Evaluation - "In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?"

Here we go again... It's evaluating time! /Cilan

Throughout the entire process of creating the music video, digipak and and promotional poster one of the main objectives has been to make my artist, Dark Flame, marketable to an audience. I decided upon the rock genre, which meant my potential audience would be rock fans. Because of this, it was necessary to look at then conventions of existing rock artists to get an idea of what traits make them appealing to this audience.

Music Video

One of the first things I did once I'd decided on the genre I was going to use was to look at the kinds of things I like and dislike in music videos. This is because I am personally a fan of the rock genre, and so although this was very much a rough, sketchbook method of research meaning I took my opinionated "findings" with a grain of salt, I thought it might be a good idea to pick apart videos I like to see what kinds of notable traits pop up.

The main things I noted are that I like easily recognisable imagery, such as the shot of the Queen band members miming the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody -

-as well as that I like the simplistic performance elements of Hardline's Fever Dreams video.

After this, I did some more research into rock videos, and found that some of the elements I'd noted were recurring features, making them conventions of rock videos. I'll explore those more in the PowerPoint below.

(Thanks Slideshare, you old pal...).

Album Cover/Digipak

As my album is a rock album (no, I'm not going to go into the technicalities of how you could argue that I Am... All of Me might be on the rock/industrial metal borderline because of the tinny drum track) I made a point of looking at various other existing rock albums to see what recurring features appeared. I looked at various albums including The 2nd Law by Muse, One by Pearl Handled Revolver, Circle of the Oath by Axel Rudi Pell and Band on the Run by Wings.

From this research, I found a few notable features - one is that the imagery was usually quite dark, or in the case of both The 2nd Law and Band on the Run have a simple solid black background on the front cover.

This simplistic background is a concept I originally intended to use back when I put together my first drafts of the front and back cover, however in this instance I decided it would be appropriate to deliberately go out of my way to subvert this convention for one reason (as I mentioned previously) - this being that I was looking at the album chart and I noticed that both Paramore and The Lumineers had an album out with a very similar artwork style. I then acknowledged that whilst having a similar cover would give rock fans a sense of familiarity, the album wouldn't stand out in a shop if there are two other albums which look practically the same. Because of this, I decided to maintain the general greyscale colour scheme (for the previously mentioned familiarity) but add some brush textures so it has its own unique aesthetical feel to it.

Promotional Poster

When albums come out, the label usually produces some kind of promotional poster for said album. These are the things you see in the window of record shops etc.. As with the music video and digipak, I took to the wonderful world of t'internets to find out more about existing posters.

One thing which stood out to me, with both the Axel Rudi Pell and Muse posters I looked at is that the main basis of the posters' designs was in fact the album cover's artwork. This makes sense from a practical purpose, as it shows potential consumers what they are supposed to be buying. My poster does subvert this to a very small degree - I changed the kinds of brushes used to add texture. This was purely for the sake of making the poster look better - what looks okay on a small image can look a bit rough on a larger one, so I thought as the poster is also trying to gain attention, I would go out of my way to make it look better. The visual link already exists as I've used the same photograph and logo on both the digipak and poster, so I can't see the change being detrimental in any way.

The other is that the name of the artist and of the album is shown right at the very top. My poster again conforms to this convention - and as with both of the posters I looked at, I've used the same typographical style in terms of both font and added visual effects; again, this gives a synoptic link between the poster and the album, showing people what is being marketed to them.

-HM.

Production Update 9 - Initial feedback; plan of action

So... after posting my first draft of the I Am... All of Me video, I asked Mr. N. to give me some feedback on the edited product. And he did. Because of this, I will hold off of tormenting him for at least twenty minutes.

This feedback has prompted me to think about how I'm going to improve the video before presenting the second version. ANALYSIS POWERS, ACTIVATE!

"0:00 -- The opening seems to lack something. It just jumps straight into the middle of the performance. I know the song itself seems to just jump straight in, so arguably the video matches the music… but when I watch it, it just seems awkward. Check out “Heaven's Basement - I Am Electric” – it does nothing special but at least gives an idea of how openings can draw us in a bit more smoothly. You could even just start with a few seconds of noise in the style of your transitions, or perhaps use an establishing shot."

I can appreciate where this comment is coming from - the first thing we see in the video is that mid-shot of me with the guitar; there's no real opening. This can come across as a bit jarring. Let's look at the video Sir referenced:

The first couple of seconds consist of a shot featuring CCTV footage of people walking around. This shot is notable because a) not much is happening in it, yet b) the noise filter they've used over it is reused throughout the video. This soothes the audience into the atmosphere of the video without overwhelming them in the first few seconds, which draws their interest to it more effectively. This is a concept which would benefit my video and make it feel more professional, because in the state it is currently in it feels very incomplete. Whilst this is mainly because it is incomplete, it is also because it just throws everything at you right away without a proper introduction.

To fix this Sir has suggested using a similar effect to the one I've used for the transitions. Whilst this does make sense as it's following the same design concept as that of the I Am Electric video, I worry that throwing a few seconds of strobe light visuals in before we see anything else would be counterproductive to what I'm trying to achieve. What I do have up my sleeve, however, is a few seconds worth of footage of a close-up of my eyes which we filmed as an extra "it might be useful for something" deal. Usually when I produce things through this clause it usually rots away on my hard drive, yet this could actually be useful! Huzzah. I'm thinking I could try using a shot section of this clip over silence to create the somewhat intense atmosphere, then use a rapid flicker clip A/clip B/clip A/clip B etc. style cutting effect to 'warp' us into the main video as the song starts.

"0:15 - 0:18 -- The facial expression looks a bit bland. It just doesn't seem to match the intensity of the song. I think part of the problem is the length of time the shot holds. Close ups generally tend to be a briefer cut than medium/long shots. The two-to-three seconds you have here is perhaps too long, and brevity will help maintain intensity. I think it looks particularly awkward because it coincides with a moment when the music drops, so you should be trying to make the visuals more… can/t think of a word… more… more crazy (you have to love the technical terminology)."

*can't

This is something I was a tad conscious of before exporting, so it's nice to know I was right. The problem is particular is when we have close-up shots of my face which seem to go on forever, such as the one at 0:15 which Sir mentioned. Fixing this should be fairly simple; go back to FCP and cut down the close-up shots. Depending on how well it works in practice, I may also experiment with some flicker cuts when using the close-up shots, as this will (in theory) create more of an intense feeling, and make it "more crazy".

"0:00 – 1:00 -- Does there have to be your special transition between every cut? I’m not suggesting you reduce the frequency of the transitions as these seem spaced out really well, but perhaps you could insert a few more cuts, different angles or movements between the transitions. E.g at 0:40 you could cut to a split-second close up as you say the word “evil.”"

From this I can see the transition effect seems to be spaced properly, though it appears that Sir has suggested making some more things happen in between them. This is another thing which is encouraging me to try using the flicker cuts - as it stands I'm wary about using regular cut transitions purely because having regular cuts mixed in with the strobe transitions would look particularly jarring, in a "oh look, he forgot to put the transition in this time!" kind of way.

In terms of using different angles/movement, as it stands I don't have much filmed in the way of moving shots, so I'm going to talk Sir into helping me film tomorrow (TUESDAY 2ND APRIL), using some movement. This could be difficult as the wall we've used to film is quite small, but we'll see what we can do.

"2:21-2:23 -- the lip sync is slightly off."

The lip-sync is indeed off in quite a few spots; this can be fixed using the good old fashioned "left a bit, right a bit" method.

"0:00 – 3:08 – the balance between narrative and performance does not seem right to me. I guess it is a matter of opinion, but on the surface it seems that you just do not have enough narrative footage to sustain the video, and have tried to squeeze as much out of what you’ve got as possible. I would go so far as to say about 90% of the video is performance based. Any chance you can reschedule some narrative scenes?"

This is a very good point; most of what we're looking at here is performance - whilst this does fit the conventions of rock videos, the narrative could be fleshed out a bit more to make the video more interesting. One idea I've been throwing around for a while now is to throw in some conceptual shots showing things being 'harmed' in some way to support the main character's insanity, for example fruit being cut, or something being dug up etc..

"Right, now that I’ve picked holes in your work I feel much better about myself. I’m sure I can find more stuff too, but I’ll save it for the next edit. Until then, adios... and enjoy Paramore in the meantime."

Nitpicking is great, and as we know posting a message on the internet saying that you hate something makes you a better person. You should make a YouTube account; I think you'd fit in well with the community! Also, Paramore are great.

-HM.

Production Update 8 - Music video first draft WIP

Analysis to follow later.

Functions of music videos

This post will cover why music videos are a thing. I -had- started a slideshow on this, but my computer which has PowerPoint on it isn't being too friendly, which is an incredibly convenient excuse for me to communicate this information in a practical manner which allows me to clearly lay out my work in a way that lets the reader easily refer back to previous parts, as opposed to an impractical "look mum, I can use interactive media!" manner. But I digress.

So, what is the purpose of music videos?

In short, to acquire this:

This is the incentive behind music video production in general: for major institutions to acquire lots and lots of money from people who have far less money than they do.

This can be broken further:

• To promote the individual product - producing a video for a song means you have a chance to get your song featured on one of the few remaining music programmes on television, and to get your video a positive presence on video sharing websites such as YouTube (yes, I know someone's likely to upload it anyway, but your song is more likely to be taken seriously if you have a professionally produced video than if you have a terrible Windows Movie Maker lyrics video uploaded by some illiterate kid who attributes the song to the wrong artist... -_-). 
• To promote the artist's star image - as per Dyer's theory, the record institution can develop a 'star image' for the artist, which essentially functions as the artist's brand. This can be done by implementing some of the conventions Goodwin mentioned, such as lots of close-up shots of the artist, and recurring motifs between videos. 
• To monetise directly from the video (YouTube) - if the label sets up a YouTube account on behalf of the artist, they can partner the account, upload some entertaining music videos people will want to watch multiple times, and generate revenue from the advertisements on that page (which is amplified if the video receives a lot of hits). (At over 880,000,000 hits right now, I would take a guess and say that PSY's Gangnam Style video is pulling in some money...).
• To mask the bland nature of the music - this allows the institution to get away with publishing boring tripe that no-one would care for otherwise. It doesn't matter that the track consists of a recycled electronic stock beat, a mediocre synth loop which isn't anything special and auto tuned vocals which makes the vocalist sound like every other performer in the charts at the moment; this will sell because the music video gives us some memorable imagery, which people will remember over all the other music out there which doesn't have this kind of imagery. 
• To create entertaining content - this on its own is more common among lesser-known independent artists who haven't been swallowed by major institutions and milked for everything they're worth. 

-HM.

Rock Video Analysis 4 - I Am the Least of Your Problems

So I intend to use a lot of dark shots during the performance segments of my video (which in my case will be done using the green screen and a dark background), so I thought it'd be a good idea to see how other artists have approached this idea.

To make up for the worrying lack of FotL in our lessons since Mr. S. left, I'll have a look at the I Am the Least of Your Problems video, as it features a lot of performance sections in a dark area.

(heads up: lots of flashing lights)

This video shows the performers in a very dark room with the only solid lighting being on the band members themselves; this is creating a really sweet intense aura which in all honesty I think is very effective in setting a dark tone. I do intend to try to create a similar tone to this in the I Am... All of Me video, though I want to use the green screen to create an artificial setting as opposed to using an actual room for the sake of exploring the uncertainty of the performer's mental state. It also gives me the chance to play around with the background to move from dark to light to enforce the conflict idea I have mentioned in previous posts.

In terms of the kinds of shots used, I feel it is useful to look at the way Falco is presented in this video as he is playing guitar and lip-syncing, as I will be. A great deal of the shots of him are close ups of his face, with only the occasional mid shot to establish that he is playing a guitar; this is something I wish to use in my video as it will help establish my performer's image (as per Goodwin's theory) by making my face recognisable (thus boosting my ego making me famous and my record label lots of money as a result of it). The occasional mid shot is necessary to show the guitar; thus satisfying one of the conventions of rock videos.

Additionally: the blinding lights. I should use these! But not in such a blinding way. My song is much slower than this song, so I do not need to have them going so fast, and ideally I'd like to have an element of randomness as to when they go off (I will use the lights to represent the 'light' side trying to break through the darkness; I want it to be a struggle so it shouldn't use any kind of consistency). This will have to be done in post production rather than through the use of actual strobe lights to avoid interfering with the chroma keyer effect.

I also want to use some of the slightly random looking cuts we see here. Again, to emphasise the struggle of light vs. the darkness, I was thinking of having very short cuts to zoomed in versions of the shot which will be lighter than the main shot - I could also potentially have the main shot in greyscale with the short 'struggle' shot showing my face in colour. I'll see what looks best when editing.

-HM.

Rock(?) Video Analysis 3 - Bring Me To Life (and production notes)

Let me tell you folks a story. Last year I had a fantastic Media Studies teacher. He did awesome things like pretending to be Falco and picking fights with chairs. He's also probably reading this and sitting there with a grin right about now.

Unfortunately this year I no longer have the privilege of being taught by the king of the hipsters himself, though I did start warming to the new teacher. He seemed like a nice guy at first. He'd write entertaining and productive comments on our blogs. He'd let us into the Mac room when we needed it. Generally seemed like the kind of person you'd want to be working with.

But that all changed when he made me listen to this:

 This is Bring Me To Life by Evanescence. But you knew that, because you can read.

I guess the reason why Sir suggested I take a look at this video is because it has a narrative focus on it, much like the plans I have for my own video. Makes sense. Though I'm sure there are plenty of other videos I -could- look at, and he just wanted to annoy me...

On to the video itself - what do we have? I'm going to focus a fair bit on the intro and then analyse the unique 'set pieces' further on. I'm not going to be looking as far into Goodwin's theory here as I'm aiming more on picking out how the narrative and performance sections are used

This is just an establishing shot, giving us an idea of whereabouts the video is set in CGI-land. This is actually something I really need to think about in terms of my video's narrative section - my video isn't going to be anywhere near as abstract as this is so I don't need to spend as long introducing the different locations featured, though I should still use brief establishing shots as to avoid confusing the viewer. These will not need to be anywhere as long as the introduction to this video is - in Bring Me To Life this shot lasts for over 25 seconds; in my video they will only need to last for about 1 second (if not less) as I plan on filming in much less complicated environments. Additionally, by having faster establishing shots, my video will be adapting to the pacing of the song (which is significantly faster than this piece of [word of choice goes here]), thus satisfying one of Goodwin's conventions in the way that the visuals will be related to the music.

This is where my biggest gripe with this video comes in - here we see the lead singer in bed in a way that suggests we should be seeing some kind of story introduced to us, or at least a conceptual idea... but I have absolutely no idea what is going on here...

Now I'm starting to see why this is particularly useful to look at: I don't want to fall into the same pitfalls as these guys have. If your audience haven't got a clue what is going on in your video, you're failing to engage them - and in this day and age where there is a heavy division in a consumer's attention as it is - there's a great chance they'll just switch to a different tab meaning your opportunity to plug the artist's star image disappears, or worse still just turn it off altogether and stick something else on.

I need to make sure that when I produce my video, it is clear to the audience from the start as to what they are looking at during each individual shot.

Now she's falling free in the wind, in the wind! from the tower block because _______? If we go by Goodwin's I would take a guess and say that it's a link between the music and visuals in that they are using depressing imagery to accompany the depressing music, but it wouldn't really make much sense for the institution to go out of their way to say "look how depressing our track is" (even though it is). Unless, of course, they're trying to market to the 14-year-old "my life is terrible and I hate my parents so I'm going to rebel by only dressing in black" crowd. Which honestly wouldn't surprise me.

Here we have the other members of the band performing during the chorus. This actually makes some sense, so well done for getting something right guys! Why does it make sense, you ask? Because you're plugging the artist's star image with the most memorable part of the song, so anyone who's watched the video will mentally see the image of the band performing when they hear that part of the song (or have it stuck in their head). This reinforces the image. The next time the image comes around (i.e. when the band have a new record out) they remember the image and associate it with the chorus of this song, and if they somehow like this they will feel encouraged to buy the new song.

Now she's walking along the side of the building, scaring the living daylights out of their insurance company. Again, it doesn't seem clear as to why this is happening.

Ack, clowns! KILL THEM WITH FIRE.

So, she was climbing up to where the other band members are? This took waaaaaay too long to make itself apparent. If I wasn't watching this for a writeup I would have switched it off by now, so this narrative would have been completely wasted on me.

Band member tries to stop her from falling, she falls anyway. Well, actually, it looks more like he throws her. I would put this down to him being sick of her annoying, monotonous shrieking throughout the whole song. I can't blame him in the slightest actually.

AND IT WAS JUST A DREAM. I think. I actually feel kinda cheated that I sat through the whole thing for it to go absolutely nowhere. Overall, a horrifically bad video. I can now look at my issues with this video to avoid making mine as terrible.

So Sir, I did it. I'm sure I'll be able to find something awful for you to have to sit through and write about; how bad the chosen video actually is depends on how nice you are to us in lesson tomorrow!

-HM.

Porcelain Recreation Evaluation - Oh dear...

So I exported the final version of the Porcelain recreation today. It is terrible.

First thing I'm going to note: yes, this post is overly self-critical, even though I received a lecture about this kind of thing in Thursday's theory lesson. Reason? Because I would much rather reward myself exclusively for absolute perfection as opposed to settling for mediocrity.

I was supposed to be recreating a minute of this:

Instead, I spewed out this:

As the purpose of this task was to get a feel for how to go about creating the final piece I am going to look at each individual problem with this and hopefully highlight what I'd need to do differently in the final piece so it doesn't look like My First Final Cut Project in the way this... thing... does.

Cinematography
If we look at the eye shot which stays throughout the video, we can see one fault in particular: it looks like it was filmed with one of those Game Boy cameras from 1998. That's an exaggeration, but the point stands - the quality is really, really poor. I'm not sure whether this is down to the camera (the Bloggie) or the filming location (it was in my bedroom, which has poor lighting), but either way, it's something I need to work around.

The overlay shot, however, is of a good quality. This is probably because I resized it, so any blurriness the original had is not visible here.

Editing
Holy Arceus, I royally screwed this up. I can break this down into two significant problems:

1) The cutting away. Whilst in theory it would be possible to cut away at the overlay bit by bit so it looks like the eye is closing over it, it is not practically possible due to time constraints. It wants to render each time you make a cut - and when you only have about two hours with the Mac at a time this just doesn't work, so I took the easier choice and just cut it in and out roughly in time.

The result of this practice is that it looks absolutely AWFUL. It's like my head is just popping in and out randomly, which is completely out of place with everything.

2) Consistency, how does it work? Because I couldn't keep my head still in the eye shot, I've had to shift the overlay crop around at different sections in the video. It is highly noticeable, and it is WRONG. To avoid things like this I need to ensure that the cinematography is spot on to avoid having to use bodge-job editing techniques to work around it.

Honourable mention in the hall of failure: some of the lip-syncing if off. This only became apparent after exporting as the FCP window is fairly laggy.

Mise-en-scene
In regards to make-up: no, I am not wearing mascara or eye liner. Ever. At all.

Sound
At least the song is nice, I guess.

So yes, I believe this shall suffice for an evaluation for this absolute abomination to the art of music videos; I think it's fair to say I'm highly dissatisfied with the outcome of this. I need to step it up.

-HM.

Here we go buddy, here we go...

PowerPoint is the devil, but somewhat necessary in this case. This is the .PPT I intend to use for the sales pitch tomorrow. Yes.

-HM.

"Sheena Is A T-shirt Salesman" Recreation Analysis

After many, many unsuccessful attempts at adding in the frame-stutter effects from the official video I've decided to give it a miss and stick with the regular full-speed video I posted previously.

For the sake of comparing the recreation to the official video, I've been able to use the fantastically useful Picture-in-Picture setting in iMovie to overlay the official video over the top of our recreation.

We can use this to look at what does and doesn't work in the recreation. Am going to start off with the obvious stuff -

- Location: we used the most conveniently accessible room in the school for filming this kind of thing (one of the music rooms, with thanks to the music department for letting us do this!) - it just happens that this room doesn't look much like the one in the official video, with blue walls rather than beige, a different window arrangement and carpet instead of the wooden floor. It's also significantly smaller, which impacts the next point.

- Cinematography: The video is just one take so I didn't have to worry about getting multiple angles of the action, however the room being smaller meant that a bit of creativity was needed in regards to camera position to make sure everyone was in the shot - meaning our recreation shows the action from a slightly different angle than the original.

- Direction: Also impacted by the size of the room - in the original clip they had significantly more space to move around in than we did. This is especially apparent in the parts throughout where a band member walks between the drum kit and the point at the front where the current attention focus is standing - due to the lack of space available this was impossible in our version, meaning they had to play along the back of the room somewhere at these points. Lip-syncing was pretty spot-on - Mr S. has the lyrics to the entire FotL discography permanently engraved in his brain somewhere, and we ran through the most distinct parts of Mr E. and Ms M. briefly before filming. Mr N. appears to have put his own distinct touch into the drumming, which was very much appreciated (though spinning around that much for the duration of the five takes can't have been healthy...). The band's movements in the original original clip look improvised, so I don't think it's a big deal that ours stray from it here and there.

- Costume: We filmed this after a school day and were all still wearing what we'd been wearing in school time. In the original video the band were dressed casually, so ours is noticeably different. The biggest difference is the fact that me and Sarah are clearly not dressed in blue full-body jumpsuits when we run in with the signs - said costume was not available, and not being able to see would have impacted on our ability to follow what was happening on the laptop. We thought that in a one-or-the-other situation, the general direction is more important than the mise-en-scene in regards to staying faithful to the original clip.

...and now for the other stuff -

- Editing: I tried to recreate the frame skip, I really did. I tried multiple different techniques of doing this - out of those I remember, the Strobe (if I recall correctly) filter in FCP was too consistent with frame drops to be faithful to the original (which had them all over the place), cutting around the strobe track to reveal the raw track in parts only worked in theory as it is way too fiddly to get right (and it sticks out like a sore thumb when not right), and laying stills over the individual part looked way too time consuming to justify the effort. The speed looks about right though; this was achieved by filming at half-speed, then adjusting to 200% in FCP.

- Props: We are using different instruments to what the band are using in the original - this is because we didn't have exact copies available, and instruments are expensive. All of the ones we used do, however, serve the same purpose thus making our video just as believable as the original. The only major differences I see are that Ms M. was using Mr S.'s awesome 5-string which I am totally not jealous of in any way *sigh* which is visually quite different to the P-bass(?) Julia is using in the original, and that the Pearl logo is visible on the drum kit in ours. Also, as mentioned previously, the signs in the video were hand-written by myself, because I'm too cheap to get proper recreations printed professionally.

-HM.

Rock Video Analysis 2 - I Want It All

Continuing on from a previous post where I looked at Hardline's Takin' Me Down... here's the video for my favourite Queen song (tied with '39 and Stone Cold Crazy, but they don't have videos...)

So, let's look at how this video relates to Goodwin's music video theory then! In regards to screenshots, these do have a VEVO logo over them. Last time this was the case I was able to Photoshop them out; however this time there are significantly more affected, and my computer which has PS on it takes decades to load up. These will have to suffice.

1) Relationship between lyrics and visuals

As with the Takin' Me Down video, this is purely performance, so that fact tied with the rather vague meaning of the song makes it difficult to pick out examples of this. That being said, however, the "I want it all" lines in the chorus could be interpreted as a desire for a supreme status in one way or another; and at these moments we see a lot of cases where the camera is placed below the band (low angle shot) members, which could represent them being 'high up' -

2) Relationship between music and visuals

As I mentioned before, it's a performance video. This gives us the link between what we see and hear in that we can see the band miming the song on their instruments. There are a couple of things especially worth noting in this video - first is during the a cappella intro we see nothing but close side-on shots of the band member's faces as they are lip-syncing -

This is drawing all of the attention to the vocal harmonies, thus satisfying the relationship between the music and the visuals. Also, as with the Hardline video, we get lots of shots of Brain as he's playing his solo, thus emphasising the solo in the music.

3) Genre characteristics

The Hardline video was performance heavy. This video is performance heavy. Pretty much every rock video I've seen before has been performance heavy. I think it's fair to say one of the conventions of rock videos is that they are performance heavy.

As we can see above, a lot of focus is given to the guitar, though we're also seeing some attention given to the other rock instruments used (the bass and drums) - though nowhere near as much.

4) Close-ups/artist motifs

As seen earlier there are a lot of close-up shots of the band members, to help make their image more prominent throughout the video. It seems most of the attention in regards to image is given to Freddie and Brian - which is highlighted heavily in the vocal exchange part way into the song by showing nothing but close-ups of their faces during their lines -

No, that isn't bad cropping on my part, it's actually shown at a different resolution in the video. Possibly used as a deliberate effect to draw more attention towards them by leaving less white space at the side of the shot.

Brian is shown with the two things we automatically associate with Brian May - his Red Special and his awesome hair (Barthes' Mythologies, anyone?).

There's one point I specifically need to make in regards to the presentation of the artist - and that's that Freddie was really showing signs of his illness by this point - and it's clear that they've gone out of their way to try and hide this - particularly in the way they've employed really harsh halogen lighting to hide how pale his face was at the time. This also seems to be why a lot of the close-up shots of Freddie are shown in greyscale (which would be a recurring theme in a lot of later Queen videos) -

5) Emphasis on 'looking'/voyeurism

I can see no examples of voyeuristic treatment of females... as there are no women in the video. I'm also not seeing much use of 'looking' to engage the audience, outside of the part with Brian/Freddie during the vocal exchange part (for which I will not repost the images to avoid excessive load times...). Part of me is thinking this is part of Queen's image - they've always been shown as more of a whole, rounded theatrical act as opposed to a typical rock band, so it makes sense for them to be shown as a one-way performance.

6) Intertextual references

Again, I'm not seeing anything... possibly because it's entirely performance. The closest thing I can think of is the a cappella intro being filmed over a plain black background, similar to their own video for Bohemian Rhapsody.

-HM.

Rock Video Analysis 1 - Takin' Me Down

I would love to have made a reference to one particular Dumbledore quote from HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH but sadly the obscene nature of it would have been too unprofessional even for me. But oh well.

For the sake of not making myself feel too conscious about post lengths etc. when analysing these, I'm going to put each analysis in a separate post.

Because Johnny Gioeli was fantastic at Summer of Sonic yesterday I'm going to start with an old Hardline video. (I'm using a MySpace embed because the ones on YouTube have terrible quality. This is slightly better but still not too great).

http://www.myspace.com/video/melodicrocker/hardline-takin-me-down/13951868

As this is solely a performance video this could be interesting...

1) Relationship between lyrics and visuals

This is fairly limited because of the aforementioned fact about it being performance only, but there is one fairly interesting point to note - most noticeably during the first chorus, the camera is positioned low down in a low-angle shot so it is looking up at Johnny whilst he's singing the "taking me down" part, so it looks like he is looking down at the viewer.

2) Relationship between music and visuals

As a performance video what we see on screen ties directly in to what we hear, so to get the obvious stuff out of the way: the vocals are lip-synced, the band are miming their parts on their instruments, the Earth revolves around the sun etc.. On to the more interesting stuff, we see a succession of different shots of Neil Schon when he is playing his solo - of particular note is this close-up of his guitar -

This amplifies the status of the guitar in the video quite a lot (and therefore draws attention to the sound of the guitar in the song), both because it is a close-up shot, and because the greyscale filter is applied only to this close-up, and not to any of the full-body wide shots of Neil playing which precede and succeed it.

3) Genre characteristics

This is pretty much your stereotypical classic rock video. So, what do we expect from a rock video?

In regards to props - guitars?

Check.

Costume - performers wearing not much?

There's also a heavy focus on action and the video has a lot of fast-paced cuts to represent this - this is something people usually associate with rock music. re: cinematography, pretty all of the shots seem to have a camera pan rather than being stationary to reinforce this action.

4) Close-ups/artist motifs

As you can see from the screenshots I've already posted you can see that there are a lot of close-up shots of the band members, which helps make them recognisable to audiences, thus building up their star image.

To the point of artist motifs/similarities to their other work, despite the constant lineup changes they still seem to keep a consistent use of seemingly random individual greyscale shots mixed in to the video - I've seen this present in this, the Hot Cherie video from the same album, as well as the Fever Dreams video (which actually only came out a couple of months ago).

It's also worth mentioning that all three of these videos consist almost, if not entirely, of performance. This could be to stress the fact that they are pretty awesome as a live band, thus helping sell concert tickets (whenever Johnny hasn't decided to take a ten year break, that is*)?

Also of note (though slightly irrelevant) is that their 2012 album Danger Zone makes reference to the 1992 album Double Eclipse by featuring a picture of an eclipse on the album art.

5) Emphasis on 'looking'/voyeurism

Nothing in regards to the male gaze (there are no women in this video), yet the band seem to be wearing hardly anything with Johnny having forgotten his shirt altogether which is probably to please the fangirls.

There are a number of shots which show the band members looking directly at the camera, as if to address the audience - this helps engage the audience to a further level than just having them passively sitting watching.

6) Intertextual references

I can't see any other than the fact they were conforming to what was popular at the time e.g. the long hair/instruments/performance appeal being similar to what a lot of other rock bands of the time were doing.

*not from music in general, just from Hardline. He's been in Crush 40 with Jun Senoue. And Crush 40 are the best thing.

-HM.

Hip-hop "music" videos

With that being a very liberal use of the word "music".

In this post I'm going to be looking at several hip-hop music videos to try and get an idea of some of the tropes which keep appearing throughout the genre, as well as seeing how the videos fit in with Goodwin's music video theories.

Just a warning: I am fairly biased against the hip-hop genre. I hate it. How much do I hate it? Well, the other week I had to be taken in to hospital after randomly passing out at a party and was in there for five and a half hours not being able to eat or walk around, feeling physically sick the whole time, developing a neck ache from the shape of the 'bed' (which is really just a plastic board of some kind) whilst being tested for all sorts of things, including having to be pinned down to have a blood sample taken because of my unnatural intolerance of needles. I would take that over having to listen to hip-hop any day.

On that note, let's look at a video from an artist I would quite happily punch in the face, Eminem. Apologies if this becomes a bit laggy.

1) Lose Yourself - Eminem

The first thing we see is a use of cinematography to establish the setting: a bird's eye view of a city, followed by a wide shot of a street area. This is showing us that it is set in what appears to be a deprived area, which from my background knowledge seems to be a recurring factor of hip-hop videos.

Now, how is the artist himself presented to us?

Eminem is shown wearing both a hooded jacket and a hat in some shots, and the hat alone in others. He also appears to be trying to look angsty in a great deal of the shots - in the same manner as those individuals who find it worthwhile asking random members of the public what they're looking at.

You could say they're trying to make him look like he's a threat, or that they're trying to make him look 'cool'. Personally I think he looks like a waste of organs.

As far as intertextual references go? We see a lot of reference to "8 Mile", which IIRC was a film he brought out around the same time as this record. I am also aware that product placement is common in hip-hop. Yay for consumerism!

2) Low - Flo-Rida ft. T-Pain

Ugh, this song. Most of what is shown here is in a club, tying in with the lyrics which are about a bird in a club. As with the Eminem video, the guy is shown at times in a hooded jacket, which again appears to be to make him look threatening.

In reference to the lighting, we see a lot of shots which feature nothing but coloured lights.

I imagine this is just to remind the viewer that it is a club. In case the terrible music and shots of people dancing hadn't already managed to get this message across.

There are also a lot of women shown in the video, and as you would expect from a hip-hop video they are shown in a respectful manner -

All the shots of women dancing in this video are highly sexualised, and it's definitely worth mentioning that from what I could see none of the women appear to be on screen for a significant amount of time - suggesting that this 'hip-hop lifestyle' the video seems to celebrate sees women as objects to be used for sex as opposed to actual people. The idea of women being treated as objects could also be seen in the shot where Flo-Rida is shown completely surrounded by women, as though they are being seen as his 'property' -

3) Drop It Like It's Hot - Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell Williams

As with the Flo-Rida video, here the artist is shown completely surrounded by women - again this could be seen as objectifying women by showing them as being Snoop Dogg's possessions.

It's also worth noting that the whole video is presented in greyscale; this appears to be for artistic effect.

4) Can I Kick It? - A Tribe Called Quest

I think the most interesting point about this video is the portrayal of the artist - instead of being shown as either yobs or guys who treat women like objects, these lot actually come across as genuine nice people who have a sense of humour. Whilst they are dressed in typical hip-hop costume in the same way Eminem is in the Lose Yourself video, they aren't trying to be threatening in any way, and are shown having a laugh in a good majority of the shots.

5) Gangsta's Paradise - Coolio ft. L.V.

Firstly, Coolio is a hypocrite and I hate him. Why? He whinged and whined about Weird Al basing Amish Paradise off of this when in actuality all he's done himself is taken Pastime Paradise and shouted over it.

But that's irrelevant, what's relevant here is the video. Two things which stand out here in particular - firstly is the representation of women. Whilst the women in this video don't appear to be shown in a sexualised manner (opposing Goodwin's theory re: voyeurism in music videos to appeal to a male audience), there are some moments where the male artist is shown to have a high degree of dominance over a female in the video, e.g.

The combination of both the staging of the people in the shot and the position of the camera show Coolio to be above the female lead, rapping 'at' her, whilst she submissively listens to what he's going on about - which could be seen to suggest that males are more dominant in that the female doesn't appear to challenge anything which is being said to her.

Secondly is the artist's image - as with Eminem they seem to be trying to make him appear threatening/intimidating. This is achieved through the use of lighting; the shots featuring Coolio are particularly dark, with the only lighting covering his face -

This also reinforces the point in Goodwin's theory regarding videos containing a lot of close-ups of the artist to promote their image - with this taking it a step further and ensuring that the only thing you can see in the shot is Coolio's face.

6) Airplanes - B.o.B. ft. Hayley Williams

What's this, a hip-hop song I can sort-of tolerate? That is only because of Hayley Williams' part, mind you.

Making their reappearance from the Low video are the brightly coloured lights!

The screen in the background changes between a number of different colours, with the black, red and green being most apparent. Whilst this isn't down to being set in a club environment like the Low video, it does appear to be aiming for a similar kind of effect (making the setting seem active/lively).

In terms of voyeurism, it seems a lot tamer than the other videos - some of the shots of Hayley at the beginning could be interpreted as going out of their way to draw a male audience (thus satisfying the male gaze theory) very little attention is given to these shots in comparison to other shots of her, such as those with her in the printed photographs.

These shots also help build up the artist's image - Hayley is shown to be a regular human being, walking through typical everyday snapshots, who the audience is meant to feel that they can relate to. This contrasts to the way B.o.B. is presented - as seen in the earlier screenshots, he is dressed in a black jacket and is seen performing a variety of different arm motions towards the viewer, making him look slightly threatening, in the vein of Eminem and Coolio (though not to the same extent).

This could lead to a point regarding the representation of males and females; B.o.B. is shown to be slightly intimidating, whilst Hayley is shown to be innocent and potentially vulnerable, depending on interpretation. This could be representing the male artist having dominance over the female one.

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So, to summarise and answer the question, "what are the conventions of hip-hop music videos?", we need to look at the recurring trends in these six videos.

Setting
I'm seeing two main kinds of location from these - the 'street', and the club. The 'street' features in Lose Yourself, Can I Kick It and Gangsta's Paradise, and is shown to be a deprived area with things people usually associate with deprived areas, such a hoodies/gangs. Often shown in a negative light, but not always - A Tribe Called Quest don't seem too bothered about their surroundings. The club, which features in Low (and to an extent Airplanes/Drop It Like It's Hot) typically features a lot of flashing lights and dancing.

Portrayal of Artist
As mentioned many times already in this post, a lot of the videos portray the artist as being threatening, in the sense that you wouldn't want to bump into them in a dark alley. This is especially true in the Eminem/Coolio videos, whilst being pretty much completely subverted in the A Tribe Called Quest video. This is potentially to make them appear 'cool' or 'rebellious' to their audiences - specifically picking up an appeal to teenagers. If we go by Dyer's theory of an artist's image being something which has been manufactured to make them a star who has a big appeal, we could theorise that the labels have identified what this particular market are looking for, and have built up their stars to meet these expectations.

Representation of Women
Some of the videos I have looked at here show women to be little more than sex objects, with this being especially apparent in the Drop It Like It's Hot/Low videos. These two are especially guilty as they show wide shots of the male artist surrounded by multiple women in a way which makes it look like they 'own' said women. They also show women wearing next to nothing whilst dancing suggestively, which appears to be a method of gaining the attention of heterosexual males.

Shots of Artist
There are lots of close-ups of the artists in each of these videos; going by Goodwin's theory, this is typically a demand from the institutions for the sake of making it absolutely clear to the viewer who is performing the track, as well as being a factor in building the artist's star image.

-HM.