Narrative in Music Video

Steve Archer: "Sometimes the artist, especially the singer, will be a part of the story, acting as a narrator and participant at the same time."

We have used this theory and Ben who is the singer in our band is the main character in the narrative based part of our video. The video gives the audience more varied access to the performer than a stage performance can. Narrative can be used as part of the voyeuristic context, which makes the video alot more interesting to watch.

Some of the most memorable music videos have had strong narratives and often they encourage the viewer the chance to see their favoured artists in a different role.

We chose to have our band members in our narrative part of the video, so that the audience can get a sense of voyeurism. This is encourages through a shot where Ben is walking through the woods and the camera is following him as if he doesn't know they are there. Like the audience is secretly watching him.

Our video does not follow a linear storyline, at the end of our video we are going to use a series of flash backs for each of our senarios between girl and boy, to show the real reaction from the boy. This will make our video more complex .

An analysis of the music video director Shane Davey.

Shane Davey is primarily a music video director, however he has also directed other things such as car commercials and tv adverts, such as Mothercare. He has also directed videos for many big name bands such as, Bullet For My Valentine, Bring Me The Horizon, Enter Shikari and Madina Lake. He has since set up his own website and company called Davey Inc, his website features work from many different directors, some of which are already well established and some are up and coming prospects.

This is a video from the band You Me At Six directed by Shane Davey. The video features a lot of technical features, such as fast cuts and faded scene changes. One of my favourite aspects of the video is the lighting, it is filmed outside so the majority is natural but this creates a surreal feeling. The use of slow motion scenes also adds to the surreal feeling.

Audience Theory & The music video

With most sources of media mainly appealing to younger audiences, music video's can be the object of public concern. Concerns focus on the effect music video's and lyrics of some songs have on young people. There are fears that young people may imitate negative behaviour or become desensitised to certain acts, which makes them think that this behaviour is acceptable.

We studied a video which caused concern in the media:

Tatu: People complained about the sexual display between two young girls wearing school uniform, however not

hing was done about these complaints as it was argued that there is nothing 'wrong' with lesbians

and there are worse video's which sexualise young girls in this way of exposing there bodies. e.g the shot where you see there pants.

Tatu wanted to cause controversy so that they gained more publicity- this can work in a positive way to get a band established, but it can also have a negative effect for a band.

We are lucky as we have no issues that stand out which will offend our audience or influence them in any negative way. We have thought about our storyline so that we do not

Audience Questionairre-Feedback

We weren't geting as much feedback as we had hoped for on our blog, so to get more audience feedback we printed and gave out our questionairre to 11 people.

From our audience quesionairre we have found that all of our audience watch music videos. We expected this from the age group that we gave our questionairre out to (17&18 year olds). he main way of viewing music videos was via youtube and watching Music Channels.

We have found that it was very difficult to define peoples favourite music video, as there are so many out there. However we could see what types of video's attraced people. Humour is a good way of geting people's attention and making a video memorable. Avril Lavigne-Girlfriend is very humourous and was chosen by one of our participants. Other videos chosen by our paricipants which include elements of humour are: It's like that- Jason Nevins+Run DMC, California Gurls-Katy Perry and Pencil Full Of Led-Paolo Nutini. Alot of these video's also included strong dance routines. We found that people also choose video with strong storylines that are memorable e.g. Beyonce feat Jay Z Bonnie & Clyde and Beyonce- If I were a Boy. This is what we will have to try to achieve in our video to catch the audiences attention, by creating a strong storyline and sense of enigma. A lot of video's are very similar with a shift of differences.

When we asked 'What do you expect of from a video of the genre 'Pop Punk' the feedback was split between a performance based video and a narrative based video, so in our video we have decided it would be ideal to split between a perfomance and storyline to keep he audience interested.

This graph shows the answer to the question What locations do you think would be best for this genre?











The answer was mainly split between city streets and mysterious setting such as woods. It would be good to include aspects of both for a contrast, but it would be hard for us to record in City Streets. To match the location 98% of people chose Casual (Jeans&T-shirt) for the image of our band.

Also the would be expeced to have fast short sharp cuts to keep in time with the music.

The Smiths- Meat Is Murder Textual Analysis.

I like this album cover, I think it would be nice to use ideas from it for our digipack, I admire the way the bands name is written down the side. I appreciate the album cover image, with the soldier which has a grey scale effect is also good as it gives a vintage feel. On the soldiers helmet it states meat is murder, which is the name of the album, believe it is hinting a message of anti war, as meat maybe a metaphor for people which could mean the band believe that War is murder, which I believe the band are sending a message of.

I have also noticed the cover does not have an image of the band, this could be due to their large popularity also they might not like being featured on the front cover. The image is simple and effective the main focus is on the image of the soldier. We have an idea for our front cover, which has been influenced from this. We are not putting our band on the front cover, instead we are using an image previously taken by a member of our group. I believe the image we have chosen will intrigue the audience and keep them guessing.

Futures Tour Poster Textual Analysis.

This is a tour poster advertising the Futures tour of 2011. We will not be doing a tour poster however, we may feature some tour dates in our digipack. I think that the band name being featured in large text right at the top is a good way of drawing attention to the poster and to the band themselves.

The picture underneath takes up a large proportion of the poster, the colours in the picture are quite basic and simple however, it still manages to look effective. The picture itself is a long shot this means that the whole band are in the picture, also it gives the effect that the band are on stage infront of the person who is reading the poster. The fact that the band have used a long shot instead of a close up is interesting because the band are reasonably new and a close up would have meant that their faces would be recognised by fans, we will take this into consideration when taking pictures for out digipack. The lights that feature in the top of the picture help to underline the bands name even more.

Below the picture are all the tour dates, these are all listed in a clear way so that they are easy to read. They are also written in white writing in order for them to stand out even more.

Then underneath the tour dates are websire addresses for the bands official website and their myspace. This promotes the band even further and it allowes people to find out more about the band and listen to their other music.

Textual Analysis Digi Pack: Plain White T's 'Every Second Counts'

The close up Picture on the poster Establishes the band, this is the main focus on the poster. For a band that is early on in their career, establishing the band is very important. They want to get their name an faces well known, so that in the future they are recognised. The use of the black and white colours makes the picture stand out more so. The picture is unique and interesting to look at, because of the random objects around it.

The whole poster has a home-made feel to it, the picture itself looks like it has been cut out and stuck down. The squiggles around the picture look like they have been hand drawn. Because of these unique features it makes the poster eye-catching, the brown paper makes it look old fashioned.

The quotes from KERRANG and Jo Whiley will make people think that this band are really good because they have been recognised by the well known magazine. The name for the name of the band is presented in a very 'plain' font. This plays on the name of the band. It is filled with the colour blue, which is the only colour on the page.

The record company logo is in the corner of the poster and their latest single cover is in the other corner to promote that.
'ON TOUR NOW' attracts the viewers attention and makes them look into it.

This is a good poster for us to look at as our band is early on in their career and need to be established. We will put a picture of the band on the poster to do this. The overall design is very unique, we will need something included in our poster to make it eye-catching and different to any others.

We recorded this video before we started filming our actual video. It was just intended to be a sort of short video log just to explain what was happening whilst we were at the location.

Editing.

We have starting editing our footage that we have recorded so far on final cut express. We have only recorded the performance parts of the video, but it has made us realise that we need more and a wider variety of shots and angles. For most of the band performance we left the camera on a tripod in one place to record, next time we will make sure we find some more complex shots