Relative theorist: Throughout my work I tried to follow the
7 conventions that should be included in a music video. These conventions were
as followed:
- Links
between lyrics and visuals
- Links
between music and visuals (complimentary, contradicting or amplification)
- Genre
characteristics
- Intertexual
reference
- Notions of looking (objectification of
women)
- voyeurism
(direct gaze, other people looking at artist, insight into artist life)
- Demands
of record label.
However, we didn’t manage to achieve all the conventions but
it was important that we included some. For example, for number 1 in our draft
music video we made the link between the lyrics “turning my milk sour”, by
using a visual prop of us pouring milk over one of the artist. Number 2, we
tried to link the genre of the music which is Indie/rock with visuals that
match this. For example, the type of song and genre that we chose is very
energetic, therefore, we decided to make the visuals of our music video verry
energetic to challenge this convention. Number 2 links with number 3 as we
decide to make our music video very energetic, but also, throughout my media
products I used fonts that are commonly used throughout the indie/rock genre,
as I wanted to make sure that I was challenging Andrew Goodwins theory. Also, I
used colour pallets such as pink and black, which is commonly used throughout
our chosen genre. The 7th convention that Andrew Goodwin stated is
that it is a must that I follow the demands of the record label. It was
important to me that I followed this convention because I wanted to make my
products as realistic as they could possible be. For example, one of the
demands is that the record name/ logo is on the digipak somewhere, therefore I
challenged this and added the record label logo at the bottom of my digipak.
Before we started filming any part of our music video it was
very important that we carried out research from previous media products, to
help us come up with ideas for our own project.
When planning for our music video it was very important that
we all chose which genre we wanted to base our product around. After
researching and discussing the many different genres, it was clear to our group
that we wanted to choose the Indie/rock genre. There were several reasons why
we chose this genre. One of those is that we all have a good understanding of
some aspects in this genre, for example; some of us knew about the different
styling of which the artists wear in this genre, which we felt would come to a
great advantage for us when choosing what clothes to wear in the final video.
We also felt that other genres could be too challenging for us and could cause
too many problems when creating the video. For example, the majority of our
group listens to the Hip-Hop/Rap genre on a daily basis; therefore we felt that
this genre would be the best to use. However, we realised that this specific
genre would force ourselves to challenge too many of the existing conventions
in the Hip-hop/rap genre which could end up jeopardising our final grade. Due
to this factor we felt as a group we should stick to a genre that we could
still challenge the conventions but also keep it noticeable to our chosen
genre.
From our research in looking at the three different types of
music videos, which are narrative, disjunctive and performance videos, we were
able to come to the conclusion that we should create a performance video. This
decision was prompted by various existing performance videos that other male
bands, like ours, have created in the past. For example, the band Kasabian used
this type of video for the song ‘Eez-eh’ and Oasis used it for the song ‘Wonder
wall’. We decided to use this type of music video because we felt that the
conventions involved would help us create an extremely good quality final
video, as we would be able to experiment and challenge other media products
that already exist. Also, as we had limited space and props to carry out the
filming for our music video we decided that a performance video would be best
for us. This was because we only have access to guitars, drums and whatever
props we had at home or could buy for a small cost, due to our small budget.
Having a small budget wasn’t a problem, as from a lot of existing Indie/rock
music videos they seem to look like they have been filmed on a small budget as
well, for example, in the Kasabain Eez-eh video they have used one studio
throughout the whole video. This was an idea that stood out for us as this was
similar to our own situation, as we were unsure whether to use an outside back
drop or to use the school studio. Also, in the same video Kasabian used some
wacky props. We took this into consideration and decided we wanted to follow
the same conventions by using some of our own crazy, out of the blue props,
such as the cars and baseball bat. We also decided to challenge the conventions
the Indie/Rock genre by having wacky outfits. We felt that if we did this it
would make our product stand out from existing products and challenge however, this
was beneficial to us because these types of props, such as guitars and drums
are used frequently throughout the Indie/Rock genre.
The research didn’t stop there; we then needed to start
thinking about what we were actually going to do during the video. Because we
had already chosen to carry out a performance video we decided to take
inspiration from big name bands in the Indie/Rock genre. For example, we looked
at previous videos by Kasabian, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Snow patrol and several
others. We pin pointed and selected different parts of existing media products
and started to create our story board. From what we found out, is that many
previous Indie/rock music videos are very energetic, and has the band members
moving around and getting up close to the camera, such as the ‘Eez-eh’ music
video by Kasabian. As a result of this we wanted to challenge these conventions
and use some of these ideas in our own work by using a lot of movement in our
video and getting the group to get up close to the camera. A big part of our
work was that we wanted to express this through the use of facial expressions
and over the top dancing to match the up beat rhythm. For this we wanted to add
in some extreme close ups of our faces. For example we did this at minutes,
(0.51-0.52) (0.59-1.04).
In any visual media product such as a music video, the
camera angles are extremely important and we took this convention into account.
We looked at what professional bands such as Kasabian and Oasis have done in
the past and tried to challenge them. As a result of this we used a lot of hand
held camera shots with different angles, and also we used several static shots.
For example we have used hand held camera shots at minutes (0.24-0.32), (1.06-1.12),
(1.16-1.22), (1.25-1.33), (1.35-1.53), (1.58-2.04), (2.20-2.29), (2.40-2.49) (2.51-2.58). Below is some visual examples of this.
The final stage of the production of our media product was
the editing stage. At this stage we traced back to our research so that we
could gain some ideas for different types of editing to help our media product
stand out from existing products. During our research we came across a
performance video which had used extreme editing shots with a lot of negative
effect filters in. The use of these filters made the videos stand out and
caused us to use them in our own media product. However, to make our media
product stand out from our inspiration we chose to play around with the effect
and use a variety of different filters and colours, to help ours stand out over
the rest. An example of the use of these negative effects can be seen at
minutes (0.18-0.21), (0.26-0.29), (0.42-0.45), (1.05), (1.15) (.127-1.28),
(1.34) (1.40), (1.45) (1.53-1.55), (2.36-2.37), (2.41-2.43), (2.47-2.49).
