When we began the process of creating our media product and music video, we first had the task of finding a band and a song that we felt would fit well with the styles of the group, and mix well with types of filming, editing, and general music taste that the group were comfortable with and enjoyed. This first step began with searching through YouTube individually and reporting any findings back to other members of the group. A few suitable songs and bands were found, but these artists were almost always under the copy right protection of a record label, and thus unsuitable for our independent video. After some searching around we came across a band called "The Novocaines", who had supported bands our group enjoyed (such as "The Crooked Vultures") and had a style of music that we felt would fit perfectly with the ideas we already had in our head. We first settled on using the song "Cup of Coffee", and emailed the band seeking permission. After they had granted us permission to use the song and had sent us a free mp3, we had second thoughts and re-evaluated our choices - eventually settling on "Ragdoll Blues", but having to buy the song from iTunes as we could not recieve another free copy. This song was seen as more suitable as it was longer, and had more varying tempos and a sound we felt generally suited the video more than "Cup of Coffee".
I then researched some music videos of my own for inspiration and ideas to put towards the video, as well as to learn how professionals handled creating high quality music videos. I studied the very entropic music video to "Karma Police" by Radiohead. This kind of video appealed to me very much as I found it interesting how the entropic concept of the video stuck in your mind, as it was dark and sinister, yet also unlike other videos from Radiohead (or in fact other similar bands). This helped us create our first idea for a narrative video, in which we would try and entropic approach to catch the audience's attention. I also looked up a more redundant style of video, by analyzing "All My Life" by Foo Fighters - a band much closer to the musical styling of The Novocaines. This also gave us ideas to do a performance based more redundant video, and possibly entwine the 2 styles, as the Foo Fighters video used this style to great effect in their video.
As a group we found it relatively easy to agree on good, creative ideas and each be happy with them. There were slight disagreements in style of costume, and a few of the shots we had in mind to use, as well as if we should go full performance or full narrative, or fuse the two together. The group luckily worked well together creatively, which took a lot of the stress off creating the video - less worrying about keeping everyone pleased as each mind was working on a similar level.
After presenting our ideas to a focus group and receiving feedback that they thought the video would work as a mix of narrative and performance, we began filming our music video. This presented challenges to us as the ideas we had presented and decided upon for the entropic narrative weren't jelling well with the style of the song, and when we came to editing we noticed performance elements taking priority over narrative as the very first cut developed. We consulted a focus group and found that they agreed that the video would work better as performance from what they had seen. This shows a definite convention in the style of music we used, having heavy performance based music videos with little to no humor or narrative seemed to work well for both the rock band we had chosen, and rock band's we had studied, such as Foo Fighters.
Our filming process of the performance was conventional to how a rock performance video would be filmed, with individual mining parts and group performance shots taking place one after the other, being edited together in final stages to look like one big performance. Lighting and setting may not have been as professional or expensive as other bigger and more funded music videos, but this worked to an advantage and helped give the video a rough, vintage and deliberately budget quality to the music video, and a grunge feel that goes well with the music - similar to that of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, also filmed in a school/college hall.
We found it difficult to be fully original in our music video, due to all the preset conventions already formulated by the music industry, especially in the form of rock videos that are performance based. We tried to stick out from the crowd by having costumes that are entropic, such as Hawaiian shirts and general bad taste in clothing. I feel the that our video will stick out to fans of the genre as taking a very redundant style of video, and adding quirky elements of entropy to it - for example, odd clothing, strange styles of playing guitar and over the top performing. The video has an equal balance of seriousness and fun, which should captivate viewers imaginations and assist in the enjoyment of the song. Walter John Williams believed that labeling a band with a style or genre is only a starting point and leads to targeting audiences - but you can't make the audience in the end like the product. I feel that after holding our focus groups appropriately and tweaking the video to match our ideas and feedback, that our video now appeals to a greater audience than it would have had we stuck to doing a narrative video, and I believe this is a main contributing factor as to why I believe it is a successful video.
No comments:
Post a Comment