Previous Students Work

This music video is done by previous students in 2008 and uses the song 'For the girl' by The Fratellis.

Strengths:

- I liked the way they used a variety of colours throughout the video to represent different parts. The performance was black and white, the narrative was normal and the 'La la la la's' parts were often in bright colours with cut on beat footage.

- They had a range of camera angles including some interesting ones. (Eg.- Following a dart and the bottom of the bin).

- The drawings were good and showed good use of technology as they may have used iStop Motion to do it.

Weaknesses:

- It was a narrative and performance based music video, however I think the narrative parts could have cut on beat better.

- They could also have had better cutting at the beginning of clips. For example cutting at the beginning would make some clips look more realistic, as in some its clear the actors have just started, for example, walking.

I personally really enjoyed the performance sections as they looked quite professional and different (The setting being toilets). They had good camera work here as it was tilted which gave it a cool effect. I would have therefore used more of the performance footage within this music video.

Air Traffic- Shooting Star

· Music Video Directed by Terri Timely

· Filmed and Edited by Adam Ryzman



· The band is signed to ‘Tiny Consumer’, an imprint of major label EMI.

This music video is one that has both performance and narrative, hence why we have found it important to look such video considering we too are doing a music video that involves both performance and narrative.

The video is mainly performance based with elements of different ‘love’ narratives running through out it. Although these narratives are not necessarily clear, they still make sense. For example we know the blonde girl is part of a more sad ‘love story’ as she is by herself looking at pictures and letters, compared to the other couples who are clearly actually together.

It uses slow motion in the narrative parts of the video and normal speed and motion within the performance parts.

Objects, in slow motion, are being lifted into the air in the narrative parts of the video and are then falling and smashing around Air Traffic in the performance part. This is one of Goodwin’s 6 (visuals and music linking) because when the objects land, it marks a new sound within the song. For example at the beginning the song is quite slow but when the first object (a lamp) smashes to the floor the music suddenly starts up and gets faster and louder, bringing in other instruments. Another example of Goodwin’s 6 and the way in which music and images link together, is that the objects rise when both the music and perhaps the characters in the story’s tensions are rising. It is then that we see, as the song gets faster, the more objects that are smashing around them as they perform.

There is a female and male character getting undressed within the music video, however, we can both see from snippets of this and from listening to the type of music and lyrics used, that voyeurism isn’t suggested. Unlike previous music videos watched e.g.- 99 Problems – Jay Z.

The lighting isn’t very bright in both the performance and narrative elements of the video. This is suggesting the type of music and perhaps audience Air Traffic are trying to attract and for the general feel for the song.

Terri Timely, the director of this video, has directed other music videos (interestingly enough, he directed ‘Charlotte’, which is another one of Air Traffics more recognized songs). He has also directed lots of TV commercials and a few short films.

Cast List

We have our Cast! Between Me and Sarah we discussed who would suit the roles for the song we have chosen. We came to an agreement and we also asked some students if they wouldn't mind helping us with our music video. To our great help they gladly said yes.

Cast List

Lead Vocalist: George Shaw

















Drums: Will Woods


















Guitar: Kris Lock

















Bass: Ben Dillon











And our Lead Girl is: Ellie Woods

Previous Students music video

This music video was added to youtube in 2009 and is an example of a previous students A2 media coursework. They did 'Sun Is Shining' by The Feeling. I decided to analyse this one in particular as they too did a band, which is what we will be doing.

Strengths:

- They have a nice sepia tone running throughout it which I think works well with their settings (a field) and also reflects the lyrics 'sun is shining' (Goodwin 6) as it does make it look warm and summer like.

- The outfits for the band were well put together and also shows the did some research on The Feeling, as they too wear suits in a field in their music video "Join with us".

- Technically they have used some advance techniques in the way they have lots of frames within frames (E.g- The newspaper with shots within the frame).

- They have a good range of camera angles which are cut and flow into the next shot well.

Weaknesses:

- The video is quite fuzzy in places. Im not sure whether this is due to the quality of youtube or because the fuzzy-ness has been created by the use of the sepia tone. Its also quite obviously fuzzy with the frame within frame shots. This is something we will have to be careful with in making our own music video. Losing quality will make the overall video look worse, therefore we will be careful when editing colours and shots.

-They have done a performance and narrative based music video, however the story line's not particularly clear.

Overall, when watching the video, the changes I personally would have made, would be to have the band members miming more. I think this would show more evidence of being able to link the music in time to the footage. I also would have had band members playing some instruments to, again , show these abilities. Therefore will add these types of elements in our music video to show our ability in terms of editing.

Target Audience

This is a poster we worked on in class for who are Target Audience would be. Myself and Sarah worked with Louis and Roisin from the class as we both had the same idea for who our Target Audience would be. Our Target Audience will be 'Hopeful Youths'.

In Our Poster we cut out pictures of Young Celebrities and brand names that our popular to the teenage generation. We Chose these because these are the celebrity's that attract the attention most of teenagers.

Permission

Now that we have chosen our song for our music video I have emailed Razor and Tie record label. Razor and Tie record label manage The Summer Set, therefore I went on their website and found their email address. I have emailed them this to ask for permission:

Lyrics

Danni and I have been busy building on our ideas that we have for our video with this song. We decided getting the lyrics and working out what order some of our ideas can go in would be a good way of establishing what we need to do when it comes to storyboarding.

So here is our printed out lyrics with all our notes on. Hopefully it give you some idea of what we are planning and when. :)

Final Song Choice!

So Danni and I have finally decided on what song we want to do for our music video! :D

In the end, we have gone with 'Punch-Drunk Love' by The Summer Set. We liked the idea of using The Summer Set as with both of their songs, that we were contemplating, didn't already have a music video unlike All American Rejects'. This for us was a real plus. We wanted to possibly avoid using a song that already had a music video as we know for a start that ours wouldn't be able to live up to the original. Secondly, and more importantly, we could find our selfs tempted to copy aspects from the original that worked well and we enjoyed. This way with using one of The Summer Set's songs (Punch-Drunk Love or Passenger Seat) we avoided these problems, giving us our own imaginative pallet to work on and made sure we weren't swayed into portraying the song in the same way they had.

Danni and I found that personally we liked the sound of The Summer Sets music as it had an upbeat and fun sound. It felt like when we listened to their songs (Punch-Drunk Love in particular) our ideas for a music video didn't stop.

Once we had narrowed down the songs to these two, we listened to them done acoustically. Although we enjoyed them we were worried that with an acoustic version there was less 'get up and go' in the songs and we would lose audience's interest in the video.

We found that we liked the sound of the lead singer (Brain Dales) voice which inspired us to think it would look good with actors mining.

We decided on Punch-drunk Love on the fact that we had more solid ideas for it and that we could work performance and narrative well into it.

We are really happy with our song and can't wait to work on it :)

Here are a couple links about The Summer Set:

http://www.thesummersetband.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_Set

Song Choices and Ideas

Between me and Sarah we knew from the start that we wanted to base our music video on Performance, but also with a narrative.

We were struck by the idea of doing a performance based after we had watched the video Faint by Linkin Park. (Blog post below by Sarah).
We were attracted to the lighting that fitted with the ‘cut on beat’. Although we did not like the cut on beat in Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers (other Blog below by Me) in the music video Faint we both agreed that the way it was structured was appealing to an audience and it was a powerful opening.

After watching previous A2 music videos from Thurston one video caught our attention the most. We liked the performance based video All The Rage by Funeral for a Friend. In the video they had their performance and a story to accompany it.
The story was interesting and we both found that it went really well with the performance as it didn’t make the video too boring with just the performance.



Song and Artist Choices

The Summer Set - Punch-Drunk Love
All American Rejects
The Summer Set - Passenger Seat

We chose to look at The Summer Sets music because the music is fun and lively. We would like to work with some lively music and we like the idea of fitting a band to this type of music.



We didn’t really look into any particular music from All American Rejects apart from one song which we liked.
We looked at ‘It Ends Tonight’ because although this performance is different to what we are looking at, it is still a performance. Its different to the idea that we want to use. We like the idea of having a band with a lead singer, guitar and drums. In this video it still has performance in it just with a piano instead.
Throughtout the video the band move away from the piano and slowly begin to set up a ‘stage’ were they perform with a microphone, guitar and drums. We like the idea of swticthing through different instruments.

Chris Cunningham - Windowlicker by Aphex Twin

This is the video and director we disliked most of all. Our reason for disliking the video and the style of it was because we found it disturbing, scary and we found that we didn’t understand the relevance of what the video was trying to portray.

In the video I have chosen which is Aphex Twin - Windowlicker, it is about the lead artist showing his love for himself. He is dressed in a white suite with a mask of himself which is over-exaggerated. He enters the frame in an extremely long limousine. He then gets out of the limousine and starts to dance. Two women are on the side of the road watching him, they enjoy his dancing and begin to turn into him, but with extremely hideous faces.
The video shows his love for himself but the women that turn into him throughout the video are ugly.

In this video it also shows that they are mocking R’n’B. Examples of this is when the lead artist is dancing and the DJ scratches link with what he is doing. This links to Goodwin’s 6 because the music links with the visuals.

The music itself was quite haunting because it was fairly repetitive and linked with the gross images from the women that were playing him.

Sarah and I found that the videos from Chris Cunningham were random and weird. We Didn’t like this style because again they link back to Michel Gondry’s style were it doesn’t have a story as such, just images and random music.

Michel Gondry - Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers

In this video by Michel Gondry, we can see that it is a cut on beat music video. Despite that this is clever and interesting myself and Sarah found it was quite boring. We felt that it was predictable and we knew what was coming next.

Goodwins 6 has been used in this with the idea of the link between music and visuals. We can see that each of the music beats fitted with s different prop that was added each time a new beat started. Myself and Sarah agreed that this is well structured the idea that we have agreed on would not work with this method.

The whole video continues as though a camera is moving throughout different scenery.

The video was very repetitive as it used the same images over and over again. Me and Sarah believe that we want to keep our audience interesting and engage their attention with a narrative story. We believe that Michel Gondry’s style in music would not help us reach this goal.

Spike Jonze - Sure Shot by Beastie Boys

This video, directed by Spike Jonze, really highlights the way he likes to incorprut fun into his videos. When watching this we can basically see that it really is a mash of shots of the Beastie Boys 'at play'.

However despite that, there are alot of elements of great ideas within the music video, it clearly wasn't just thrown together. This, as i mentioned in the post before last, is a great example of where Spike Jonze shows us his creativity and intellegence of having the Beastie Boys mime the song really fast so he can then use slow motion on it. This gives the effect of the boys miming in time to the music and lyrics but you can still see that there is something different and slow about it. Its really cleaver and makes it look really good.

The camera angles are less steady than that of Mark Romanek's videos but this is to get Jonze's sense of fun across. For example he uses a crane to give high angle shots however he has clearly attached something to the crane that the Beastie Boys can jump and hold onto as they rap to the camera. It gives the effect that they are mucking around and having fun and we are part of that as the audience. He also uses low angle shots looking up on the Beastie Boys as they rap to the camera. This, and the use of the fish eye lens, that Jonze uses, is stereotypical for this type of music genre within videos. It shows us Spike Jonze is aware of the type of artists he is working with.

The music video cuts on beat and is generally fast paced which, this in its self, is a link between visuals and lyrics. The lyrics are "I don't stop" and this is being shown in the way they are constantly moving and jumping around and the fast pace of the editing.

Two really interesting points about this music video is that it its self is representing postmodernism in the way that at one point we see a shot of the actual crane and the crew standing around it. This is showing it has been constructed which is self-reflectivity.

Another cool thing is that at the end of the video we see them walking through the inside of a casino. Casino's, due to gambling, are illegal to film in. We can tell this by the way it is quick and the camera angle is low down, perhaps being hidden by some thing. This is perhaps used to again reflect the idea of them 'playing' and being 'rebellious'.

Throughout the video there is a lot of CGI with lots of different effects being used. It goes from black and white one minuet to an enhanced bright colour pallet the next. There are also clips/images that pop up of things that they are rapping about, which is obviously a link between visuals and images. This is again is all done to create a sense of fun.

In terms of applying Spike Jonze's elements of fun to our own music video, its definitely something, depending on song choice that we want to include. Perhaps we can do this in any performance shots we take by having actors put effort and enthusiasm into it, clearly like the Beasty Boys are doing here. An element that differs from Mark Romanek, as said, is the different types of steady shots. As we like the high production look perhaps we could have mostly these types of shots and have some more Spike Jonze's like ones to show a different perspective of maybe a narrative and these can be postmodern. This video with the conventions of low camera angles appeals to its target audience. When picking our song we will have to take target audience and therefore the music genre into account as they will influence what conventions we too have in our video.

Mark Romanek - Faint by Linkin Park

In this video, directed by Mark Romanek, we straight away witness the way he loves to use lots of technical lighting. At the start of the video the lights are relatively low and then when the music starts up properly the lights flash up bright. The lights are constantly going up and down in time with the music. This must have been hard to achieve as each light would have to be set to a certain timer.

There is one of Goodwins 6 when we see a link between lyrics and visuals. We are watching them perform to an audience and are therefore behind them. The lyrics sing "don't turn your back on me". Which the band are currently doing to us.

There are interesting camera shots, that again, due to Mark Romanek's high production values, are still and steady (using a crane for high angle shots looking down on the stage and audience). They continue the sharp look of it being neat along with the pristine looking lights.

We eventually become part of the audience in the crowd and can then see there faces playing to us. It is now lighter as all the lights at the back are thought to be lighting them up. You can again see the detail Mark Romanek goes for when we can clearly see them with a setting behind them that reflects them as a band.

When the music stops, its almost trying to reflect the high energy it has left us and there audience watching with, as we can just see them still jumping round as silhouette's in the background.

Despite never being able to create a music video like this due to budget! We can still take elements from it an apply it to our own work. For example, as said before, we liked the high production element that Mark Romanek brings to his videos. One way he creates this in this music video that we too can do is via using a variety of different shot types and having them still and steady. This will mean planning, via storyboarding, many shots that we can use within our production. When we then come to creating them it will involve using a steady tripod and making sure our shots are well framed and structured to give off a high production value look.

Our Favourite and Least Favourite Music Video Directors

As we said in our last post we have been looking at 5 big music video directors over the last few weeks.We have been looking at Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Johnathon Glazer.

Our personal favourite's out of these directors were Mark Romanek and Spike Jonze. We really enjoyed videos from these two directors for many reasons.

Firstly with Mark Romanek we loved the way he uses high prodution value. Clearly all music videos take ages to plan and create, however it really seems that his shots are perfect, accurate and that everything was well thought out. Perhaps he was least likely out of the directors to find someting that works well on the day and use it. His high production would have required maticulous planning which results in a very clean and percise looking video which we liked. Another great aspect about his work is the great use of lighting within his videos. This is a common theam that runs throughout a lot of his videos and helps add to that high production value look.

Spike Jonze was another music video director we admired. We personally both enjoyed the way he bought an element of fun to his videos. He also did some really cleaver things with his music videos. He would often use slow motion or reverse in his videos. However despite using them the video would still run in time with the music or the video would still be playing in the right order. This required the people he was working with to either do things very fast or backwards. When he then edited them to make them look normal, they did. However despite perhaps the miming fitting in with the lyrics, you can tell something has been done as it looks odd which actually creates a really cool look. It must be an very hard thing to achieve yet he pulls it off and makes it look even more fun and entertaining.

Music video directors Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry were directors we were not so keen on.

Despite Michel Gondry style being very clever in terms of beats and sounds within the music, we often found his videos quite boring. He frequently used lots of Goodwins theory of 'music and images' when a beat would hit he would add a new image in its place. At the beginning of these videos it was cleaver and interesting but would quickly lose our attention and become boring.

Chris Cunningham was our least favourite. His videos were slightly 'out there' and almost quite disturbing! It seemed that because of a lot of his videos are so random and weird you weren't sure what was really going on. It would seem he was one of those directors that if something worked on the day he would go along with it. Which Im sure isn't the case as directors plan ALOT. However perhaps some of his planning isn't appreciated as much because it often involves a lot of random content. Due to its content being like this, throughout a whole video, it too leaves you feeling bored of seeing it.

At least this is how we felt! :)

Therefore, through learning about the different styles each music video director has and automatically forming an opinion on them. This in it's self has helped us establish what we would and wouldn't want to include in our own music video. For example, as said before, we found with Michel Gondry that the repeated shots, images and theme became boring. Therefore we most probably will keep a variety of things (performance or narrative) elements running throughout it so it doesn't get boring. However on the other hand we will still take his element of manipulating beats (either by cutting on them or, like Michel Gondry, making something happen in the shot.) as this was very cleaver. Another example of what we can take from studying these directors is that its important that the music video makes sense. As said, we found that an element of Chris Cunningham's work that we disliked was, because of its random nature, the way it didn't make much sense and therefore flow. This has already taught us that we need to make sure our music video is one that people can follow.

New Blog

Hello :)
This is our Year 13 Blog for our A2 Music Video.
We've been looking at music videos for the past few weeks and different directors. We've looked at Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Johnathon Glazer.
We have now started our own work on our production. We are looking forward to it and we will keep you updated with the process.