There are many contrasting styles in conventional music videos, ranging from a pure performance viewpoint, or narrative, telling a story through the music, using animation or a cameo performance by the singer or even a mixture of all these. We chose to produce a narrative and atmospheric video using flashbacks to tell the story, thus keeping faith with convention in this respect.
Often the conventions of simple love songs depict the women as the heartbroken victims of bad relationships, showing men as the heartless ‘bad guys’ of the romantic world, shown so well in the video ‘Broken Hearted Girl’ by Beyonce (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v8bSHlZIyU). We challenged these typical conventions of this music style, firstly placing our lead role in the hands of a male character. We showed him depressed and miserable within the confines of his dimly lit bedroom, seeking refuge in his own memories and imagination.
As most music videos in this style portray their character as verbal and expressive in their sadness, we chose to ignore this common trait, and we curled our character up within his own arms, showing him broken and melancholy, whilst the traditional music videos often show their emotions through the singer’s wide actions of their hands and expressive body language, e.g ‘All The Right Moves’ by OneRepublic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrOeGCJdZe4&a=IoO78Fn-koc&playnext_from=ML) But as shown in OneRepublics music video, this would not suit our character’s emotions and personality so we showed him miserable and saddened throughout the video, further contrasting to the normal conventions of our chosen genre of music video.
However, we didn’t stray too far away from typical conventions as we deliberately chose to use continuity editing. Using this to set our scene and make our shots flow into each other, illustrated beautifully in the video ‘Stylo’ by The Gorillaz (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9vAOzYz-Qs). We used these filming techniques towards the beginning of the film then descended into cross fade transitions and jumps, to different environments and scenes. We also chose to include past memory sequences in picture frames as they are both standalone shots, but also creative and free, adding to the weight of the story line. Editing the footage to suit the music, giving it a more melancholy feel, helped to depict the character tumbling downwards into depression, becoming less coherent as he becomes more and more unhappy. We felt that these techniques, conventions used often in music videos, suited our purpose and helped create a convincing story line.
Also important was our use of mise-en-scene. This is often used in modern music videos. We chose a beautiful rural location for the green screen scenes, to depict a romantic moment in their past relationship. Props were minimal, using only the beer cans and liquor bottles to imply despair, and costumes were chosen for their everyday simplicity. This I feel gave the audience an authentic connection to the well-known familiar situation of young love followed by the heartbreak of separation.
Another music video convention that is becoming more widespread is the use of green screen. I feel the most eye catching and impressive shots of our movie were the green screen shots. As I filmed and edited all of our video, I am particularly proud of the green screen results. We used the photo frames dotted around the room as hosts for these shots, showing scenes from our character’s past. This worked almost perfectly, showing the picture moving, perfectly capturing the romantic atmosphere of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, setting the scene and showing the audience a more in-depth back story, giving the viewers much more information than a regular photo would. The green screen gives our film a tool to flip from our bedroom scenes to our memory scenes, fading the background and emphasising the picture to give the impression that we are diving into the memory contained within the picture frame. This I felt, worked particularly well.
As stated, Green screen is not uncommon in the music industry, many music videos use green screen. the most recent green screen music to hit the music channels is Rhianna’s ‘Rude Boy’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e82VE8UtW8A). Using a green screen and vibrant colours to a ridiculous level to represent the absurd nature of Rhianna’s lyrics.
Using colour in films can determine a mood, the quality of the environment, create tension, add emphasis to a certain shot/line of dialogue and thoroughly change the way a certain scene is portrayed. This convention is usually portrays the present as colourful and new whilst rendering the past as colourless and gloomy. We decided against this convention. We used this editing technique and applied it to our film in reverse, using muted colours for the bedroom scenes and bright vibrant colours in the flashbacks, exaggerating the transition between present day and the past.
We chose to challenge this convention in this way to represent and exaggerate the mind state and depression of our male character; it suggests that the past was a happier and brighter time. Again I felt this worked well and suited our purpose.
With our audience age group being the broad teenage and young adult group, spanning from 13 yrs olds right up to early twenties, we chose to promote out video through media that would reach this audience the easiest and the most effective. We chose the magazine advert and digi-pak.
With our colour layout and choice of photography/photoshop, we strived to make the digi-pak reach out of the shelves and to grab the passing potential buyers attention. After several designs of our digi-pak we settled on our basic but very effective scribble design. It represents his frustration towards his situation. This combination of magazine adverts and CD designs was considered very effective by our target audience and our own group, we and the chosen audience members thought that they were eye catching and captured the essence of the song and its story line.
Once our film was rendered and finished we held a premiere for several of our class mates and passing students. The random students were crucial as they would supply us with unbiased reviews, meaning we could have a truthful opinion about our film. The gathering of this audience was to ensure a mixed set of reviews; we had the general evaluation by the general students plus the media students who would provide the technical and further informative appraisal that the general audience would not be able to give. After our film was premiered we gained a thorough analysis from our audience, they loved the green screen effect and the work on the dulled/over contrasting colours. The character feedback was appreciated. We had many audience members compliment the depth of the characters personality and the actual acting skills of our actors. They said they could identify with the emotional state of mind the music and the video portrayed. They felt that the editing was excellent at providing a coherent story line. I personally felt that the movie could have explored the couples past relationship, in a more varied manner, using more enjoyable sequences such as fun in the park and on the swings or at a fun fair, bringing more action to the memory scenes to further contrast the scenes and emphasise the enjoyment of the past.
Although our feedback was mainly positive we also had constructive feedback including a general irritation towards the limited locations of our shots and the lack of variety of dream like flashbacks, plus the choice of song, as it generated a lot of cliché scenes that sometimes made the film seem somewhat simplistic. This created a considerable amount of useful information and advice. Overall, I think the audience feedback proved that our film was a success and we felt we had achieved our purpose in a very effective manner and in the way we had planned at the outset.
Throughout the whole process, our use of the blog has been immensely helpful. We used the simple layout and design of our customized blog to create ease of access, using its easy navigation and simplistic eye for editing and refining posts. This allowed us to slowly develop certain blogposts, mainly focusing on film and sound research to create a database of information that was used and useful to all members of the group. Sharing a blog meant a project based on team work and involvement in all improvements and changes. This meant we could focus our group effort on the research that mattered, sharing the load as we all focused on different aspects of media investigation. The main down side using the blog is that on more than one occasion we were met by slow loading times and the sites inability to post certain photos and items that were useful to our coursework.
The internet was a crucial aspect of our research, giving us the chance to view and record many different genres of music and music videos mainly through Youtube and Itunes. We could scour the internet as we studied the varied conventions used in this form of media. We took different elements of our internet based research and we compiled large amounts of references such as album covers/art, songs, many music adverts and band/gig posters on which we based our ancillary products.
Our use of other media technology involved choosing to use a Panasonic HDD video camera. This gave us impressive amounts of high quality footage whilst being portable. It also had a large battery capacity, which meant we could focus more on the shooting of our film and not the equipment battery life and the memory status. Once we’d shot our footage I was placed with the job of editing our film. We had Apple Macs at our disposal; they provided us with fast and functional support through its easy user interface and simplicity. We Chose Final Cut Pro as it holds great respect from all film and footage editing professionals. It boasts a massive amount of optional content for editing, from easy ‘cut and drag’ abilities all the way through to its own CGI software that could potential rival that of small successful budget movies. The ability to take footage from the camera to the FCP software was relatively easy, although long waiting times meant frustration built as eagerness to finish the movie conflicted with endless loading bars and inaccurate countdown timers. But as I progressed through editing the film, the green screen was incorporated seamlessly using Final Cut Pro’s own green screen editor.
I used a chroma-key to highlight the shade of the green screen, removing any potential mistakes from background colours, such as the green of the beer can props which would have been edited to include the memory footage. This meant only the shade of green inside the picture frames were edited out of the film. Final Cut Pro was invaluable in the production of the final music video that matched and exceeded our initial aims and objectives.
In summary, this has been a very rewarding and interesting experience, not only as a piece of film-making, but also as an exercise in team work and co-operation. Everyone has their own skills to bring to the project and I feel my technical skills were well used in this operation. We have as a group taken on board the constructive criticism that has been offered and in evaluating the experience I feel we achieved what we set out to do – producing a well made and well-received music video.
