature shots and also show James Couleur, but we wanted to, and also needed to show James Couleur singing, meeting the lip syncing criteria. Below you can see some shots from our video.
From this gif you can see that we aimed to get in some stunning nature shots, but as well as this incorporating James Couleur into the video as much as we could, showing a narrative theme to our music video, which I will explain about later. We traveled to Goldhanger near Maldon to get these beautiful shots. When we showed our video to the class for peer feedback we got some really positive comments about these shots. They loved the close up shot, with the locket in James Couleur's hand looking out on the glistening sea, with the sun setting on the horizon. We were really pleased about this feedback because, we shot this specific shot multiple times, just waiting for the right time where the sea was glistening in full effect.
Andrew Goodwin
Andrew Goodwin's theory says that music videos fit into three categories; Narrative, Concept and Performance.
A narrative video is one which tells a story, The Gif below shows Walk Off The earth's Video 'Gang Of Rhythm' this is a music video where the band plays the role of a gang escaping from prison. The narrative is clearly shown in the music video though the use of costume and the characterization.
A Concept video is very different from a narrative music video. This style of video doesn't follow a direct story line and often contains abstract elements such as stylized movements or objectifying elements. There is also often elements that include parts of the song within the video, or the lyrics and the video have a direct collation.
A performance video is a video that is based around a band performing or a solo artist singing. This type of music video is more commonly found in videos for a band as the video will focus on the bands skills.
James Couleur's My Face: Our music video is one that is hard to categorise, I would personally say that it doesn't have one category that it fits into. Our music video Contains elements of all three categories. The narrative category would be the one that we fit into the least, although our music video does show a journey that builds to the paint party at the end of the video. In terms of concept our video ticks the most boxes. There is no story line and we also have elements of the song portrayed within the video - The 'Mistakes' Wall is evidence of this in our music video. we also have elements of stylized movements to represent the journey in our video. The performance element of the Video is only within the shots where our music video where James is walking towards the camera singing.
Carol Vernallis
Carol Vernallis' theories overlap with Andrew Goodwin's to a certain point. Carol's theory digest how a music video is created though the use of narrative, editing, camera movement and framing and diegesis. Where her theory differs from Andrew's is her ideas about cutting to the beat. Her ideas about cutting to the beat relate to our video. We are constantly cutting to the beat in our video where different parts of the song change. We also made sure that the tracking shots we filmed walked to the beat as well.
Digipak
Our digipak challenges real life media products as typical indie pop artists as the bright colours come through across all of our media products. Below you can see our digipak.
Our digipak shows a vast array of colours. We did this as we wanted to get the theme of indie and pop across to our audience. As you can see below, Coldplays front cover of their album for Mylo Xyloto.
The front of the Mylo Xyloto album is covered in colour. We used this as inspiration as we wanted to match the bright colours and the eye catching visuals. We believe that we achieved our aim to use eye catching visuals and colours to attract our audiences attention.
Website
Our website challenges forms and conventions for real media products in different ways. You can see the home page of our website below.
Our website continues the theme of colour. As you can see by the background, we like to have products that stand out as we wanted to be individual and have unique ideas. If you look at Bastille's website, another inspiration for our group you will see that he has used lots of unique fonts and images associated to his name. I have put a screen shot below of Bastille's home page.
The triangle for the letter 'a' is shown throughout Bastille's work across song names, album names and in music videos. This can be automatically linked to the band and allows the audience to connect and acknowledge the band.
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