Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is the psychological process in which your mind produces a visual image from a collection of sounds. The concept of synaesthesia is one of the most important aspects of understanding music video as the director builds on a song or pieces of music’s visual associations to connect with their target audience. Synaesthesia works by designing itself around the layering of the sound and the visual aspects allied with the song, this does not necessarily mean analysing the lyrics that accompany the music as they rarely have a lucid meaning that can be simply read off, but often you have to take into consideration the mood that the artist introduces.
The lyrics however, do have an important role to play in creating a sense of subject matter as key words or phrases that are in the chorus, which is repeated throughout the song, are likely to be more important than those in the verse which are usually just heard once.
Some argue that synaesthesia takes away the freedom of the fans to imagine the song how they like, and that creating a video for a song imposes a visual narrative on the audience that would not be there otherwise, as once you have seen the video to a song, it is extremely hard to associate it with any other visual images other than its official video. This links in again with what John Friske says about ‘MTV foregrounds the signifier over the signified’ essentially meaning that what you see is more important than what you hear.
The theory of behind ‘Grain of voice’ by Roland Barthes applies to this section particularly as Barthes sees the voice as a unique expressive tool that as fore-mentioned is completely unique which allows the singer to create associations for themselves or even a sort of trademark. This could all work alongside their ‘star image’, there are many distinct voices within the music industry, for example, Michael Jackson, Thom Yorke – Radiohead and E – Eels; these are all artists that stand out purely by using their vocal abilities as an expressive tool.
The musical arrangement of a song; instrumentation, mix and effects (including samples) generally all work in parallel with the lyrics and the grain of voice to create a certain experience the artist wanted you to feel. One example of lyrics not matching the Instrumentation, however, is the song ‘It’s a motherf**ker’ – Eels, as the music is very pretty and soothing but the lyrics as imaginable use the heavy repetition of the word ‘Motherf**ker’ which is a very ugly word, however it is almost as if this has been deliberately to contrast something so beautiful with something so ugly. In terms of music creating a visual image, an example could be crashing drums or loud piano would make you visualize a storm or perhaps thunder, while soft synthesizers would create a much more relaxing image, possibly the a calm sea. This works due to the fact that we all share a bank of random cultural images and references (intertextuality) this is a sense of a shored culture without which these references would make no sense. This intertextuality acts as a sort of catalyst that triggers a form of nostalgia. The sounds within popular music can lead to the appearance of mini-narratives; often triggered by things such as people, places, certain feelings or specific situations. These are related to the audience through lyrics and instrumentation, forming the basis for all music video creativity.

VH1 pop up video

Pop up video was a television show shown on VH1 that shows a variety of music videos, usually 5 per show and throughout the course of the music video little bubbles or ‘info nuggets’ popped up containing trivial facts and witticisms.
It was created by Woody Thompson and Tad Low and for a small amount of time it was the highest rated program on VH1 before it was eventually overtaken by ‘Behind the music’ in 1998.
The music videos were selected for each show to try and include new, older, "classic", and "campy" videos, the ‘info nuggets’ usually popped up at about 10-15 second intervals containing information about both the artist, the song, the video itself and random related facts.

To gain additional insight into the production of the video in question the researchers would often interview people such as:
· The Director· Make-Up artists· Choreographers· Models and Extras were also used as additional sources

One example of this is Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal, this example features trivial information on Jackson himself, the song lyrics, other actors within the video, costumes used and some of the initial idea behind the videos concept.

The overall aim of ‘pop up video’ is to dissect music videos therefore showing and comparing different generic conventions giving the viewer an insight into music video production. Watching a variety of different ‘pop up’ videos I have gained a better understanding of genre conventions, production techniques and the sheer scale of some music videos, all of which can be applied and in terms of scale, contrasted to my music video.

Videos go to the wall

‘Videos go to the wall’ is an article written by Andy Beckett on ‘the life and death of the pop promo’ and how they are taking music television with them.
His initial point is that ‘Tastes in pop videos – indeed, the taste for pop videos – have shifted and diminished.’ To back up his point he uses the extremely well known song ‘Save a prayer’ by Duran Duran, explaining its plot, highlighting how cliché it is, (very) and the conventions that were very popular in the 80’s in terms of music video. Things such as the big planes, the speedboats, the tropical settings, the suits, the use of slow motion, all of these are seen as very ‘cheesy’ and extremely cliché. Perfect for the eighties then. Also the huge costs that they took to produce; one of Duran Duran’s was rumored to have cost £900,000!
I agree with what Andy Beckett is saying in terms of the taste in and for music videos is shifting and changing, as that is inevitable, after all music videos are a commodity so they will always shift with the trends and contemporary culture. However, I do not believe that they are diminishing.

·Clichés and stereotypes have been ruled out due to the vast range of an artist’s personal view of him or herself.·Music Videos have in general become better with new technologies and new methods of filming them.·Although disjuncture is still very common, many songs follow a narrative which doesn’t involve ‘cheesy’ aspects.

Beckett also includes an interview with Christine Boar in his article, Boar work at MTV in London and she decides what goes on MTV. And in her point of view “It’s not exactly very exciting to have videos on all the time. It’s not interactive. It’s not personable…. When videos first came out, people thought, ‘Wow, someone’s put pictures to music.’ Now, they say, ‘Is the song good?’ People just have MTV on in the background.’ Maybe this could be something to do with what they found out in their research on what people thought of MTV Europe? People thought it was cheesy. But one thing is sure and that is that MTV as a channel is not as popular as it used to be, perhaps due to some of the factors listed below:
· The general opinion was that people thought music videos were cliché and critically rubbish.
· Music videos were also suffering due to the expense to produce them.
· Only one in four households had satellite or cable TV where music videos were shown.
· The emerging truth about music videos is that they were boring.
However, nowadays with the better availability of new technologies, and the new technologies themselves these problems are much easier to solve. So music video is becoming much more a way to ‘show – off’ the talent and ideas of directors, with much better concepts, images and ideas. This also enables the band to create themselves a ‘star image’ using music video. This is all tied together by the widespread use of sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook as these kind of sites enable artists to reach a much larger audience effectively and for free. YouTube particularly solves the issue of satellite or ‘multichannel’ television as more people have the internet than have multichannel television and YouTube has channels dedicated to music videos and artists. So overall ‘Videos go to the wall’ has given me a new perspective on music video and highlighted some of the common problems with music videos such a they are too cheesy or cliché. So it has shown some things that I should steer clear of when producing my media music video.

Directors

Chris Cunningham – Chris is an English music video director, most noted for his work on the video "Come to daddy" by Aphex Twin which was voted the 17th best video of all time by the readers of Q music magazine. The dark lighting, recurring face of Richard D. James (often distorted when show on a television screen) and the intimidating setting of the ‘Come to daddy’ video all add to the scary and slightly surreal element that is placed on the song in a loose narrative within the video. The idea and context of this video works perfectly with this song as the song itself features shouts and screams within it, which works perfectly with the overall ‘scary’ image.
Both this video and the video for "Windowlicker" by Aphex Twin feature fast camerawork and fact cuts in the editing process, this is because of the type of music the video is set to, and as it is drum and bass verging on electronica it warrants these fast cuts and fast camerawork. Otherwise the video would look wrong, or ‘out of place’ combined with a song like this.
Other notable Chris Cunningham video include:
· "Second Bad Vilbel" - Autechre
· "Only You" - Portishead
· "Frozen" - Madonna
· "Afrika Shox" - Leftfield featuring Afrika Bambaataa
· "Come On My Selector" - Squarepusher
· "All Is Full of Love" - Björk

Shynola – is the name of a group of, then, 4 visual artists who met in 1994 at The Kent Institute of Art and Design, and are now based in London. They have collaborated on several projects, but most notably on several music videos for pioneering artists. These four artists being Gideon Baws, Chris Harding, Richard Kenworthy and Jason Groves, however Gideon Baws passed away in 2008 aged 33. Their latest project, ‘Strawberry swing’ – Coldplay, is an incredible work of art as the video features the lead singer Chris Martin lying on the road, on top of elaborate chalk backgrounds that are cleverly draw onto the tarmac. This video uses the idea of stop motion but in a completely unique way as it is always the drawn-on background that is changing, this makes the video extremely repeatable and enjoyable many times over as the viewer always finds new bits in it. At the end of the video the animation stops and Chris Martin gets up and walks away reminding the audience of just how it was done and the techniques used.
The music video for "Strawberry Swing" premiered on 4 Music and Channel 4 on 29 July 2009 and later in 2009 it was nominated for the ‘best animation in a video’ category at the UK music video awards.

Other notable works by Shynola are:
· Guns Blazing - UNKLE
· On The Double - Grooverider vs. Cypress Hill
· Pyramid Song - Radiohead
· Eye for an Eye - U.N.K.L.E
· You Got the Style - Athlete
· Go with the Flow - Queens of the Stone Age
· E – pro - Beck

Jonas Åkerlund – is a Swedish born music and film director, he is best known for his work on music videos which are often mock movie trailers or short films.
Arguably one of his best known videos is that of The Prodigy – ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ in which all the camera work is point of view from one character and their night out in the city. It features drinking and driving, snorting cocaine, violence, vandalism, nudity and sex. The unedited version also including a scene of heroin use and a hit and run incident. The lead character then takes a stripper home, has sex with her and then as the stripper leaves with her belongings, the lead character glances in the mirror and reveals themselves to be a woman; who then promptly passes out on the bed.
Despite the many controversial aspects of this video, (most notably it was accused of promoting violence toward women) it was nominated for four MTV music video awards, winning best dance video and best breakthrough video. The first time The Prodigy actually viewed this video; they did not like it at all and refused to release it but Åkerlund persisted, and rang them up a few months later to ask them to watch it again, once they finally relented and watched it again, they found it to be in fact an incredible piece of work and that this time round the appreciated it to its full extent and released it immediately.

Other Jonas Åkerlund videos worth noting include:

• James Bond Theme - Moby

• Smack My Bitch Up - The Prodigy

• Ray of Light - Madonna

• Whiskey in the Jar - Metallica

• Canned Heat - Jamiroquai

• Corruption - Iggy Pop

• The Everlasting Gaze - The Smashing Pumpkins

• Me Julie - Ali G and Shaggy

• Beautiful - Christina Aguilera

• Beautiful Day - U2

• I Miss You - blink-182

• Paparazzi - Lady Gaga

• When Love Takes Over - David Guetta featuring Kelly Rowland

• We Are Golden – Mika

Trends within music video

Commodification – the idea that music videos are ‘the ultimate expression of various trends in contemporary culture coming together’. Commodification is easily applied to music videos as recently it is being recognized more and more as an art form in itself and a way of expression, thus becoming a commodity.
This is becoming the case more and more recently with the rise of sites such as iTunes where artists can sell their videos to the public as a marketable product as well as a form of creative expression.
This area of music video trend is not as prominent in my music video, however, I would like to take ideas such as repeatability and apply them to my video, making it simply repeatable and not a one hit wonder. Hopefully this will be achieved by using the stop motion technique making it an enjoyable and interesting media piece.

‘Textural ‘Schizophrenia’ – this is the when music videos are a complete detachment from reality and can be viewed as an expression of the director or artists inhibited feelings. An example of this can be seen in the Foo Fighters video – Everlong, where director Michel Gondry plays out a nightmare he used to have where his hand would become too large to perform any tasks whatsoever, he does this by applying this concept to the video and Dave Grohl’s hand becomes extremely large in order to help him attack and defend himself from the antagonistic characters within the narrative.
This information was sourced from ‘I’ve been twelve forever’ – DVD extra on Michel Gondry.
Textural Schizophrenia doesn’t really apply to my music video; however the creative and detached element of the video will come through stop motion and the fact that I aim to take pictures on a Canon EOS camera, then have them professionally printed then take pictures of them again, keeping the viewer interested and enabling the repeatability factor. This also creates a unique style of music video, giving it a believable ‘true’ element, while still making it clearly disjointed from a full screen shot.

Postmodernism and the disappearance of reality – this is looking at the increasingly blurry boundaries between reality and media and in the majority of music videos ceases to exist at all, however, genre’s such as rap, R’n’B and hip hop still have elements of realism within them. A good example of the disappearance of reality is Daft Punks’ video for ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ (produced by Daft Punk and directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi under the supervision of anime artist Leiji Matsumoto) featuring four characters supposed to be the band in an electronic facility where they are turned to resemble humans by various machine and electronic pieces of equipment. This video is in no way realistic due to the anime aspect which is both hand drawn and computer generated.
Although my media video will not use the principle of the ‘disappearance of reality’ within the context or the plot, my video is detached from reality due to the fact that it is in stop motion and it is clearly not realistic, this can be observed through the viewing of inanimate objects moving and performing tasks that are in no way feasible without human assistance.

Erosion of authenticity – this is basically the ratio between the importance of sound and image. Increasingly image far outweighing sound or meaning. However this erosion of authenticity can also be seen as an erosion of the relationship between the fan and the artist which has always been a main characteristic of rock and pop culture.
Lawrence Grossberg calls this the ‘ideology of authenticity’ meaning that music is at its most authentic state when people are playing instruments or performing live. So it is becoming an increasingly popular convention to have artists performing their instruments, performing ‘live’ or often miming in a music video to give a false sense of authenticity.
An example of this could be in the Jamie T video ‘sticks ‘n’ stones’ where the video shows him in various scenes around a city ‘performing’ the vocal parts to the song, when in actual fact it is miming. However, as the audience we go along with this inauthentic authenticity as we are more concerned about the aesthetics of the video rather than whether the video is deemed to be ‘real’ or not.
Another aspect of inauthentic authenticity is the labeling of songs at the beginning and end, this shows that is not an authentic performance and that it has been edited for television use, however they often label live sets or performances now as well, for the same purpose. Promotion. Radio DJ’s often forget to name the artist or even more crucially the song, making it very hard for people to market their songs on the radio and even harder for listeners to find them off the radio. This technique of labeling was introduced by MTV and has caught on widely in the search for promotion and advertising.
It has been suggested that music video is killing music or rock vulture, but it is just changing the face of it and making image more important that the music itself, and audiences are becoming much more concerned with the visual concept and aspect of the video than the song itself. This does however have repercussions, as artists who maybe have a poor image, but brilliant music may be overlooked or underappreciated. However there are always people who break all conventions and achieve success when everything point against them, for example Seasick Steve.

Music videos are crucial in establishing an artists’ performer identity or persona, especially now as the visual aspect is so important especially to youth ‘MTV’ culture. This is summed up by John Friske when he says that ‘MTV foregrounds the signifier over the signified’ saying that MTV promotes the idea of image before message. There have been other criticisms of music video saying that they limit the imagination of the fans and restricts them to a narrative or a structure. Taking away their freedom to interpret a song how they want to or see it themselves.





My music video heavily relies on the erosion of authenticity due to its;
• Lack of ‘real live performance’
• Emphasis on the visual
• The labeling of the artist and the song at the start and the end of the video
• The importance of ‘image’ over ‘music’.
• Abandonment of narrative structure

My media piece does not however, rely on the principle of inauthentic authenticity as the video is not being used to create or establish a performer identity and the structure of the video is not at all based on the lyrics to the song, it is in fact based around a disjuncture storyline created by me and my group.

Dancing in the distraction factory

Dancing in the distraction factory offers a very valuable insight into music video and although it is aimed at degree level students, it is still a very good secondary source for my research as it investigates a scope of critical perspectives on music video with different case studies of particular artists and videos.
It offers the views of many different critics such as Mercer, who considers music video to be a kind of cinematic genre all of its own, Fry and Fry who view them purely as a new form of advertisement, Friske sees them as a new form of television as classic postmodern texts, Walker views them as essentially visual art, Lewis looks at them in terms of shopping culture and finally Marcus as a form of semiotic pornography.

However the point of looking at all the opinions of these critics is not to see their reasoning, although that is important, but within this book the point is to show that it is nearly impossible to say what music video is or to categorize it, as for every argument put forth against them it is easy to put forward a convincing counter-argument explaining why they are important and a good form of media. For example, MTV is often blamed for societies inability to see what really matters, be completely image obsessed and have a short attention span, but it has also been at the forefront of promoting new acts and enabling artists such as Michael Jackson and Prince to become world renowned. It is thought that ‘Billie Jean’ is the song that changed MTV’s focus from rock and pop and onto R’n’B enabling this artist to reach global superstardom.

Dancing in the distraction factory also discusses the idea of meta-narrative and star persona; this is an artist turning themselves or their image around through the medium of music video into a marketable product almost by inventing themselves a star persona. Meta-narrative illustrates how a collection of promo videos can be built up by an artist as a kind of story or meta-narrative to their development as an artist and a person. A good example of this is Kylie’s ‘story’ from frizzy haired innocent teen to global sex symbol.
But as stated at the beginning it has limited use due to the fact that it is pitched at degree level students and that it is focused more on the music television side of music video instead of the in-depth production side of music video. All this makes it good for a source of secondary background research but not as useful when trying to generate creative ideas for our media product.

The ultimate postmodern text?

Increasingly of late some media theorists consider music video to be the ultimate postmodern texts because they abandon narrative structures and are often a non-realist construction, for example ‘Can’t stop’ by Red hot chili peppers. They also combine high art and popular culture into one piece of creative imagery that is seen and appreciated widely. And finally they borrow heavily from other cultural text which is intertextuality; this intertextuality is a vivid but wild mix of eye-catching images that blur chronological distinctions so as to make conventional notions of past/present/future less important. This is seen as a very contemporary, exciting, and ‘new’ convention within the media industry.

Music videos have been said to have made image more important than the actual musical experience which is seen as a bad thing because it can discriminate against people who have what is seen as a ‘poor image’. This viewer obsession with image rather than the music has bred what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘inauthentic authenticity’ which is where we know as the audience that we are not actually watching the artists perform but we go along with it because we are much more concerned about the visual aspects of the video.

Media Music Video Research

For my A2 media piece I have chosen to undertake and create a music video, however in addition to this OCR require me to make 2 out of the 3 following ancillary pieces to accompany the music video….
· Home page for the band
· DVD cover
· Magazine ad for the DVD.

So to make sure I really understand music, its origins, its conventions and the ideas that make a music video successful I will research music videos extensively. Through my research I will hope to gain an overall better understanding of music videos and hopefully this will lead to me being able to direct a much more competent and successful music video. I aim to use and challenge the regular conventions of a music video, in challenging the conventions I hope to make it more exciting and possibly improve its repeatability.
The best way for me to gauge what is successful and not so successful in a music video is to do primary research by watching as many different types of music video, by many different bands and a variety of different directors. And in addition to this, ask other people what they think of the music videos and what they think makes a good music video.
Throughout the research process I must make sure that I include information and evaluations on….
· Synaesthesia
· Narrative & Performance
· Star Image
· Illustration, Amplification & Disjuncture
· Technical Aspects

Directors



To provide a more specific type of research and enable me to look at different techniques and conventions I will look at certain directors, these will include Chris Cunningham, Jonas Ăkerlund, Shynola, Michel Gondry and Yuval & Merav Nathan. Who are all very talented and interesting directors, working at an extremely high standard but at the same time in a very original style. Looking at a variety of different directors will help me establish what I think is successful in a music video and what concepts I could look in to for my music video, providing me with a source of inspiration and influence. However it will also provide me with a better understanding of the technical aspects of a music video and how they should and could be applied to my music video. These technical aspects are….
· Camera Movement
· Editing
· Post production/digital effects
· Lighting & Colour
· Mise-en-scѐne

Stop motion

One of the initial ideas we had was to make a stop motion video, which is just a sequence of still images put together so that you get the same idea as video, but there are just fewer frames per second, giving it an almost disjointed effect, which when used well can give create a very high-quality media product. Throughout this research stage not only will we watch many stop motion videos, (most on Youtube) but
we will also research the technology behind it, as we can only use it to full effect once we know all the technical aspects and how to utilize them all. There are however some examples that will feature in my research more than others and these are the works of…
· PES
· PENstory
· Kristofer Strom
· Shynola
· Yuval & Merav Nathan

Background on music video

The term ‘music video’ is basically exactly what it says, it is a short film made to accompany some music, it often has a loose narrative but it is not essential and many very good music videos have no narrative at all. These are called disjuncture videos and the images within them have no reference to the band or the lyrics. However the majority of videos do have a narrative of some sort, and often feature the band ‘performing’, ‘playing live’ or miming to the song for example Jamie T with ‘Sticks ‘n’ stones’.
When played on television and the internet, the video normally states the name of the song, band and album it is taken off t both the beginning and end of the song, to help viewers recognize the song or be able to find it again if they have never heard it before, this is mainly influenced by companies such as MTV who started by doing it many years ago.

The exact purpose for having a music video is still not quite defined as many believe it is a marketing tool used to attract people to an artist’s music and to try and sell more singles or albums, while others believe it is an art form all in its own and that it should be respected as an individual art form.
In terms of a media technology, music video is a completely new one, especially in comparison with forms such as film, television, newspapers, radio etc.
As the popularity of music videos as a media form developed so did the styles and techniques used within them, now you see a huge variety of styles from animation to live performances as well as mimed performances and stop motion.