Storyboards

Deciding on a song, treatment and permission message

Deciding on a song

When I was given the task of deciding on a song I knew that to make the best music video I could, I would need to use a song that I liked. I felt that essentially there were two types of song that I would like to create a video for. These we’re either an up-tempo, happy song, to which the video would be quite performance based and very bright in terms of imagery, to reflect on the songs happy tone, or a much slower tempo, meaningful song, that I could create and equally meaningful and possibly quite dark music video. To make my decision I scoured my iPod to find songs that I was excited about the prospect of filming for. I narrowed my decision down to four songs, three of which we’re very up-tempo, and one song was a powerful acoustic song. I narrowed it down to the acoustic song and one other that wasn’t in my original four as it was a very recent release and I hadn’t heard it until very recently. Although I felt I understood the acoustic song better, something told me that I would be able to make a much better music video for the other song, purely because I liked the song much more and would have more fun trying to be creative with it. The song I finished up choosing was Arctic Monkeys – Pretty Visitors.

Permission Message

After I was positive on the song I had chosen i sent an e-mail to the brittish label the band were on asking if I could use the track for my video and stating where it would be found and by whom it could be viewed.

I have been made aware that when the image is clicked up to be viewed in its full size it is no where near big enough to read the message I sent. i double checked the sizings that I uploaded it in and can't find any reason that it shouldn't come up large enough to read, so I can only assume that it has something to do with blogger and not myself. The e-mail that i sent to Domino UK the representatives for the Arctic Monkeys in the UK read like this:

My name is Thomas Cooper and I am a media student from Thomas Adams Sixth Form Wem in Shropshire. I am e-mailing you to ask your permission in using a track taken from the Arctic Monkeys new album to make a music video with. The track I wish to use is 'Pretty Visitors'. Once the video is made I will not be uploading it to youtube or anything like that, but instead the only place that I will be putting it is on a blog that my college have set up for students to publish their work on, this way the exam board can see it when it comes to be marked. I hope that you will allow me the permission to use this song in my video

Regards

Tom

Treatment

Music Video Analysis

Analysis

This video has an extremely unusual visual style. The background, although it is completely naturalistic, is almost otherworldly in the colours it has in it, and the way it changes colour throughout the video. This is seen again in the motion of the boat the band are in as although everything looks completely normal the boat is going against the current. This video has quite a slow pace which when combined with the strange mise en scene is quite unsettling, part of the strange mise en scene being that a band of five people, long with instruments and a full drum kit fit into a tiny, unsafe looking boat and are sailing in fast currents, without a sail. in place of the sail are a series of lightbulbs strung out across the boat. The performance within the video is completely as expected, the band play their instruments and lip sync the song, there is no narrative in the piece, which again is almost a convention of this genre, to have either no narrative or a very strange and seemingly abstract one. The lighting again added to the effect of the video as it tended to match the colour of the sky around them as it changed. The lighting was also quite dim which gave the impression of the song having quite a dark meaning although this didnt really come off in any other way. CGI was probably used to create alot of the water effects as they didn't seem quite as naturalistic as any of the other elements but this only again added to the very unsettling and strange vibe the video was giving off. This again was used to create the giant versions off the artists rising out of the sea playing there instruments, this was however made much more obvious because the had a slight opacity, suggesting there link to the sea maybe? For the most part mid shots were used showing the entire band rather than what would normally be seen in a music video, which is lots of close ups, mainly of the lead singer. Some close ups were used to show instruments being played, along with some long shots so the entire boat could be seen in with the giant versions of the artists.

Analysis

The first thing that srikes me about this video is that it is monochrome, which is the case with quite alot of videos in this genre, and for the most part of the videos in colour they are always quiote dull or faded colours. as for the distinction between narrative and performance this video is somewhat unusual, the singer does lip sync to the words of the song, but not in a performance context, but rather down the phone to someone (whom is never revealed) this would initially suggest to me that because there is no performance the video will have a clear narrative, however this was not the case, instead of this no real storyline can be followed and seemingly random events all lead up to the collapse of a building around the singer, you could argue that this is a metaphor for something but nothing else in the video really suggests this. The shots in this video are very soft focus and very slow paced allowing for a very calm mood to be set, this mood is then offset when the shots begin to blur and become faster towards the end of the video. Again as with most videos plenty of close ups and moving shots are used. The fact that the whole video is very difficult to understand I think adds quite effectively to the unsettling end, as the audience can't quite be sure why the things that occur in the video are happening.

Conclusion to analysis

I feel that analysing these videos has been extremely helpful to me in that I have been able to take away both inspiration and confidence in my abilty to make a good music video for a song in this genre. This is mainly because of what I took away from analysing the second video, i found that a successful video can be made without it having much, if any relation to the lyrics in the song. This was one thing I was particularly worried about with my song choice as the lyrics are quite difficult to decipher. Although I have taken some meaning away from them I know that a video can be made even if I hadn't. In terms of conventions of this genre I found that the videos tend to mimic the songs. By this I mean that if the song was slow paced so was the video, if the song had a very dark tone, then the video would mimic this with a dark mise en scene etc. camera shots tended to be cut to the beat which helped them become a little less noticeable. I would need to consider these conventions when planning, filming and editing my piece.