Our final project, the music video, has started. We will be producing a video for the Global Beats competition, selecting a track from an exisiting lsit or pitching our own.
We started looking at existing student music videos. There were certain techniques that I liked which made certain videos stand out and look less like a student video, and more like a real video. The standout video for me was the Lulla Violet video. This featured heavy use of strobe lighting. This is something which gives a look of high production value, but was presumably easy to come by. This single technique, matched against the harsh, underground setting and mis-en-scene suited the track, but also took best advantage of the resources avaiable. Another video composited a motion graphics onto everyday objects and locations. This again shows how they are getting normal thigns we all have access to, and putting a spin on it to rise it above it's un-cinematic origin. Many of the videos had tried to recreate mainstream techniques and style, but the standard of the cameras and the lack of any adaption for resources made the more creative choices stand out to me.
These kind of decisions will effect my intial ideas. I will try to base ideas around plausability and making something creative out of something available to us.
I have started looking at my favourite videos as inspiration for the ideas we will concieve when in groups.
I like the black and white, heavily urban style of The View from the Afternoon by Arctic Monkeys and it's use of everyman architeture as some sort of grand setting. It's also quite ambiguous and each viewer could take thier own meanings from the video:
One interesting example I am also a fan of is probably not classed by everyone as a video, but in You Think You're (John Fucking Lennon) by Glassjaw they use a one take perfromance in what appears to be some abandoned squat. I like the fact that this captures the DIY, spur of the moment attitude of the band and has swagger even with minimal production value and completes the purpose of a video; to show a visual representation of a song:
Lastly, You've Seen the Butcher by Deftones, is heavily ambiguous, over stylised but importantly has a controversial and evil third act. This sees the band playing amongst loads of half naked girls, a convention of boasting rapper videos, but instead, everyone and everything is showered in blood. There is alot of subtext in the video and again, it's up to the viewer to make a decision on the meaning. It also perfectly represents the epic, heavy vibe of the song:
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