An interesting video

Considering this blog is all about music videos, I thought I would share one of my favourite videos at the moment. It is important to note that I hate the song, however, I love the video. It is a great example of how important a music video is in terms of selling an artist because if the video was any different, I would not watch it altogether, as I only watch it because of the idea, not the song itself. After researching music videos in depth and working on my own, it is great to see that such a simple idea is so effective. Even though when watching it, the audience is caught up in the concept of the video, it should not go unnoticed the amount of different shots that have been used; 360 degree shot, close ups, bird's eye view, mid shots and profile shots to name but a few.

Ben Folds - Rockin the suburbs

As I am using the masking effect in my music video, I found it really beneficial when my teacher showed me Ben Folds music video for 'Rockin the suburbs'. This video features Ben playing each instrument in the video where he is essentially playing everyone, which is what will happen in my music video. From watching this, I am amazed at what the outcome of masking can look like, and although his is on a larger scale, I am very much looking forward to the editing process to experiment with this effect.

Here is the video for 'Rockin the suburbs':

Target audience

The Proclaimers were a band in the 1980’s, who covered an array of genres including Pop Rock,  Folk Rock and Power Pop.

Folk Rock:

Folk rock is a musical genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the UK around the mid 1960s.

College Rock:

College rock is a term that was used to describe alternative before the term ‘’alternative’’ came into common usage, because it was played on student-run university and college campus radio stations in the 1980s. the stations’ playlists were often created by students who avoided mainstream rock played on commercial radio stations.

Power Pop:

Power pop is a popular musical genre that draws its inspiration from the 1960s British and America pop and rock music. It typically incorporates a combination of musical devices such as strong melodies, clear vocals and crisp vocal harmonies, economical arrangements and prominent guitar riffs.

These are some images that illustrate some of the genres mentioned above:

It is apparent that these genres all involve instruments, especially the guitar, which is something we will incorporate into our video. However, as our video is a gag video, we will use am inflatable guitar rather than a real one for our base layer.

Our target audience is young people who listen to alternative music. The age range would roughly be 16-23 as these are the type of people who have established their music taste and know which genres they do and don’t like. Our video reflects our target audience as it is young, fun, different, and not a big budget, go all out video which can be associated with mainstream chart music, that our audience would dislike.

Here is an upbeat, low budget, simplistic video with a positive vibe, where the artists do not take themselves too seriously. Again, there is use of a guitar.

This differs from a big budget video such as Mark Romanek’s video for Scream by Michael Jackson. Mark Romanek was given his first Grammy Award for Best Short Form Video in 1996 for ‘Scream’. The video, which cost $7 million to make, is cited as one of the most expensive ever made. His subsequent work has come to be regarded as among the best of the medium. He has worked with many top-selling recording artists from different genres of popular music, and his videos have been given credit for making starts out of some.

Analysing CD covers - Taylor Swift

As part of my coursework is to create a digipak for my new artist, it is vital that I analyse existing digipaks so that I am familiar with the conventions of them.