Who's doing what

This is a list of what each person in our group will be doing in our music video.

Actor - Josh
Camera Operator - Chris and Will
Continuity - Will
Costume Design - Will
Director - Chris and Will
Editor - Chris and Will
Lighting - Chris
Props - Will
Storyboard Artist - Chris

Because there are only two of us in our group, we have decided to share the major roles such as; director, camera and editor. This is because we both want to have a chance to contribute to these areas. We have shared the remainder of the roles because they are the smaller roles however they are still as important.

Audience Research - Questionnaire

We have created a questionnaire in order to help find casual trends in what audiences look for in a music video - which will help to better our own work when we begin the creation process. As we intend to create a video for those predominantly between the ages of 16 - 26, we had every reason to quiz students of their music video preferences.

Findings will be posted shortly.

Ancillary Task - Webpage Analysis

http://www.thescriptmusic.com/gb/home/

First and foremost the main emphasis on The Script's official website is the integration of social networking in order to help promote their band on websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Although this may not necessarily be possible for us with our own project - it will be important to remember the value of appealing directly to our intended audience - which will be of a similar demographic to those of The Script. Younger adults will be those using said sites and they are exactly who we intend to target with our production. The embedded video is something that I feel is worth emulating on our own web page as it gives it further exposure. The grunge/sepia tones reflect the band's style and again - those they aim to target. This sleek aesthetic is in popular demand among similar natured band's websites and it is possible we will seek to give our own webpage the same look.

Ancillary Task - Digipack

This album came out this year and is Joe Bonamassa's 10th album. The blues rock singer has recently toured in the UK at some local venues such as Ipswich Regent and the Corn Exchange in Cambridge.



The digipack itself is in black and gold (relating to the name of the album 'Black Rock'). The style is very simple but effective which contains throughout the digipack. Inside, the sleeve shows a lot of images of Joe Bonamassa in the studio along with messages to his fans of what to expect from the album. The digipack also lists the people involved with the album such as the band. Unlike most other albums, this one does not list the lyrics to his songs however does list the title of each song. Another unconventional aspect to his album is a list of the instruments used especially a long list of guitars. The album also shows off the character of Joe Bonamassa by adding in humour to the sleeve for instance a list of 'random things in the world to avoid'.

I like the idea of a simplistic front cover for our digipack, focusing on two or three colours, such as black and gold. Also we need to show the artist either in the sleeve or on the album cover. Our digipack would be better with the lyrics to the song inside, unlike this album, so our audience can read them.

Planning - Storyboards

Storyboards include the following: Shot type, frame transition as well as the narration of each particular shot. Clearly storyboards will not entirely reflect the finished piece - though they give a more concise outline of what we plan to do and help us to determine how to logistically go about filming our work.

Letter of consent

We were prompted to write to the record label of our desired song, asking for permission to use their song in our video. We have written to EMI Music asking for their consent for the use of 'The Sun and The Rain' by Madness.

The song for our music video

The song we have chosen is 'The Sun and The Rain' by Madness. We picked this song after much discussion. Madness are a British pop/ska band from Camden Town, London, that formed in 1976. We wanted to pick a song that was not very well known and even though many people don't know Madness they may have heard some of their songs. For instance 'Baggy Trousers', 'Our House' and 'One Step Beyond'.

Brainstorm

This is our brainstorm which shows some ideas for the type of song we would like to do. The first idea is 'End where I begin' by The Script. For this song we thought our video could be a performance/narrative about a man and women arguing which leads to her throwing out his stuff. This intercuts with the man walking in the rain in the street carrying his stuff.

Our other idea is 'The Sun and The Rain' by Madness. This is our favourite idea so far and for our video we thought we could have a homeless man changing into a suit as he walks around the town centre. In the song there is an instrumental so at this point the man could do some sort of dance to fill this space as well as entertaining its audience. The man would eventually come back to where the video started and he sits back down to beg. The video would be presented as a performance/narrative video, similarly to the Script song.

Initial Deadlines

These are the deadlines we have been given:

All planning and research tasks - Friday 26th November

All principle photography/filming - Tuesday 4th January

All construction work (including ancillary texts) - Friday 4th January

Evaluation - Friday 18th February

We hope to stick to these deadlines if not as close as possible.

Previous Student Work - Invaders Must Die

I found the video to be accurate in that it followed typical conventions of its particular genre of music video. There were fast paced edits utilised to match the tempo of the song where it was appropriate and in turn longer shots were used when the song did slow. The fact that it is a video with a quirky narrative illustrates the attention that has been paid to making sure that the video targets a desired audience and that it 'fits' into the typical expectations of this genre. Also - the use of lighting in the scenes showing the man in a jacket and is an effective way of developing the story.

I'm not as keen on the use of a fight scene and aim to avoid it in my own piece as, is so often the case if not done right, it lacks in authenticity and seems to jar the flow of a narrative. The video has shown me the importance of precise editing and how it needs to reflect the pacing of the song. As our song is fairly up beat - our use of editing needs to match it.

Previous Student Work - I Will Remember You

At the very beginning I like the idea of having the performer doing something before the song comes in for instance in this video the student is walking to the field (with diegetic sound) to where he will perform the song. I feel it gives it more of an introduction and gives the audience time to see where the artist is before the music is played. I also like how the settings change for each verse. At the start the student is in a field which intercuts into woods, then he gradually goes further into the woods. The lip syncing is very good and it fits within the song. I also like how he goes back to where he was in the beginning of the video for instance outside the woods on a path and the video also cuts back to him on the field.

This music video has been shot very well however some of it does seem improvised whih is evident towards the end and also at the start the transitions between shots do not seem as fluid as they could be. I feel some of the shots are too long for instance when he is singing in the tree the shot goes on for 14 seconds. Also there is one shot when he is near the tree and you can see cars in the background which sorts of ruins that particular shot. I feel it is a good music video because the shots are kept in time with the music.

Previous Student Work - A Long Time Ago

This video follows a narrative with the use of "claymation" with intercutting real-life footage, which is a feature that I like. There are 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end' real-life shots that would initially lead us to believe the entire video is another narrative - but by cutting into clay-animation it immediately gives the video something slightly unique. I also like the fact that the claymation has lyrical relevance (e.g. "a girl by the cigarette machine" - 1.44) as it gives purpose for the claymation to be there other than just for effect. The 'shaky' camera work is actually effective and conventional for stopmotion which is another positive of the video.

Slight complaints can be made in some lack of continuity shown in lighting and prop positioning (0.50) as well as clear sight of a wire at (0.43). Other than these slight errors the video is well shot and is unique conceptually - which is something that we hope to emulate in our own work.

Previous Student Work - Triple Trouble

This student music video uses some very simple but very effective techniques to make it a well made video. The beginning of the video shows the camera being sped up as it goes towards the three performers. The bits in the video I like are when they are shown on a billboard. This is a brilliant part of the video because it shows off the quality of the editing. Another section of the video which shows off their editing skills is when two shots are split together so it looks like a split screen and one of the performers are shown twice (1.12).
The video also uses some good tracking shots and other good camerawork. Also the colour schemes are good for instance the background is in black and white but the clothes they wear are in colour which makes them stand out. Another simple technique used is just reversing the shot which is very effective.
Throughout the video they use a lot of shots which keeps in time with the music, because it is a fast song they have managed to keep the shots at a similar speed to the video. Finally I like the way they have used still images for some of the lyrics to add more humour to their video.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was a breakthrough in music videos for a number of reasons. Though it wasn't necessarily the first time an artist had made video clips to accompany songs - it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. These videos could then be shown on television shows, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers. According to guitarist Brian May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops, since they would have looked "off" miming to such a complex song. The video has been touted as that which helped launch the 'MTV age' due to it being the first video to ever be widely aired on British TV.

The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a Queen video prior. The video was recorded in just four hours in November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. The video opens with a shot of the four band members in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Freddie Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo was the band's "favourite image of themselves."


All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed line "go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare similar to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The tail end of the video sees it transition to live footage of a performance of their's, before closing on the original underlit shot. Again, this video illustrates the importance of promoting the artist themselves within a music video (whether it be performance or narrative) and how this can be related to Goodwin's ideas of typical conventions for these videos. In taking inspiration from these shown examples for our own work - we have decided that featuring our 'artist' in the video itself is imperative.

a-ha - Take on Me

The music video to "Take on Me" was directed by Steve Barron, and filmed at Kim's Café and on a sound stage in London in 1985. The video used a pencil-sketch animation/live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced-over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. Approximately 3,000 frames were rotoscoped, which took 16 weeks to complete.

The video depicts a romantic fantasy narrative. The concept was devised by Steve Barron - which was based on a comic book he read as a young child featuring "guys racing against each other on motorbikes and sidecars". A girl reading a comic book in a greasy spoon cafe - played by Bunty Bailey of dance troupe Hot Gossip - is attracted to a sketched version of Morten Harket (a-ha's lead singer) before she finds herself sucked into his' animated world. The pair are pursued by violent motorcyclists before the singer breaks out of the animation and they are finally reunited in the real world. The narrative touches on a stereotyped tale of the 'damsel in distress' ultimately being saved by the main protagonist.

At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, the video for "Take on Me" won six awards—Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice—and was nominated for two others, Best Group Video and Video of the Year. It was also nominated for Favorite Pop/Rock Video at the 13th American Music Awards in 1986. It is arguable that the notoriety gained by the video stems from it being one of the first instances that a music video's reception has been viewed as instrumental to the song's general success. Its' seamless entwining of real-life footage and cartoon had never been seen in such a way before within a music video. It also exploits prominent aspects of culture in the 1980's - such as comic books, romance in a narrative, etc. If the video were to be deconstructed using Goodwin's Six - the heavy promotion of the lead singer would make his theory of 'multiple close ups of the main artist or vocalist' relevant. The fact that the video is centred around a comic strip could also be seen as an 'intertextual reference to other media texts'. It is, to this day, regarded as one of the most commercially successful music videos of all time.

The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony

The music video to "Bittersweet Symphony" features Verve singer Richard Ashcroft lip-synching the song while walking down a busy London pavement; with him refusing to change his stride or direction throughout, apparently oblivious to what is going on around him. He repeatedly bumps into passers-by (causing one woman to lose balance and fall), narrowly avoids being hit by a car, and jumps on top of the bonnet of another vehicle stopped in his path (the driver gets out of her car and proceeds to pursue and shout at him, while he continues unbewildered). At the end of the video, the rest of The Verve join Ashcroft, and the final shot sees them walking down the street into the distance - which leads into the beginning of another of their music videos. ("The Drugs Don't Work")

Ashcroft starts walking from the southeast corner of the intersection of Hoxton and Falkirk Streets in Hoxton, north London, subsequently proceeding north along the east side of Hoxton Street. The "pavement journey" format was inspired by the music video for the Massive Attack song "Unfinished Sympathy", in which Shara Nelson sings while walking through a Los Angeles neighbourhood.

The video is effective in that it has barely any edits in it at all due to the fact that it uses a prominent tracking shot throughout, only taking brief cuts toward the end. This isn't often done in videos and consequently makes the video stand out from the number of typical performance videos that see the artist on stage with frequent cuts.

Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine

The "Sweet Child o' Mine" video shows the band rehearsing in the Huntington Ballroom at Huntington Beach, surrounded by crew members. All of the band members' girlfriends at the time were shown in the clip. The video was extremely successful on MTV, and helped launch the song to success on mainstream radio. The video itself is one of the best performance videos of all time. One of the reasons for this is because the video shows them performing in colour but from the crew member's point of view its in black and white. When it is in black and white the camera shows the band not performing instead they show them getting ready to rehearse.

In an effort to make "Sweet Child o' Mine" more marketable to MTV and radio stations, the song was cut from 5:56 minutes to 4:12, with much of Slash's guitar solo removed. This move drew the ire of the band members, including Axl Rose, who commented on it in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone: "I hate the edit of 'Sweet Child o' Mine.' Radio stations said, "Well, your vocals aren't cut." "My favourite part of the song is Slash's slow solo; it's the heaviest part for me. There's no reason for it to be missing except to create more space for commercials, so the radio-station owners can get more advertising dollars. When you get the chopped version of 'Paradise City' or half of 'Sweet Child' and 'Patience' cut, you're getting screwed."

On an interview on Eddie Trunk's New York radio show in May 2006, Axl Rose stated that his original concept for the video focused on the theme of drug trafficking. According to Rose, the video was to depict an Asian woman carrying a baby into a foreign land, only to discover at the end that the child was dead and filled with heroin. This concept was rejected by Geffen Records.I like the idea of having the artist in the video performing however I wouldn't have it cut in with black and white footage because it probably wouldn't be very clear in our music video.

Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer

Sledgehammer is a widely popular and influential music video directed by Stephen R. Johnson. Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. The video ended with a group of extras rotating around Gabriel, among them: Gabriel's daughters Anna and Melanie, the animators themselves, and director Stephen Johnson's girlfriend. Also included were six women who posed as the back-up singers of the song. Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time.

In 1987, it won nine MTV Video Music Awards, a record which still stands today. It ranked at number four on MTV's 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made (1999). MTV later announced that "Sledgehammer" is the most played music video in the history of the station. "Sledgehammer" has also been declared to be MTV's number one animated video of all time.

The video was also voted number seven on TMF's Ultimate 50 Videos You Must See - first aired 24 June 2006. It ranked at number 2 on VH1's "Top 20 Videos of the 80's" as well as being named the No. 1 "Amazing Moment in Music" on the Australian TV show 20 to 1 in 2007.The portion of the song featuring the synthesized flute solo was realised in the video by first one and then two oven-ready turkeys, headless and featherless, animated using stop-motion. These were animated by Nick Park (of Wallace and Gromit fame) who, at that time was refining his work in plasticine animation. The video won Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards. Also, the video was nominated for the Best Music Video category for the first annual Soul Train Music Awards in that same year.

This was a breakthrough music video because of the animation used in it and that is has a unique concept to it. It is however a performance video because the artist is shown in front of the camera as he sings to the song. What makes the music video is what is happening behind him with the animations. They create the story for the song by using animations that fit. I like the idea of having the artist in the video because it is more personal and also having something so simple like looking at the camera but with something happening in the background.

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

Gnarls Barkley's music video for "Crazy" is done in the style of the Rorschach inkblot test which is animated, mirrored inkblots morph into another, while taking on ambiguous shapes. Both Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse appear in the shapes, as do the band's gunshot/heart logo, "Satan", a cranium and various animals, including, birds, bats, spiders, centipedes and insects.

The inkblot illustrations were done by art director and motion graphic designer Bryan Louie, whose other works include commercial campaigns for the Scion tC. The music video for "Crazy" was directed by Robert Hales, who had previously directed music videos for Jet, Nine Inch Nails and Richard Ashcroft, amongst others.
The video was nominated for three 2006 MTV Video Music Awards: Best Group Video, Best Direction, and Best Editing, and won the latter two. It was also nominated for a 2006 MTV Europe Music Award for Best Video, but lost to "We Are Your Friends" by Justice vs. Simian.

It can be argued that this particular music video is a performance video because it shows the two band members: Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green. However it is a unique concept because of the use of animation in the style of ink images. The video shows a constant white background with the ink of the images on top. The video itself is very unique because it has not been done before which is why the song itself is so popular. Also because it is so unique many people are drawn towards it because no other video is like this one. We would like to make a unique music video however not in the style of Gnarls Barkley with imagery but with a concept not done before.

Director Study - Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry was born and raised in Versailles, France. He begun his film-making career by creating music videos for the French rock band ‘Oui Oui’ - of which he was the drummer. His craft work caught the eye of Bjork, who then went on to collaborate with Michel on a total of seven music videos. Gondry is best known for his inventive and extroverted visual style as well as his manipulation of mise en scene.

Other artists he has worked with on more than one occasion include Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead and Beck. As well as music videos, Gondry’s work extends to feature length and short length films, as well as T.V, adverts and documentaries. His controversial Levi 501 Jeans “Drugstore” commercial currently holds the record for “Most awards won by a TV commercial”. The advert never aired in the U.S due to its suggestive nature. Gondry has been involved in a wide number of different advertisements over the years including ones for Nike, Adidas, Motorola, BMW, Volvo, Heineken and many more.



In his 1998 Smirnoff vodka advert, Gondry pioneered the “bullet time” technique - whereby time and space undergoes extreme transformation, making the impossible possible. This was later adapted in The Matrix films. His works, especially in advertising, has been of great influence to the perceptions and expectations placed upon adverts. No longer do adverts solely serve to make people buy a product - as they are now also a form of entertainment.

Director Study - Jonathan Glazer

Born in 1966, Jonathan Glazer grew up to direct films, commercials and music videos. After studying theatre design at Nottingham Trent University, Glazer started directing theatre and making film and television trailers.

In 1993 Glazer teamed up with producer Nick Morris at Academy Commercials, where he wrote and directed three short films, entitled MAD, POOL, and COMMISSION, before moving on to direct music videos and commercials. His work in the music video field includes promotions for Massive Attack, Blur, Nick Cave, and the mufti-award winning films for Radiohead and Jamiroquai.

In 1997 Glazer was named Director of the Year at the MTV Video Awards and Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity was nominated for ten MTV awards. The video shows Jay Kay performing the song in a room. In a documentary, Glazer describes how the four walls move on a stationary grey floor with no detail, to give the illusion that the floor is moving. However, he does not reveal where the fourth wall is so in several shots, chairs and sofas are fixed to the walls so that they appear to be standing still, when in fact they are moving. In other shots chairs remain stationary on the floor, but the illusion is such that they appear to be moving. The moving walls were not completely rigid and can be seen in some shots to wiggle slightly. This can be seen when Jay Kay is dancing in a narrow corridor with other members of Jamiroquai.



His video for UNKLE Rabbit in Your Headlights picked an MVPA award for Best Foreign Video. The video uses a technique which Glazer would later use for the Richard Ashcroft song A Song for Lovers music video, being shot in real-time and allowing the diegetic sounds produced by objects and characters to be audible above the music. It differs from that video in that the music itself is non-diegetic.

More recently Glazer has concentrated on television adverts. In 2006 he directed an advert for Sony BRAVIA TV, which took 10 days and 250 people to film. It was filmed at a housing estate in Glasgow and featured paint exploding over the tower blocks.