Inspirations for our music video

Inspirations for our music Promo

After deciding upon a style for our music promo, we looked at several inspirations that would give us ideas. We visited YouTube and the Vevo website and watched several music videos. We analysed the conventions, mise-en-scene and the camera work that was used throughout the video and thought about how we could incorporate it into our own.

One of the first videos we looked at ‘Counting stars’ by One Republic. We knew that in our music video, there will be a strong sense of performance. This is why we looked at ‘counting Stars’. In this video, there are recurring shots of the band performing the song. We will use this idea in the same way.

We also looked at the setting/location that was used in the song. One republic has set their song in an ‘out of the way’ urban location. The audience are aware that the band is in a building occupied only by them. This creates a sense of isolation within the video. We will be using the same idea for our song. We will use some kind of studio that has the ability to darken so nothing is seen. We will then set up some lights that will shine on each member of the band. This will emphasises the idea of isolation and will link to our song’s lyrics based on a lonely wanderer.

Another idea we have considered is the use of stop motion within our video. Rather than a video recording, stop motion is a series of images that are all placed together to create a stop and start movie. An obvious example of an artist that has used this is Peter Gabriel with his video of ‘Sledgehammer’. This video uses stop motion throughout the entire video. This is affective as it adds to the narrative of the song. However, although effective, stop motion can be hard to use if it isn’t done in time. In order for it to work, the images have to match up with each word from the song; otherwise the music will be out of sync. We may use some stop motion in our video but we will still show the band performance throughout. This will ensure that we keep the link between a narrative and the performance. This will help us to stick with our chosen style and genre.

 

Another video we looked at was ‘Californication’ by the rock band red Hot Chilli Peppers. The reason we looked at this song was for its use of animation throughout and the abstract style of the video. This music video uses a surreal style of narrative throughout the video and does not have any direct link to the song’s lyrics. We had the possible idea of using this style of disjuncture within our own music video. We thought about using a similar abstract style in our music video that would not link to the lyrics in any way. However, we would still show a band performance throughout our music promo. This would prevent it from becoming too surreal and therefore our video would still make sense to our target audience.