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.