John Stewart of the music production company Oil Factory, suggests that increasingly music videos reflect the desire of a director to demonstrate their power. The work of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham (see me if you want to borrow any of these directors showreels) is perhaps the most striking example of authorial voice and demonstrates the potential of the medium to reach a mass audience with unusual and experimental work.
The famous music director Jonas Akerland commented that “Music videos aren’t meant to be more than eye candy, not supposed to live long, only supposed to be lifting up the music and make the artist look good. Not supposed to be an art piece lasting for years.”
Jonathan Glazer the director for Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’ video (1996) said “Your images may be the thing that defines the sound… it’s a really strange 3 minute period where you have to hook the audience visually.”
Spike Jonze said in 2000 “I look at short videos as short films, I always make sure they have a beginning, middle and end”.
David Fincher who directed features such as Seven and Fight Club after his success in making music videos commented that “Video is truly abstract, you have complete carte blanche in terms of what it can show”.
So, as you can see the directors have very different views and approaches to making promos.
Mac Miller's 'I am who I am (Killing Time)'s music video was directed by Ian Wolfson of Rex Arrow. I like this video as I believe it's such a unique visual to match the video, giving feeling of nostalgia and as if you were dreaming. Ian Wolfson is one of my favourite music video directors as he has been working with Mac since he started and by watching their videos chronologically you can see the videos become more sophisticated and deep, just like the content of Mac's songs. I like to think that he will inspire my idea as in this video it visually looks like a work of art, I would like to have the same feeling with my own.
Flatbush Zombies and Trash Talk's '97.92' was directed by AplusFilmz' & Pier Picture's house directors. It was created using a 360-degree HD camera rig with a remote-controlled drone octo-copter. The device is the H3Pro7, which shoots with 7 GoPro cameras all rolling simultaneously. The 7 shots are synced and stitched together to create the full-360 spherical view, which can then be manipulated with the effects and camera movements you see here. This is one of my favourite music videos purely for the use of modern technology to help their artistic vison. I don't think this video will inspire my music video too much, as we would not be able to film and create the same effects that are demonstrated in this video.
Fiske says that people naturally categorise events that take place in their reality in reference to their experiences in the past.. People tend to believe that genre is based on real life, however, the human mind tends to give real life events context. For example - when something seemingly super natural takes place in real life such as, if an object might randomly fall off a shelf in a supposedly haunted location on a ghost walk, people will witness this in reference to things they have seen in The Exorcist or other such films. This is convenient for producers and helps them target a market and audiences whose expectations are satisfied.
Henry Jenkins
Jenkins says genre constantly breaks rules through hybridization – mixing genres: "Hybridization is now commonplace to maximize audience appeal but also to offer a unique selling point by appearing to break the rules e.g. Submarine is both social realist in format but using comedy conventions typical for a rites of passage film".
John Hartley
Hartley says genre is interpreted culturally. He gives the example of Bollywood films, which are predominantly watched and interpreted culturally by a Hindi target audience who “understand the encoded metaphor and meaning through the elaborate dance routines”.
Daniel Chandler
Chandler feels that genre is too restricting for filmmakers and audiences. He gives the example of Gravity which limited its appeal due to predictability (notions of self sacrifice) even through Cuaron the director attempted much more than other 'space films' like Apollo 13. So there’s a type of ‘genre straightjacket’ evident.
Steve Neale
Neale says that audiences are familiarized with genres through repetition, but also led to believe that genres are evolving and changing by for example having strong female lead characters for instance in Tomb Raider, which challenges the physically strong, dynamic, violent, male hero in the action adventure genre. This creates and maintains the interest of audiences.
David Buckingham
Buckingham argues that genres are in a ‘constant process of negotiation and change’ and that they have to change and adapt to respond to cultural and social changes e.g. Brokeback Mountain has elements of the Western but the central story is about the love between two men, which breaks the mold of the conventional Western tough man womaniser.
Jason Mittel
Mittel shows that the industry uses genre to produce profitable material, exploiting audiences who enjoy certain types of representations e.g. tabloid newspapers and the obsession with celebrity gossip which is also used as a form of synergy with programmes like "I'm a Celebrity - Get me out of Here!"
Barry Keith Grant
Grant explains that defining film genres is surprisingly complex and that idea of genres only developed relatively recently after the 1940’s when genre pioneer Andre Bazin wrote about Gangster and Western films. Since then it has been used as a convenient label to catagorise a film and manipulate audience preferences. However the difficulty of classifying genres is because of ‘impurity’ – where genres merge.
Rick Altman
Altman notes that film classification by genre is the logical continuation of genre classification in literature. It divides an art form into various categories and simplifies a possibly comples subject matter by fixing points and giving some useful co-ordinates to the audience.
Genre in music helps us categorise different styles of music into conventional categories that have set conventions. It means classifying a text according to its content and style as well as its structure and way of production. Generalising, most music can be divided into these categories, with the exception of sub-genres - each of them contains a variety of sub-genres, as well as hybrids and mash-ups.
Pop
Classical
Hip-Hop/Rap
Dance/Techno/House
R&B
Rock
Metal
Country
Jazz
Blues
Reggae
Pop
Pop music (a term that originally derives from an abbreviation of "popular") is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes. Pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, but as a genre is particularly associated with the rock and roll and later rock style. The embedded video below is Lana Del Rey's 'National Anthem', which falls into the sub-genre of Indie Pop.
Sometimes genres can cross over, in this instance Charli XCX's pop song is interrupted by a rap verse from Danny Brown:
Classical Classicalmusic, strictly defined, means music produced in the Western world between 1750 and 1820. This music included opera, chamber music, choral pieces, and music requiring a full orchestra. To most, however, the term refers to all of the above types of music within most time periods before the 20th century.
Rhythm & Blues
Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B or RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the late 1930s. The term 'Rhythm and Blues' was first introduced into the American lexicon in the late 1940s: designate upbeat popular music performed by African American artists that combined Blues and Jazz.
Hip-Hop/Rap
The music genre was the developed after product of Hip-Hop culture, a subculture which can be defined and recognised by four key elements: MCing/Rapping, DJing/scratching, break dancing and graffiti writing. As Hip-Hop is one of my favourite genres - I will show a few sub-genres that are part of the main genre.
Hip-Hop - Psychedelic Hip-Hop
Psychedelic Hip-Hop is a style of Hip-Hop music that is defined by complex sample-based beats, often about obscure material, witty and with abstract lyrics with far-out references. The video I have embedded below is a modern day example of this sub-genre.
Hip-Hop - Drill-Hop
The video embedded below is Chief Keef's 'Everyday', this song falls into the sub-genre of Drill Music/Drill-Hop, originating from the south side of Chicago. The genre is defined by it's grim, violent lyrical content and heavy trap influenced beats.
EDM Hip-Hop Electronic Dance Music Hip-Hop is a sub genre which falls under the sub genre of Experimental Hip-Hop, producers and DJ's that usually make EDM music create very fast paced instrumentals that work extremely well when rapped over. EDM Hip-Hop is becoming very commercialised as of the EDM factor. Below I have embedded A-Trak's 'P*ss Test' this shows a popular indie EDM artist with a few rappers featuring on the track.
Rock Music
Rock music evolved from rock and roll and pop music during the mid and late 1960s. Harsher and often self-consciously more serious than its predecessors, it was initially characterized by musical experimentation and drug-related or anti-establishment lyrics.
Rock and Roll
'Rock and Roll' is a sub genre of Rock, a type of popular dance music originating in the 1950s, characterized by a heavy beat and simple melodies. Rock and roll was an amalgam of black rhythm and blues and white country music, usually based around a twelve-bar structure and an instrumentation of guitar, double bass, and drums. I have embedded my a live video of my favourite Rock and Roll artist below.
Metal
Heavy Metal is a genre of rock that includes a group of related styles that are intense, virtuosic and powerful, the aggressive sounds of the distorted electric guitar drive metal to be arguably one of the most commercially successful sub genres of Rock Music. The video below I have embedded is my favourite metal and band - Trash Talk 'Awake'.
Blues
Blues is a genre of music developed from rural African-American experience, derived from an oral tradition of field hollers and work songs, usually performed in unison by slaves and prisoners. Although the blues' roots are in African rhythms, early Mississippi Delta blues musicians often incorporated elements of folk and Appalachian-derived "hillbilly" music into the creation of the blues.
House
House music is an electronicup-tempostyleofdiscomusiccharacterizedbydeepbassrhythms,pianoorsynthesizermelodies,andsoul-musicsinging,sometimeswithelementsofrapmusic. I have embedded an example of a house track below.
Jazz Jazz is defined as a style of music, an American culture and distinguished by flexible rhythmic tempo, as a base accompanied with improvisation of solo and ensemble on basic tunes and chord patterns.
Reggae
Reggae music is a genre that first took form during the late 1960s in the country of Jamaica. It is a genre that is defined by its distinctive rhythm, instrumentation and lyrical content.
Country
a form of popular music originating in the rural southern US. It is a mixture of ballads and dance tunes played characteristically on fiddle, banjo, guitar, and pedal steel guitar. Also called country and western.
Below is an embedded Youtube video of a short music video that myself and my group created using Adobe Premiere Pro. We were given the video clips, and had to source our own copyright free music online, then had to edit it all together and include various cuts between the different video clips, we found that using markers in Premiere Pro really helps with keeping track of where to arrange and position clips.
Below I have attached screenshots showing the techniques we used on the editing task in premiere pro.
The video starts with a crane shot panning upwards showing the sea and a beach close up, which then dissolves into a graphic match of a fast moving image which looks to be filmed out of a moving car which then dissolves into very slowly panning shot of the swimming pool in Mac's house. The scene has been set with very bright imagery and aesthetically pleasing imagery, which creates a calm mood along with non diegetic background music (which is infact a slow tempo piano version of the instrumental used in Missed Calls). After the establishing shots, the video cuts to show Mac and his girlfriend laughing and eating take out food, followed by a variety of clips portraying them as a very happy couple in love. The background music got gradually louder as the video progressed up until 1:16 where the video cuts (and the music stops suddenly and starts to quietly ring) to a black screen and the title "Missed Calls" slowly appears.
As the start of the the song starts to play a low angle pan of Mac looking over his balcony shows Mac looking a lot more serious than in the previous clips, and as the video progresses it shows how their relationship is failing as Mac is constantly putting his many concerts, studio sessions and late nights out before her. The video cuts between Mac driving his convertible car down the freeway, which we later find out that he is driving to the wedding of his (ex) girlfriend, as he realised that his priorities were in the wrong order. The lyrics of the song show this as he sings on the hook - "Baby i got missed calls and emails, all going into detail, bout how you not happy and you think you gotta leave, so go". The video leaves the viewer on a cliffhanger, as we don't know if he will successfully stop the wedding and everything will go to plan, this is good technique as it doesn't give too much away and leaves the audience continue thinking about the video even after they watch it.
While some music videos transcend genres, others can be more easily categorised. Some, but not all, music channels concentrate on particular music genres. If you watch these channels then over a period of time, you will be able to identify a range of distinct features which characterise the videos of different genres. These features might be reflected in types of mise en scene, themes performance, camera and editing styles. If one were to summarise these different styles one could say they can be broken down into the following three styles:
Performance
Performance videos usually show a live performance of the artist/band or just them performing , they can include some scenes from a story/plot to make it more interesting and sometimes animation is added.
Narrative A narrative is a music video which tells a story, either non-fictionional or fictionional events, portraying a short story/film. Narrative music videos are an interesting type of music video as the narrative script is how the director interprets how the song would be visually, so the it's like making a film from a single song. This particular type of video can engage the audience as they are very interesting to watch, and the audience might be able to relate to the storyline e.g. a breakup or death in the family. Below is a selection of my favourite narrative based music videos:
Concept Based Concept based music videos tend to be very aesthetically unique. They are usually based around a single idea or concept, and tend to be fairly unusual or for a more niche and indie audience as the commercial world demands more 'normal' video ideas.
As Digital Technology is advancing rapidly, it opens the door to a new type of media consumer - the prosumer. Average consumers can now be their own producer, being able to easily create their own media productions at home. High quality video cameras are now more compact, more user friendly and cheaper to buy as well as editing softwares such as iMovie and Adobe After Effects provide great editing tools while being very easy to use and considerably cheaper than AVID (used by most production companies).
Youtube is a video sharing platform that allows users to share their own homemade promo's online for free. The videos will be listed in the same format as those made by professional production companies for official artist's videos.
UK grime artist 'Skepta' has recently won the MOBO award for best music video this year, when it only cost him £80 to make. The homemade aesthetic works well as it represents the UK grime scene, you can tell he's been filmed in front of a green screen then been layered over older clips of him and his crew.
Since it's launch in 1981, MTV has been the main relevant source for current and new music videos. MTV was meant to be the video equivalent to the radio, using 'video jockeys' (VJ's) to select which music videos would be played. The demographic has moved from young adults to be primarily targeting adolescent and teenagers.
Viral is the term used to describe anything that has become very popular in a short space of time through the use of the internet - social media, sharing and email. Viral videos create a 'buzz' about the song and artist, giving them more recognition in the business and in to the public. The most modern day social media for creating viral hits is 'Vine'. Vine lets the user take a 6 second video and upload it, where it can be displayed to the public. Vines are constantly shared on all other platforms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. A good example of a song that went viral because of a Vine is the artist 'Riff Raff's' song 'Tip Toe wing in my Jawwdins'. Thousands of users used the song to create a comical response to various situations or as background music, which results in the creation of a hilarious 6 second loop.
Below I have embedded the original song:
Below I have embedded a vine remake of 'Tip Toewing in my Jawwdins':
Promotional activity can help to identify and address a specific market. The need for specific marketing has to fall into one of two categories:
Trial: Where you get your customer to try your product or service for the first time.
Loyalty: Increasing the chance of a customer returning to continue purchasing your product or service before buying it. Promotional activity operates most often in partnership with other marketing activity. Typically this will be advertising but may also include direct mail, public relations or sponsorship campaigns. Advertising acts mainly to build awareness and imagery of the product’s key attributes – brand values.
The Advantages
Promotional activity can be targeted to a greater degree than other forms of advertising.
Promotions can be timed and results viewed over a more specific and much shorter timeframe than conventional advertising.
Perhaps most importantly, promotional campaigns can be quantified relatively easily and as results are more readily available, activity can be accurately evaluated.
“For music video, permission should be sought from the artist for use of the audio track.’ Where this rule was breached, centres either didn’t comment on the use of found material, or acknowledged its use but did not reflect it in the marks allocated. In these cases significant adjustments were made to construction marks which potentially jeopardised the order of merit in a centre, thereby affecting the outcomes for those candidates who had followed the requirements of the Specification; such a situation may also result in all work being returned to the centre for remarking.”
A Music Video is a short film or video that
accompanies a complete piece of music, most commonly a song. Modern music
videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote
the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back even
further, they came into their own in the 1980s, when MTV’s format was based
solely around them.
During the pre production of our opening title sequence, as a class we were given the chance to interview a film editor via Skype. Mike Harrowes' advice truly helped my groups creativity when structuring our opening title sequence.
To generate ideas for where we should film our opening title sequence, as a group we visited different locations to view and get a feel for the choice of surroundings.
Production
During production, my group were creative when filming as the camera crew found a problem with the sunlight's glare, and to overcome this obstacle we found another spot to do the scenes and shots that were affected.
Post Production
During the post production stages, I feel that we were very creative on the whole, as we created custom graphics for the sniper scene to make it look as if the screen was a sniper viewfinder, and also positioned the credits to flow with what's on screen. Also the film's title 'Vindicate', was synchronised to flash up immediately after the trigger was pulled on Jeremy (playing one of the policemen), this didn't give too much away for an opening title sequence. The colours were chosen to portray specific meanings, as the white represented the innocence of the agent who was killed and the pink represents the blood shed.
During the process of working on the AS media task (preliminary task and the final opening sequence), myself and my group used various types of digital technology in order to produce a final product.
Pre Production:
During the filming of the Preliminary task, we used a Canon Legria, which is a high quality HD camcorder. This gave myself and the rest of my group a basic understanding of how a video camera works, which will help us in the opening title sequence filming. The Canon Legria uses an internal microphone, which unfortunately picks up background noise.
For editing, my group used professional softwares such as Final Cut Pro X and Adobe After Effects. As a group we all had to learn how to use them as this was our first time creating a film on them, but having access to these softwares greatly benefitted our final Preliminary Task.
Canon Legria
Production:
In the opening title sequence we used a different more advanced camera, the Canon 700D, which is a DSLR camera shooting in better quality than the previous camcorder and includes different more advanced features that were not achievable with the Canon Legria, so we learnt how to use the 700D effectively to capture our final opening title sequence.
Canon 700D
Post Production:
During the post production process we over dubbed the audio, as the microphone we used in filming picked up a lot of background noise. We rerecorded our spoken parts in a studio using an apple mac's Garageband software and a condenser microphone, giving a clearer sound without any unnecessary distracting background noise.
We used Final Cut Pro X and Adobe After Effects as we did in the preliminary task, the result of using these two programs was that our final product looked very professional as we were able to apply cuts, titles and visual effects to the film.
