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.