Case study: Jamie Thraves

Case Study 01- Jamie Thraves
He began by making short films at university
He made his way onto the market by shooting three low budget music videos which cost about £5,000 each.

Process of music video creation:
"Commissioner" from record label sends a track to 5-10 directors. Each director submits a treatment. The director who submitted the best treatment is then commissioned to make the video. It is only after this that the director is paid.

Top Tips-Use the lyrics but try not to be too literal and go with the emotion of the lyrics.

Two of Jamie Thraves best work are his videos for Just by Radio head and The Scientist by Coldplay.
This video is rather clever as we are left wondering why the man is lying in the road and Radio head themselves have said they will never release what it is that the man said.  The entirety of this video was filmed in reverse even down to him singing the lyrics backwards by reversing the mouth movements .

Star Theory and Britney Spears

Dyers Star Theory- the three ways music videos promote songs: illustrate-when the images fit the lyrics, Amplify- no distinction, portrays narrative, Disjuncture -meaning of the song is ignored.

Britney Spears-Initially viewed and constructed as a role model for the teen girl market, her early videos used "girlie iconography" but her imaged changed to suit the record deal going from disney princess to sexualised female.
This links to Dyers theory as her videos changed to suit her new image, having sexualised themes such as in "Womanizer" showing her wearing little to no clothing at times appealing to Laura Mulvey's theory of "the male gaze".

In this video however She appears to be the dominant figure and shows power over the male dancers, which goes against the subordinate sexualised image from before.She is still shown sexualised at times but remains largely in control, partially rejecting her constructed image

Digipak and Advert analysis

Here is an example of a digipak from our chosen genre.
It has a fairly simple design on the front cover showing the name of the group and the name of the album in large enough font to be seen at a distance it also has album art to help branding. The back cover lists all of the songs in the album and follows the same house-style of a black background with red and white text, it again has a small image to promote the group.The inside back cover shows the members of the group and their role in the group as well as names and roles of people involved in production.The CD has the Artists name and title of the album with the information of the of the production company, the CD has all of the names of the songs as well as their placement in the album. The CD also has art linking with the other pieces and the group in general.

This is a magazine advert for Daft Punk the electronic music duo consisting of French musicians Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter.  This page is advertising their song "Get Lucky" and includes the lyrics to the song as well as showing the duo off in an old fashioned image depicting a casino and the bottom of the page continues this with the Las-Vegas logo but instead saying "welcome to fabulous Daft Punk casino" this furthers the branding of the song as it links to gambling with "being lucky"

Goodwin's Theory

Goodwin's theory is based on 8 main principles:


-Links between Lyrics and Visuals
-Links between Music and Visuals (Complimentary, Contradicting or Amplification)
-Genre characteristics
-Intertextual reference
-Notions of Looking (objectification of women)
-Voyeurism (direct gaze, other people looking at artist, insight into artists life, screens and mirrors)
-Demands of the Record Label (representation of the artist)
-Performance based, Narrative based or Concept based music videos

Goodwin suggest that there is a close relationship between the lyrics of the song and the visual on screen, music videos can use a set of images to illustrate the meaning of lyrics and genre.
the visual can also amplify which is when the imagery does not contradict the lyrics but add additional meanings.
However there are times when the meaning of the song is completely ignored in conjunction to the visuals.

2nd day of editing

Here is a screenshot from our last day editing, we managed to get most of it done in lesson but we had to stay back after to finish completely and upload it to youtube as a finished video.As you can see there is a lot going on which is hard to do as there was a lot of small cutting so that it fit in time of the beat as well as using effects to change the colour and speed of several shots and to crop and adjust others on the screen.

Editing the music video Day 1

Here is a screenshot of my first day editing our raw clips for the music video, all i have done is synchronise the lips to the words and i have started adding bits here and there to make the video more creative such as these four faces which appear one at a time with the beat.

History of Music Videos

A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes.^[1] Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos date back to musical short films that first appeared in the 1920's, they came into prominence in the 1980s when MTV based their format around the medium. Prior to the 1980s, these works were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip" or "film clip".  -Wikipedia

One of the early examples of a music video would be St. Louis Blue's by Bessie Smith in 1929. of course with this being so early we can hardly liken it to the music videos of today as it features only the singer moving around and singing with the group.

In 1940 Walt Disney released Fantasia, a cartoon based around classical music.This could be thought of as a music video as the cartoon was created around the music to fit it. the idea of animated music videos is still used a fair amount today, the group Gorrilaz use it for most of their songs with only a few being "real" footage.

Second day of filming

This is the post for our second day of filming, for this we actually had sam in drag, (yaaaay!) which is half of what our music video is about.

 Carly was the make up artist as well as costume designer and choreographer and camerawoman.

Michal and Sam were obviously the actors and lovers in our video.

I was only there for guidance and I offered up my opinion when I thought it was useful.


The main focus of the day for filming was looking at Sam and Michal's relationship in the video, filming them chasing each other and laying next to each other.

Branding in Music videos

Branding is used in music videos to sell to the audience, whether it is the artist(s) having a set appearance each video or if the video includes products that the artist(s) are sponsored by.

Branding is important as it allows for more awareness of the artist(s) and gets them more fans and opportunities to rise higher in the eyes of the public.

The spice girls are a good example of branding in music as near enough straight after they were formed as a group they were all portrayed as being a set character: posh spice, baby spice, sporty spice, scary spice and ginger spice. when they were formed they begged for a showcase and after receiving it they were noticed by Simon Fuller who proceeded to become their manager, one of their earliest songs "wannabe" was written in just 15-20 minutes but went straight to number three and shortly after went to number one in the charts.
the group probably wouldn't have had the chance to rise without the heavy branding especially since there was a lot of competition as the pop industry at the time with boy bands dominating the scene.

Album Art Exercise

Therapeutic gene modulation-This is the random title i was given to use as the artist for the exercise. 

Write a book about it- This is the random sentence i was given to use as the album name.

-And this is the random image i was given to use for the album art

After playing around with the artist name, album title and image i have created an impromptu album cover.

Unfortunately the quality of the image is too low for this to look professional and the web i have added in the middle is clearly drawn on with a mouse, but i hope i have at least shown some of my skills in photoshop. which i will be using later when we create our final digipak.

First day of filming

Here are some pics from our first day of filming.

the first image is a shot showing Michal having his hair dyed, luckily enough for him it is not permanent, merely a spray on colour for use in our work so he fits in with our genre.

This next pic is a lovely shot of Michal devouring an innocent pink frosted doughnut because it is "pop-punk", or so i am told by our resident expert on the genre, Carly.







This shot is an idea for the digipak, a dramatic shot of Michal smiling of into the distance.

location sheet

Editing to the beat

This was a task set to us, to allow us to practice our editing skills by matching the cuts to the beat of the song. this task can also be considered research as it shows us what tools we can use to further our work such as using black and white or effecting the speed the clip plays at.

There are other things you can edit about the video such as cropping the frame or changing its size and adding effects.

These screen shots show what i am describing, such as the options for cropping and how you can add several clips to the same frame.

You can also see that in order to make editing easier, i have locked the audio track in place so that i don't accidentally move it out of sync. Regrettably i did not manage to edit the entire length of the track as i spent far too much time trying out different effects.however this task has definitely been useful for me as i now know what i can add to my music video to make it more effective.

Song Lyrics

Here I have gathered the lyrics for our song: "A Song About A Girl"

I was just a boy
Now i'm a man (hehe!)
I hate this town
This deadbeat town
But everything i do
I do it all for you
and everything you say makes my pain and sadness go -

This is a song about a girl
This is a song about her long blonde hair
This is a song about the way she stares at me
In my American Apparel underwear
Na, na, na, naa
Na, na, na, naa       (X2)

Parents are mad
Don't understand
They think i'm bad and all
Don't give a fuck at all
You're the reason why
I feel like I can fly
You're the reason why i just don't care at all

This is a song about a girl
This is a song about her long blonde hair
This is a song about the way she stares at me
In my American Apparel underwear
Na, na, na, naa
Na, na, na, naa       (X2)

This is a song about a girl
This is a song about her long blonde hair
This is a song about the way she stares at me
In my American Apparel underwear...

This is a song about a girl
This is a song about her long blonde hair
This is a song about the way she stares at me
In my American Apparel underwear!

Na, na, na, naa
Na, na, na, naa       (X2)

This is a song about a girl
This is a song about her long blonde hair
This is a song about the way she stares at me
In my American Apparel underwear

This is a song about a girl!
This is a song about a girl!
I think she's rad and all
I wanna fuck her all the time...

...This is a song about a girl

Information about the artist

Luke Cutforth:
Luke rose to fame on YouTube. He wrote A Song About A Girl with Patty Walters and the recorded version is sang by him. His influences for writing this song were typical pop punk bands like Blink-182, Green Day, etc.

Patty Walters:

Patty was/is also a YouTuber, but he was recognised with his generic pop punk band 'As It Is' which rose to fame earlier this year.'As It Is' recently have gone viral in the alternative music industry. He stars in A Song About A Girl dressed as a typical  girl and also plays some instruments in it.

Music Video-Added Value

Take on me was originally released with out a music video in 1984 and it bombed in the charts but then a year later it was released with this music video and is now number 3 in the best music video of all time, the music video was produced by director Steve Baron it took 3 months and over 1400 drawings to create. The video itself is stop motion animation mixed with an overall cinematic cutting to the band shots every so often. This has made it such a memorable music video.

 

Originally this music video was supposed to be a multitude of shots taken all over France showing Sinead walking around and singing, some of the original shots are still involved in the video, however when filming the close up of Sinead singing she started to cry as some of the lyrics reminded her that her mother had passed away and the director of the video thought this was moving enough to make the whole video, despite spending so much money to film in France, this saddening act is what has brought fame to this music video

Initial Ideas

The idea for our video based off of "A song about a girl" is for Michal to be madly in love with Sam who is dressed in drag and that Michal is confessing his feeling for her/him through the words of the song.

We want to film in a variety of romantic settings to make the scenes more realistic such as a beach front and a park, but we will also need some band shots so that the video fits into the genre.

What we want is for our work to fit into the genre of pop-punk in as most of a professional way we can through the use of camerawork, editing and mise-en-scene.

Mood Board

Here is the mood board we have created to show what the genre of our music is and different things related to the genre that we can use when it comes to creating our music video.
this mood shows the basics of whats in a pop-punk music video such as dyed hair and the props and clothing.

Audience Research

We asked a group of people to look at the song we have picked and we asked them several questions so we can see if the song fits and how others feel about it.

Here is some feedback:

1. without too much thinking give three words that come to mind after hearing this song? there is no right or wrong answer, we want your first impression/emotional response.

a) Fun

b) Parody

c) Cliche

a)i)Comical
b)i)Funny
c)i)Silly

a)ii)Funny
b)ii)Silly
c)ii)Cliche

2.Which other artist(s) does this music remind you of?

a) Busted

3. What are this/these artist's music videos like? what would you expect to see in their music videos?

a) Parody

a)i)Comical

a)ii)Cliche

4.How would you describe the mood of this song?
a) Happy

a)i) Comical

a)ii)Silly

5. If the song was a color what color would it be?
a) Neon yellow

a)i) Pink

a)ii)Light Blue

6. What pictures does the song create in your mind?
a) Guitars
b)Gimmicks
c) Girls

a)i) Cliche's
b)i) Fan-girls

7. What narrative do you imagine with this song?
a) A comical romance

a)i) A silly story

After getting this information back we can see that our song is still viable and we can use this information to further how we create our music video

Contacting the artist.

Carly contacted the artist of our song on twitter asking him if it would be okay to use his song for our coursework and here you can see that he has replied and given his consent.

Deconstructing music videos

"You've had a bad day" - Daniel Powter 

This music video is heavily performance based and features the artist a lot in the video cutting back to him singing and playing the piano frequently. The whole video links back to the title and line in the song "You've had a bad day" the video can feel a little depressing at times showing the man and woman having a multitude of bad days with waking up early and working. A large amount of people can probably sympathise with this feeling which makes the song much more relatable.

This video also links back to a set line and bases the entire video on it "Shut up and drive" this video also focuses a lot on Rihanna's body as opposed to the cars that the song first appears to be about  you listen to the lyrics and watch the video you realize cars are not what she is talking about however the setting and costume and props lead you to believe she is talking about cars.

Music Video Styles

Music Videos can have many different styles that work with the song to bring added effects to the viewer.

Parody:

The first i am going to look at are Parodies:



This is a parody of smells like teen spirit by Nirvana, the video is satire and looks to mock the original video and group the video imitates the original but with some obvious differences.

Animation:

Animation for music videos can help convey things that are harder to see or use from real life, this may include CGI (Computer Generated Images) or stop motion for a surrealistic effect.

This is the music video for Blue by Eiffel 65, it uses a lot of CGI to show aliens which are blue, tying into the lyrics, this is something that would be harder to create without the use of animation, the alien world and species give this an otherworldly feel (pun intended)

Intertextual

This is the video for Take on me by a-ha, it is intertextual as it contains a mix of styles, it includes animation and also narrative by telling a short story.

Pastiche

This is the video for Last Friday Night by Katy perry, it is a pastiche music video as the rise-en-scene shows us it is set in an older time than when it was actually created, this also adds a story into the video.

Narrative

This is the video for From the inside by Linkin Park, is is a narrative video as it tells us a story while the music is playing but it also goes back to the group every so often.

Cinematic

This is the video for Common People by pulp, this is a cinematic video as we are just watching something quite like a short film with the lyrics acting as the story backing it up.

A Song About A Girl

A Song About A Girl - Luke Cutforth & Patty Walters

We have chosen to do this song for our A2 project. This is a royalty free song.

We decided to pick this song for our coursework as we feel it would allow us to be creative when creating our own version of the video, also as the editor I feel that the beat of the music would make for some good edits and the words aren't too fast that lip syncing would be an issue.

the genre of the song allows for a lot of good work in regards to mise-en-scene for our actors and later it will be good for designing our digipak and adverts as Carly in our group knows a lot about the genre and what would work for it.

Lip Syncing Test-02: Don't go breaking my heart

This is our second lip syncing test, here we have used Don't go breaking my heart but with Michal and Ross singing. I think this is better than our first test as i have synced up their lips better and we have used a wider range of shot types such as close-ups and medium shots.

However there are some errors when it comes to cutting, instead of cutting from two shots to close ups i have gone between two different two shots. This makes it look like its either a jump cut or that there is an issue with continuity. this is definitely something we must avoid when it comes to making our actual music video.


The biggest issue i think we have is that there isn't enough footage to make anything good from, there needs to be a lot more edits and material to use.

Lip Syncing Test-01: I got you babe

This is our first test at lip syncing. It isn't the best video in the world as i didn't enjoy being in front of the camera singing and dancing, or at least pretending to sing and dance.

The camerawork is very basic as we were just trying to see what works and ultimately what doesn't.
the acting as well needs improvement when it comes to our final product otherwise it wouldn't look up to scratch my final issue is the editing, partly because it was my job but i feel i really need to improve as when this is compared to actual videos the shots are too long and transition a little too wildly in my opinion.

When we come to our next try we will also need more shot types as we stuck to predominately wide shots, we can use close-ups and shots at different angles.

The Team

This year i will be working with the same group from the previous year: Me (Joshua Collier), Michal Cendrowski, Carly Laslett.

I am not sure about our tastes in music but that doesn't matter so much because Carly does know about good music so she can decide on that like she does everything else. as our ability to create a good piece of coursework.I think that my strength would definitely be editing, i would much rather be working behind the scenes up to a desk than in front of a camera.
which is good as Michal works very well in front of the camera just like he did last year for our thriller.

Brief

In this second blog I will be going over the brief for this years project.

Our task is to produce a music video up to five minutes long as well as promotional material for the video working in a group of up to four members. including a 'digipak' (six panels) for its CD release and a magazine advertisement for said digipak.

In addition to the video we will also include an evaluation.

This is similar to the work we have for AS, however with a music video I feel that editing may be much more challenging as well as also having to create a digipak and advert, these are things we haven't created before so we will probably work through trial and error to get the best mark we can.

Welcome

This will be the first post of my A2 Media Studies blog, this year we are creating promotional material for a music artist including a music video.

I will be using this blog to chart my progress as i; research, plan, construct and evaluate my portfolio.

Due to creating a blog for working with our thriller last year i have learned a lot about how to write an effective blog so this one will be better.