In an Indie Rock genre, the videos tend to have varying combinations
of conventions; such as bright, dark or sometimes black and white depending on
the tone of the lyrics and music.
Indie music tend to cover a mixture of
narrative and performance base whereby the focal point can either be the main
vocalist or the performance of the whole band, or even the band or artist not
making an appearance in their music video.
The narrative music videos in this
context usually are more representational or symbolic, rather than illustrating
the lyrics. In this sense, they are typically quite versatile. The editing
techniques differ based on the pace of the Indie music, whereby it can vary
from slow to fast pace. The artists are generally presented in a casual manner
reflecting upon their outfits. One example could be the band; Kaiser Chiefs.
For our music Video we chose The Jacques band that produces Indie Rock genre. In this case I and my group will be studying/ researching similar bands that does the same genre and similiar ideas/concepts ino their videos. This will allow us to represent our chosen band in a high standard concept and conventions within the music video, which will make us produce it similar to big budget music videos.
Imagine Dragons
Imagine Dragons is an American rock band, who formed in 2009. They also produce different genrs within the rock theme including the following, alternative rock, pop rock and indie rock. The band topped the year-end rock ranking for 2013. Imagine Dragons spent nearly two years bringing their passionately inventive brand of alt-rock to arenas around the world.
Their music sound was perfect for "blurring the lines between genres". this was certainly the case for their hit Raidioactive which rose high in the Hot 100, Alternative, and Mainstream Top 40 charts. As a whole, the band's sound is a mix of alternative rock and some pop that focuses on deep bass, strong drums, and powerful vocals. In the music industry, Imagine Dragons' sound is described as distinctly "rhythmic".
Musically, "Radioactive" is an electronic rock song with elements of alternative rock and contains cryptic lyrics about apocalyptic and revolutionist themes.
This song song that has it all – infectious, engaging and memorable melodies, multiple “payoffs,” multiple “magic moments,” deep, engaging lyrics that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. “Magic moments” are certain aspects of a song that take the listener’s experience to a level far beyond what they were expecting.
The video revolves around a mysterious female drifter (Daddario) who is on a quest to save her friends (Imagine Dragons) from the perils of a sinister, underground puppet-fighting ring. The "Champion" of the fight, a large purple-colored beast, beats and kills innocent stuffed animals and puppets forced to fight. The woman's pink teddy bear puppet enters the ring and fights the "Champion", initially being beaten up. After getting up from the ground, the teddy bear knocks out the champion with a single superpower punch. The owner sends two human body guards to subdue the teddy and both are disintegrated with the teddy's laser vision. The remaining spectators flee, leaving the woman with the owner. She takes a key off the owner's chest and unlocks the band from their dungeon. They walk out leaving the owner in the dungeon. He is then surrounded and attacked by the earlier defeated puppets.
In our group we have expressed an interest in creating a music video, which includes both or either narrative/ performance as a base for the music video.
The conventions of a music video differ depending on the genre of the music. However, some general conventions are; the artist are shown performing, the lyrics of the song reflect and influence what is shown in the video, the pace of editing is suitable to the pace of the music, and the codes of outfits tend to reflect the mood of the song.
We researched a performance based video with relating to Rock/ heavy metal genre.
The Rock genre videos are usually presented in a slightly mysterious and edgy way to create an atmosphere. The video tends to be performance based, with more focus on the main dressed and the make-up, which reflects upon the stereotypical rock look; more so in general, the mise-en-scene is entirely of dark tone. Sometimes, when a narrative based music video is produced, th storyline tends to outline the meaning of the usually dark lyrics. Moreover, the editing of the video tends to have a fast pace to match the tempo of the rock/metal atmosphere.
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Deconstructing Nirvana music video:
Throughout the music video there are several shots of
members of the band all in equal measure to show that they all make up the
band. However, throughout the music video more shots were focused on the lead
singer to notify us as an audience that he is the main artist. To add to that,
the lead singer is framed centrally compared to the rest of the band to highlight
his importance, whilst he is playing his guitar to keep to generic conventions
of the rock genre. The artist and the band clothing would have been representative
of the rock style when the music video was released in 1991. The lead singer has
the stereotypical image of a rock star with long hair and almost 'shabby'
looking clothing. Today, however, they are not too symbolic towards the trend
of the target audience or the genre because of the changes in fashion. Which
means that we thought about our music video outfits to fit within the new
fashion to attract our target audience. The narrative in the music video is
mostly performance as you are often shown images of the band playing their
instruments throughout the video, however as seen there is some concept and
abstract idea in the foreground. The fast paced editing of the video,
emphasizes the intense and dramatic tone of the grunge music, the low key
lighting and evident smoke machine also add to the hectic nature of the rock
and roll stars.
I chose to select Rock genre within the period of the 90's as I believe they have a strong Rock genre within their music videos. They also have something in common such as the conventions. They all tend to have performance base either on a stage or in a hall. They also tend to be in a dark tone grading or steamy foggy atmosphere to keep the performance energetically high.
Mar Klasfeld is an American commercial director, film director, screenwriter, photographer and music video director. He has directed over two handred music videos for artist such as Katy Perry, Jay-Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Britney Spears, Kid Rock, Micheal Buble, Nelly, Foo Fighters, Charli XCX, Jewel, Fun, Avril L avigne, Aerosmith and many others with muliple awards wins and nominations.
His hit videos for Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's "See You Aagian (Wiz Khalifa song)" is not only the first hi hop video to ever raech 1 billion views on YouTube, but the fastest to ever achieve the landmark. He is also the founder of Rockhard. Rockhard has produced videos for Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Jessie J, Adam Lambert and among others.
Jake Nava Jake Nava is a British director, best known for his work in music videos and TV commercials. He's created videos for various artists, including Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and Adele. Jake Nava has worked with Beyonce for 12 years, and it's time he does not take for granted. Nava the fifth best music video director of 2011 for his videos “Someone Like You” and “Monster”. The Times placed Nava's video for Beyoncé, “Single Ladies”, at #3 in The 25 Most Influential Music Videos of All Time. It won "Video of the Year” at the MTV Video Music Awards, the MTV Europe Music Awards and the BET Awards.
He prefers
to work with instead of having a conceptual or narrative based music video with
actors. However, in the music video “single lady”, he decided to make it
slightly different that it does not fit his typical type of music video, though
he still included performance base with the main artist in focus (centre) throughout
the whole video.
To add to that, as you can tell the music video, through post production editing was colour graded in black and white. Normally, Jake Nava works with natural colour grade, for example, like in Usher's music video for his song 'Burn.
Julien Christian Lutz (born October 31, 1975), better known
as Little X, X or Director X. He has been directing music videos since 1998. X
has been noted for his high-budget, visually distinctive music videos for
popular music singles, including videos for The Wanted, R. Kelly, Usher, Kanye
West, Jay-Z, Korn, David Guetta, Nelly Furtado, Sean Paul, Justin Bieber,
Drake, Nicki Minaj, T.I., Little Mix, Fifth Harmony, and Iggy Azalea. He always
worked with very popular and well-known artists. He is most probably very well-known
music video director of the modern age producing music videos from the pop and
hip hop genre.
City and Colour - Wasted Love
His trademark is tweaking the letterbox format; instead of
just using black bars on the top and bottom of the frame to frame the image,
many videos by X actually feature the bars opening vertically to reveal the
video and closing vertically at the end, like a letter box.
There are some similarities between his music videos he
produces. As you can see, it seems like Director X prefers to use the artists
in their videos, rather than hiring an actor to portray the artist. To add to
that, Director X seems to prefer to incorporate some sort of dance routine into
his videos, but not in all of his video, for example in Little Mix's 'Black
Magic' there is no dance, due to the fact that it's a strong narrative based
music video. In addition to directing musical videos, Director X has also had
experiences in filming and into fashion and modelling consultancy.
In my media lesson as a whole class we explored the theory by Steve Archer- music video quote(2004)
'Music video typically consist of an excessive amounts of close, extreme close up and voyeuristic shots in creation.'
which suggests that mostly in all music videos the amounts of shots are used are close, extreme close up and medium close up.
We explored this by watching music videos and in each group is to start predicting the number of set up, cuts and medium close up. Then calculate the percentage of the medium close up being used in that particular music video. We calculated the percentage by dividing the number of medium close up by the number of cuts and then multiplying it by 100.
This table shows our results of this theory
Music names
Ed Sheeran
The vaccines-
If you wanna
Mcbustard-
Air Guitar
Royal blood
Predicted number of set up
17
23
20
15
Predicted number of cuts
64
132
153
243
Predicted number of medium close up
37
80
98
180
Percentage of medium close up is used in the music
video
(37÷64) x 100= 57.8%
(80÷132) x 100= 60%
(98÷153) x 100= 64%
(180÷243) x 100= 73%
faster the
tempo
By
observing the table and watching the music videos I believe that the faster the
tempo the more cuts are used is the video. Under the table there is an arrow showing the music tempo getting faster each time we watch a different video which increased the number of shots, cuts etc. This evidence shows that the tempo speed need to sync with the shots, as well as sync with the sound in the music video
The basis for visualising images comes from a psychological
process called synaesthesia, where you picture sounds in your mind’s eye. Derived
from anaesthesia (loss of feeling or sensation), the term synaesthesia is
formed by combining syn (with, together, similarity, alike) and aesthesia (to
feel, perceive). Commonly defined as “A sensation in one part of the body
produced by a stimulus applied to another part - or- Production, from a
sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a
sense-impression of another kind. This
idea is absolutely central to understanding music video as they build on the
soundtrack’s visual associations in order to connect with the audience and
provide that additional pleasure.
Quote The music theorist Andrew Goodwin claims that a good music
video is:
‘…a film that responds to the pleasures of music, and in
which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that music is
made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual
associations.’ In my media lesson we explored this theory by listing to
music videos and start to visual the video without looking at it for the first
time and try to embed our visualization into images on a piece of paper. We had
to draw anything that we visual from the sound and music and apply it into our pieces
of visualizations. The music videos we explored in our lessons and applied
Andrew Goodwin’s theory were:
The xx- The visulisation we imagined for this music video were, alleyways, characters in hoods, dark/dim places, some sort of journey, blurry effects. After listening to the song for the our first time and draw our visualisation we watched the video to compare our visuals and the actual music video. In my experience, I believe Goodwins theory is again proved right, as the majority of mine and the class visuals where in the video.
Josh Record- For this music video, majority of our class drew stars (which connotes a dark and starry sky), rings, hearts and the main singer with his girl ( a couple in a relationship), due to the slow pace music and rather romantic lyrics. As we can see from the offcial music video, our visualisation were smiliar, even though we have never watched/ seen the video before.
This processes tells us that when creating our music videos in the year, we need to first listen to the song and see what we visuals we subconsiously picture in our minds eyes.
Matching visuals to lyrics is doubtfully
more important in a music video, than matching visuals to sound. Nonetheless, I
accept and think it should equally be the same importance as sounds.
Lyrics and visuals interact
creating meaning. Clearly, production of meaning in music videos is complex,
compromised of several flows of audio-visual information. These flows interact
and the resultant meaning is perceived as one complete whole, created by both
the ears and eyes. In many music videos a new meaning is added to the banal
lyrics through metaphorical language, often with an amusing twist. When
presented well, the concurrence of lyrics and text opens a dimension that an create
a poetic experience. For instance, in the music video King by the band the song
'Years & Years' uses the method
of matching visuals in a metaphorical way. The lyrics in the music video implies
being under-controlled, and the lead singer is being pushed and pulled by white
costume people, which represents him being measured and controlled by physically moving him around.
The people are dressed in white to present that in reality they don’t exist as
they match and camouflage the exact wall colour, but the people exists in the
lead singers mind.
The opposite of the metaphorical
joining of lyrics and images occurs when the illustration to the lyrics are
simply illustrated by the visual imagery. For instance, if a dog is mentioned
in the lyrics, we see a dog on the TV-screen, if a child is mentioned, we are
shown a child. Like a salad of images where the visual story is missing, the
story is carried by the music and lyrics and not by an independent visual
story. For example, in the song 'Fester Skank' by Lethal Bizzle is very
accurate and literal between visuals and lyrics throughout the music video.
For example the joining of lyrics and image in the binging of this music video such as when hear 'you might see me on a Lambo' we as an audience see the lead singer on a fake toy Lambo, also when we hear '2 2 chicken...' we are presented with two chickens in the that shot etc.
The most important thing to know is the music dictates the
edit. Cuts, transitions, and effects should coincide with the flow of the
music, becoming a visual extension of the song. The coordination of the music
and the edit builds the overall viewing experience for the audience. The audio
helps to lead and pace the changing imagery. A straight cut between two clips
of video can be visually jarring, the juxtaposition of two different images is
not natural to the human experience.
When a cut is synced in time to an audio
hit, such as a beat in a music track, it becomes a natural transition. The same
thing goes for effects and transitions that coincide with audio events, the
audio carries the impact of the visual effect. A music video is a
straightforward example of video coordinated with audio. When making a music
video the goal of the video editor should be to craft the most cohesive
integration between video and audio, effectively engaging the audience with the
whole of the two parts as they become one. Its very important to use the sync method very professionally and accurately between the visuals and sound. If it did not accurately sync all thorough out the whole music video ,then it will have a poor quality of literal meaning to the audience. For instance in the music video 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen is a performance and concept base. However, the wording of lip reading is out of place in some points of the video. I believe the reason behind this, is that the music video is an older song created in the 90's, meaning the media technology (at the stage of post production) at that period of time was more difficult and harder to create a perfect match and sync throughout a whole video.
Reference the song’s instrumentation and structure through the video’s visuals. Whenever a particular instrument or riff happens in the track it can be reinforced by the repetition of the same effect or a related visual. This doesn’t just apply to the instrumentation, structure is an important part of song writing and can be applied to video editing. Popular music often follows similar patterns consisting of multiple verses, a repeated chorus, and the use of a musical bridge to transition between key and tempo changes. The video editor should take note of these musical structures and build a corresponding visual style to match. This way the visual repetition of the music video will follow the auditory structure.
To add to that, although in the music video 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen had some minor lip-syncing, there were aspects of visuals sync with sound such as instruments that are played through some shots in the video, which makes up for the slight out of sync shots as it drives the music video to keep it flowing.
The video needs to be a partner for the track and visually
tell the story of the song, whether it’s a narrative or a performance by the
music artist. Every frame counts in a music video and every edit needs to match
up with the music in the context of the video. The music should drive the edit,
with the beat often supplying the perfect moment for a cut between shots. This
should be considered more of a guideline and an opportunity but not a hard-line
rule. If a video were cut with a different shot coming in at every single beat
it would be overwhelming, disconnecting the audience from the song.
Correspondingly, in the music video 'I Got U' by Duke Dumont uses the matching visuals to sound in a very careful and smart way, for example when the main character is shot in reality whilst he is drifted away by the headsets he bought, the music that is coming through the headsets is muted/ silenced. This creates the atmosphere of reality how music sounds like when coming out of headsets to the audience.
