Research - The History of Music Video

The formal definition for a music video is this:

"A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes." -Wikipedia

But what does that mean to us when we will be producing our own? To me, a music video is a way of visually reprecenting a song, capturing it's meaning, essence or narrative in a creative way. It's how we as an audience get an insight into the artists personality and their kind of music and is often one of the main pormotional devices for a record company. So keeping the definition of what a music video should be, and more crucially, has been before, fresh in our minds as we go into this process.

Music videos are often entirely dependent upon an awareness of genre, whether you are going to fit to the conventions of the genre or not. The main genres are thus:
Pop and Chart music
Rock
Indie
R'n'B
Soul
R'n'B and Hip Hop
Jazz and Blues
Dance Electronic
Country

How Music Video Began

Talkies and Soundies
With the arrival of talkies in 1926 (films with synchronised sound), many more musical short films. Early cartoons are an example of this, such as Loony Tunes.  Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theaters. Soundies were invented around the 1940's and were another early form of music video. Soundies were one-song films made for the Panoram visual jukebox. People would be able to watch the sequence created for the song that was chosen in black and white, usually in diners or bars. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, showing that it had been staged for a viewing purpose.

Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues (1929)
As a dramatised version of the hit song 'St Louis Blues' in 1929 by the blues artist Bessie Smith, this is classed as the first ever music video ever made. The 'film' was two reels short and featured a dramatised performance. It was shown in theatres in America until 1932.

In 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated film based around famous pieces of classical music. The Sorcerers Apprentice is probably one of the most well known from the film and could be classified as a music video for the classical pieces used, as the film sets the moving image to previously produced music.

Musical films were also an important influence on what we now know as music video. Old Hollywood musical numbers from the 1930's and 50's heavily influenced later music videos, an example of which is Madonna's Material Girl.
In the 1950's, music films became popular, featuring performance clips of the artist. Elvis Pressely's Rock Around the Clock is a notable example of these types of films.

Music videos as we know them today began to be produced for music programmes such as Top of The Pops in Britain and Hullabaloo in the USA. These were used as promotional clips for groups, in particular for The Beatles in the 1960's with their song Yellow Submarine. It was after this that other acts began to follow their example, and music video promotional clips were soon produced for others.

The Start of Music Video Television

In 1981, the US music channel MTV was launched - ready for an era of 24-hour-a-day music viewing.

The first music video to be featured on the channel was The Buggle's 'Video Killed The Radio Star', which really provides a strange sense of irony and perhaps now truth.

Surprisingly, many of the first music videos came from Great Britain. Music videos by Duran Duran (who ended up creating very visually interesting videos for the time), were made because their songs had not been aired on the radio and the band wanted publicity. They recieved popularity after their music videos were aired on the new music channels.
Many artists besides Duran Duran, such as Madonna, Michael Jackson and U2 recieved promotion and created their career after their videos were featured on MTV.

Now, with the popularity of music video, MTV has many varying channels that are solely for separate genres. These include Classic, Base, Rocks, Dance and Live variations of the channel, whilst the original MTV shows mainly current chart music.

Music Video in the Online Age

Downloading of videos off the internet is now common and this is seen as a threat to the dominance of MTV, because more people are watching music videos on YouTube and converting these to an MP4 format that they can view on their Ipods or tablets. This can result in the artist not getting the right amount of money for their troubles and are losing out on their income, because their jobs rely on people paying to view and listen to the music/videos.

Despite this, in my view and I think many others, YouTube has meant that people now have greater access to a large range of music videos that they have never previously heard. This means that artists are reaching a far wider audience and are gaining more potential fans through the websites suggested videos format. It also generates a whole new source of revenue for acts through YouTube's advertising models and allows the bands and solo acts alike to reach out to their fanbase in an interactive and almost personal way.

Research - Artist and Song Choices Update

We've spent a long time discussing various different artists and, along with that possible choices of songs for those artists. We want to choose a relatively unknown band or artist so that we don't have to go against or conform to too many preconceived perceptions, which will give us the most creative opportunities as possible. Further to this, it will be easier to contact the artist to get permission to work with the song. So far, we've thought of a few songs to consider, sticking to a few ideas:

Pitter Pat - Erin McCarley
Keep on Walking - Gabrielle Aplin
This Beauty - Amanda Rogers

As we are stil deciding upon which to choose as the song for our music video, these will almost certainly change between now and the beginning of our planning stages, meaning we have plenty to take inspirations from.

Research - Shot Types

Music Videos are rather different in style to the usual short film. Each employs a set of conventions of the genre to the way in which it is made. The most obvious of some these are the types of shots that they are used. Whilst they are quite similar to those found in normal film, the style is often more themed around the genre and look of the main video.
A small series of different shot styles were all found in the videos we have watched so far. Some of these are explained below:

• Slow Pan - A shot that is frequently used to show the artists performance. The camera very slowly moves around the subject, focusing on one part of the subject, perhaps in close up or in a wide angle. This is often used when it comes to filming vocalists.
• Slow Motion - A key feature of music video that is used in nearly every single music video with some form of narrative. It involves slowing the frame rate of the footage down by a considerable ammount to achieve an almost dreamlike effect or one of moving underwater. Often, it is used to draw emphasis on the certain narrative points or for dramatic effect. Pretty much the biggest convention of music videos.
• Close Ups - Used on artists or on their instruments, close ups are a good way of establishing artist identity and persona. They can als draw emphasis to specific emotion (since there is only a short ammount of time to do so in a music video) or the instruments on which a crucial melody line is being played.
• Tracking Shots - Often used to follow the artists "journey" throughout the song, tracking shots can once again be useful for establishing band members or for capturing an artists style.

Of course, this isn't to say that these are the only types of shots used in music video today. The range of shot types used is as wide and as imaginative as in film, yet subtle differences in this kind of composition are what essentially make music videos recognisable as what they are.

Recreating Another Music Video Shot

Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve

 

We took this still shot from the opening 30 seconds of the music video for Bittersweet Symphony, which we were asked to recreate. We discussed how we could be as accurate to the original as possible through replicating the mise en scene, colour, costume and other key features.

 

For this we thought props played a key role in the look of the shot. The urban location is crucial to the main themes within the song and so we considered trying to get this as one of the most accurate aspects of our shot. We also studied the way in which the camera moved since it's all one continuous shot. Tracking its movement, we found it began at the feet, tracking, before moving back slowly into a mid shot, then long shot. We realised we'd need to use the steady cam if we wanted to achieve the same sense of stability.

 

We hope to film the shot with the same style road crossing with another road the the right of the frame, meaning we'll also have to shoot at a time when it is safe for us to cross frequently. This will be tricky to achieve, as really we also want a few crowds to create the sense of going against the flow. 

Research - Music Video Directors

Many directors of music videos begin with the genre as a way of developing their technical and creative skills, sometimes then progressing to direct full length films. However, the videos they create for the songs sometimes become iconic when they are well made and creative.

On many lists of the "Greatest Music Videos of All-Time", such as one from NME, one specific video kept appearing at number one. Hurt by Johnny Cash (2002) was described by the magazine as "A fitting audiovisual epitaph." after the famous artist died 7 months later.
The video was directed by Mark Romanek, a renowed music video, advertisement and feature film director who has won a toal of three Grammy Awards for Best Short Form Music Video, more than any other director. His credits include the critically acclaimed and contraversial video for Closer by Nine Inch Nails and the modern film Never Let Me Go.  The video uses haunting imagery of decaying fruit and montages of Cash from his earlier years, amking it a poigniant reflection on his life past and present, just before his death.

 



Another video that everyone appears to remember is Michael Jackson's Thriller. In fact, many of the pop icons videos have posthumously and his lifetime become iconic. Thriller was one of the most expensive, and longest, music videos made of it's time, and is often refered to as changing the concept of music video. Directed by John Landis, it won a Grammy award for the Best Video, Long Form and had a total budget of $500,000.
Landis wanted to create a video that really told a story and thats exactly what was produced. The video has often been called a "mini movie" in itself and remains one of the most recognisable songs of all time.

Research - Music Video Conventions

To create an authentic vidoe, we need to really understand how they are constructed. To do this, we turned to as many examples of videos across various genres and looked at key features that ran through all of them, compiling a list.

Low angle shots, giving the artist power over the audience

Tracking Shots

Extreme Closeup

Fluid or just genral continuous camera shots

Artist featured in the video

A narrative is featured within the performance, or it's just narratively based

Instruments being played

Lyrics matching visuals

Slow Motion

Sound matching visuals - eg the drums matching the flashing lights in a video

All these things can be found in the two videos we looked at to give us this list. Adele's Chasing Pavements and McFly's Five Colours in Her Hair. Despite both being entirely different styles of music, along with the videos that were created for them.

Research - Types of Music Videos

A theory by Firth in 1998 states that all music videos can be placed into three seperate catorgories: Performance, Narrative and Concept. Whether on not this is now true remains to be seen but elements of each can be found in nearly all the music videos of today.

Performance
Perfomance type videos contain mainly elements of, obviously, permorming. This means that they often feature the band or the artist that performs the song, or else and actor or dancer that portrays them. Commonly, they contain frequent shots of the instruments being played or of the miming of lyrics, meant to feel as if the artist is performing the song for the video.

Pure Performance Examples:

 

Parachute - Kiss Me Slowly ... A pure performance based music video, focusing on the band playing the song. Perhaps it is meant to replicate a concert experience or possibly create more of a personal connection between band and audience. Many close up shots are used, along with sweeping panning shots to capture the full band with all memebers. However, another convention of music video, slow motion, is notably absent here.

 

 

Beyonce - Single Ladies ... A music vidoe that is slowly becoming quite iconic. The whole video is singularly of the artist plus dancers performing, with only a few subtle nods in the routine to the lyrics. It's also in black and white, making it look even more simple. Interestingly, no slow motion is used here either, leading me to believe that perfomance based music videos often don't use it, a possible reason for this being the directors intentions of keeping the performace as "live" looking as possible.

 

Narrative

Videos such as these follow a set storyline that usually match directly to the lyrics and follow set characters. These character may either be the artist or actors portraying others ky to the story line. They tend to use many slow motion shots along with slow pans and close up shots, once again features many music video conventions.

 

Pure Narrative Examples:

 

 

Taylor Swift ft. Ed Sheeran - Everything Has Changed ... This works perfectly as an example of a narrative based music video, containing no element of performance at all. The children in the video either represent the artists at a younger age or, as revealed in the end of the video, play young relatives or their children. It captures the idea of the songs title whilst also fitting to many music video conventions, re introducing slow motion.

 

 

Jay Malinowski - Life is a Gun ... A music video we looked at in class. The story is highly related to the lyrics, a key convention of narrative based songs and videos and contains no performance element. It also follows the same black and white colour style, an idea that can later be linked to the lyrics.

Concept
This refers to a random idea which often does not relate to lyrics or song meaning. Concept videos often make the audience question what they are really about and fit to the sound of a song.

Pure Concept Examples:

 

OK Go - Here it Goes Again ... This was by far the hardest to find are video for. Many concept videos often contain some performance at the very least, an example of how the lines between these genres are slowly becomning blurred. The Treadmill idea is part of the video simply for the reason that it is interesting to watch. The idea itself has no real link to the lyrics but perhaps it can be fitting to the sound of the song.

 

The blurring of the lines between the types...

 

Firths theory was originally developed in 1998, a time when the idea of music videos were still developing and boundries ahd yet to be pushed. Whilst in the early years of vidoes these types were certainly kept to, artists striving to be creative and innovative began merging the three to create something entirely new. Now, it is resonably rare to find a video that does not contain at least two of Performance, Narrative and Concept and it is extremely hard to find pure versions of the video types.

 

For example, I Want Crazy b y Hunter Hayes uses a little of all three. Whilst the majority of the video is based around a narrative, there are frequent scenes of the artist performing the song, guitar in hand. There are also vague concept ideas placed within the narrative that have little to do with the lyrics or song. This type of video has become the norm these days and the lines can only continue to blur further.