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.
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.
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.
Music Videos are, in essence, a supporting feature to a song from a certain band or artist. This means that the visuals have to represent the song or the feeling it presents in an effective way with the limited amount that they can do in the songs timeframe.
The sound of a song is a culmination of many aspects of music. Instrumentation, key and timbre all play a role in how we as an audience perceive a song. The composer often makes these creative decisions in order to convey a particular mood to the listener; everything is intentional. This is simultaneously reflected in the visuals chosen by the creator of the video.
One of the key things we have to think about is fitting to the conventions of the genre so that what we produce is authentic as possible, yet despite this, there is also the option of going against some less prominent conventions to make our creation unique.
The Importance of Sound to Music Video
Sound in a song often dicatates an audiences perception of it. It creates mood, emphasises emotion and reinforces any lyrics in the piece. The mood of the song firstly helps to define the visuals. It gives them a direction and a feeling in what they are doing, no matter what type of video it is for. The visuals usually match the the sound or the genre, in instrumentation and lyrics, unless you are juxtaposing the two against each other an creating the opposite of what people expect to see for a valid reason. Idividual interpretations of these sounds working with visuals create the songs meaning to a person and therefore heavily influence their opinion of it, still taking into account their past experiences and conventions of the genre.
The Importance of Lyrics to Music Video
In my opinion, lyrical content plays a huge role of defining what a music video is. Without lyrics and meaning, the song would have no real definition to base its sound upon and in turn, nothing to develop a music video from. Lyrics make a song what it is. In modern commercial pop music, the lyrics tend to be nothing more than fillers, something to pronounce when singign the melody line and I think that songs develop fat more meaning and cnnection with the audience when they contain lyrics that mean something. Crucially, direct links can be made between lyrics and visuals, such as props as seen in the Life is a Gun video, or even narrative.
Both sound and lyrics combine to help influence the visuals in a music video. Without both, a song seems to lose its identity and for me, that means it no longer appealsto a wider udience.
Choosing the music video for pop songstress Adele's Chasing Pavements, we sought to recreate a close up scene like the ones we had been looking at. To do this, we studied the way in which the shot we chose (2:25 - 2:29) was composed, so that we could best replicate it's set up.
We realised that we were going to need to stick to a low lit, natural style of lighting to try and define the mood of the song that is shown in the video. We also want to replicate the location and costume seen in the video and to do this, we'll need to look at the less focused on sections of the frame. Testing out how best to recreate the close up, panning shot will hopefully help us when it comes to storyboarding and filming our own music video, letting us learn how to achieve a common shot type of music videos and make sure we achieve it to the best of our ability.
After looking at the original vidoe we decided to try and practise a few still shots to look at camera angles, lighting, mise en scene and costume. Doing this allows us to have a reference when setting up and capturing the four second shot. The stills we ended with are below.
The first shot we felt was a little too close, whilst also showing more of the tree than we wanted. Because we spotted this, we then knew how to change the shot in order to make it more accurate to the original. We also felt that the camera angle need to be a little higher and it was also obvious to us that we need to perform some colour grading on the final shot to make it match. Thinking about location, we chose an area that held a similar, gnarled tree to the one seen in the video with grass behind it. Before shooting we listed what kind of things we would need.
Low lighting, sourced from right side of frame.
Warm filter which we will add in post production - colour grading.
A coat for the costume, simliar to that of the one in the music video.
A high angle shot slowly panning from left to right.
A ratio of 7:2
Similar texture of tree
Grassy background
Our second shot was greatly improved upon the first, though still not as acurate as we wanted. We also attempted to perfect the panning motion so that when we film we'll be able to get it right.
Over the duration of our AS Media Studies course, we developed many new and interesting skills and a general understanding of the subject. Through the creation of our very own media product - a feature film opening - we began to develop our own sense of style whilst also working on our own understanding.
Looking back over the whole year and particularly our own project, I think there was a lot we could have improved upon. But saying that now means that we have drastically improved and learnt a lot since the beginning of the course. I've also found that I have a greater apreciation for the film industry as a whole from the experience of trying to accurately replicate the processes of the indutry.
Firstly, we learnt to develop key skills that are going to be crucial to the A2 section of the course.
Some of these things included:
Editing - The use of Final Cut Pro and also the conventions of editing. Using the best software allowed us to produce a high quality video. We got more adept to using the software the more we explored its functions.
Thinking in relation to the outcome of the final product.
Planning and developing - This involved working through problems before they occurred (to minimise the problems that occurred later). This was essential for our location shoot.
Film knowledge - Probably the most important learning curve of all. We've expanded upon our knowledge of technical terms, film conventions, shot types, equipment, and metaphorical resonance.
Professionalism - In dealing with others, team building and dealing with the public, particularly on the occasions of our location shoot.
Working with new technology.
Patience.
Over the course of the production of our film, many of these key areas were put to the test. I think we were very in depth in our planning which allowed us to make a more refined finished product. Also, using our individual unique skills, such as my comfort in writing the screenplay, to add to what we created helped a great deal.
The influence from previously existing media was obvious from the beginning of our project. We realised as we were collectively developing a narrative that it was highly similar to films we had previous seen within the genre we were trying to recreate. Along with this, as a group, we held a preconceived idea of what our film should be or what conventions we should fit to. We looked to various different films for inspiration. These included The Bourne Trilogy for our narrative and location ideas, Good Will Hunting for a specific shot and other iconic action films for the way in which we set up our shots and style. We looked to other films to also provide inspiration for each of the aspects of our film - shot types, narrative, script, mise en scene etc. Thinking of things in this way meant that we could make our video as authentic to the real thing as possible, whilst also
