Jacks Mannequin music video 3

The next video is another song from Jacks Mannequin, which I do not like as much as the other two songs but I think the video is very good in matching with the time and beat of the music. It has a lot of cuts, as do the other two Jacks Mannequin videos. This video also has a lot of shots of the main member of the band again, whereas the other members do not appear much, if at all. This video has alot of close ups of the main member, and the camera uses alot of pan up, pan down shots to get a good view of the main member and the surroundings.

Overall, I think out of the Jacks Mannequin videos, the first one is the most effective, the music video for 'The Mixed Tape. I think the animation works really well with the music and due to this i think it is the most effective.

Jacks Mannequin music video 2

The next video is a video and song I really like, perhaps more than the original song I found. This song is called 'Dark Blue' and the video is embedded below. The video has a slight story to it, which is a bit strange and mysterious if watched all the way through.

The video does not pay much attention to the lyrics, but does follow the characteristics of an indie rock genre music video. There is alot of close ups to the main member in the band, (Andrew Mcban) while there are some shots of the other members of the band playing drums or guitar etc. I like this song the most out of the two as in comparison to the first video, it is slower paced, and has a calmer feel to the song.

Jacks Mannequin music video 1

This video below is the actual video for the song you heard in the previous post, 'The Mixed Tape'. The video is in the style of an animation, which blends well with the lyrics. It is only the second time I have seen the actual video for the track as it is unavailable on YouTube. I think the track works very well for an indie genre of music and the effect of the animation is very effective, maybe an effect like this in my music video could also be effective. Kirk used the same or a similar effect on his film opening, which made his camera footage appear cartoon-like, similar ot the effect in the video.

Favourite Indie band

However, I have came across a band which I think would be great for my music video. They are not well known in the UK, as they are more of a US band, therefore they will not be as well known as some bands and this would perhaps be acceptable to use in my music video.

I have emailed asking for consent and permission to use one of their songs but no reply as of yet. I first came across the band while watching a US TV series 'One Tree Hill'. However it was about a year ago that I first heard the band, and have only just realised they would be a great band to use. I have also managed to find the original clip with the band in, and have embedded it below. The band are called 'Jacks Mannequin'.

Further Ideas

From my original and initial idea of a dance music video, I have realised this will simply be too much for students to handle with upcoming A level pressure and other lessons to contend with, so this would be very hard to do and it would be too much pressure for them.

I am now thinking of doing an 'indie rock' genre music video, and i also have a band that would be willing to lipsync and be in the music video too, which would be perfect. Therefore I have started to research a few indie bands on Myspace, such as The kooks, The arctic monkeys, Kasabian, Franz Ferdinand and Oasis. I have also listened to some of their songs which are very influential and i believe would go well with any music video. Some are a bit fast paced and some are slower - but any would work well with my music video.

Hip Hop music Genre

Another music genre for a music video is the 'Hip Hop' genre. It is a music genre typically consisting of a rhythmic vocal style called rap which is accompanied with backing beats. Hip hop music is part of hip hop culture which began in New York City in the 1970s, among African Americans and Latin Americans.

Hip Hop is similar to R&B as a style of music and a culture of music, but is different in terms of sound. Hip hop music is generally very violent, with swearing and fast based rapping. Rapping is a vocal style in which the performer speaks rhythmically to a beat of music. The characteristics of a hip hio music video includes slow transitions of fade ins/outs, and shots of a lavish lifestyle, for example the shot of the Mercedes above and the mansion.

The video also features rapping, as shown by the picture above, but the only difference is that this video 'Notorious B.I.G - Sky's the limit' uses children instead of the actual rappers. However most hip hop videos have clear shots of the artist rapping including close ups and often flash backs of events that have happened, usually closely related to the lyrics.

Indie rock genre

Here is a pop video as opposed to an 'Indie rock video' to show the harsh difference in colour between the two.





Another genre of a music video is 'Indie rock'. The characteristics of Indie rock is as follows:

Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that mainly exists in the independent underground music scene. Indie rock musicians are mostly unsigned, or have signed to independent record labels rather than major ones.

Indie rock artists place a premium on maintaining complete control of their music and careers, releasing albums on independent record labels (sometimes their own) and relying on touring, word-of-mouth, and airplay on independent or college radio stations for promotion.

Indie rock as opposed to Pop or R&B is totally different, it is alot slower and the music videos follow a different camera effect, more of a pan around, up and across of the camera as opposed to a lot of fast paced shots. A good example of an India rock band is 'The Fratellis, with their single 'Whistle for the choir'. Indie rock videos often show more main shots of the main character in the band and some shots of the band altogether. The video below shows alot of camera panning and all in all a slower pace than the other two areas of music genre. R&B and pop videos often focus on alot of vibrant colour to attract the audience, while an indie rock video is more black and white style.

R&B music video genre

The next music video genre is an R&B video genre, which also has clear characteristics to establish the genre of the music video. These are slow transitions eg fade ins, fade outs, and R& music videos often feature more than one artist, which portray each artist in a different light.

As R&B songs tend to be slower than Pop, the shots are slightly slower paced and not as lively. A good example of this is 'Keri Hilson ft Kayne West and Ne-Yo - Knock You Down'. As you can tell immediately from the name, this video features more than one artist, in this case it features three. From watching the below video, you can see each artist is portrayed in a different way during the video.

You can also see the fade ins, outs of the transitions and slightly slower paced cuts. There is also a split screen effect in this video, which shows two artists in a different way to one another - as you can see from the picture above. As you watch the video, you will also see the video does pay attention to the lyrics and the video has been based around the lyrics, like most R&B videos are.

Music video genres

There are many genres in which music videos could originate from. The most common are Pop, R&B, Hip Hop, Indie, and Rock. For pop music videos, we looked at some interesting videos in class which clearly show characteristics of 'pop' video, such as there is (the majority of the time) some kind of dance routine or dance to go with the video.

There is also lots of close ups to the singers of the video and shots which portray them in a certain way for a the purpose of the video - showing attention to mise en scene in the video. Also, the most common pop song singers are often Girl bands or sometimes, boy bands. Sometimes there are pop videos made by one single artist also. A good example and one we looked at in class is 'The Saturdays - Just Can't Get Enough'.



The video was done for comic relief, so therefore has to have some relevance to comic relief in Mise en scene etc. As you can see, there are red noses in the video which shows this. There is also close ups of each girl in the girl band, and they are each portrayed in a different way to one another, for example one is a cheerleader and the other is a sailor. Each girl member also has a certain colour to recognise them with. For example one has yellow, one has red etc. This is fairly common in a pop genre music video. There is no specific dance routine in this video, which is slightly unusual, but as the video is for comic relief this is probably why.

A good example of a pop video which shows The Saturdays all as individuals is the video 'Up' which portrays each of them in a different way yet again by colours, in this instance referring to mise en scene, it is shown by the different colours of their leggings and sunglasses. This video shows a more prominent dance routine than the comic relief one but yet again shows close ups of each member of the band and shows clear characteristics of a pop music video genre.

Comparison Britney Videos

Here is a video done in after effects, which compares the two Britney videos shot by shot. We did the same for our Lego life on mars sequence earlier in the year, in order to compare the videos and show how the shots match up. I think they match up very well, and some shots match up better than other.

In final cut, I put the original britney video at the bottom timeline and stretched our clips of britney and the shots to match the same time. Matt helped me with the editing, because I found editing really hard and difficult to do the video shot by shot. Overall, I think the videos match up well.

Britney spears 'Hit me baby one more time' music video edit

Above is my final Britney spears hit me baby one more time video, done shot by shot for the first minute of the sequence. As you can see from the above video, almost all the group took part and we worked as a team, with some having managerial roles while others smaller roles such as location scout, choreographer etc.

I found this video to be very similar to the original, but it was quite hard to edit, and in the end match the music with the video. This lip syncing was a lot harder than previous lip syncing tasks, (such as Dizzee Rascal), and this was mainly due to the video being a shot by shot remake.

Overall, I think the task and the editing went well, with me finding editing as a harder part than shooting, and my role within the group was to be a choreographer of the dance along with Philippa and Ash. However, we ended up short of time and this meant we did not have a lot of time to learn the dance moves, although Philippa had a dance move sheet which helped a lot.

Best lip syncing and variety of shots music video

However, the most effective music video I have seen is the one posted below, the video is from Coombe girls school in London, who teach A level and GCSE media.

It is a remake of the 'Katy Perry - Hot N' Cold' song. The lip syncing is exceptionally good and the video works extremely well with the video.

The range of different camera shots and angles enables this video to never be boring as there is so much to watch while the music plays.

There is 9 different camera shots and angles which give the video a wide variety of shots. I hope to have the same variety of shots in my music video as I think this is what makes it effective, and after reflecting on the Dizzee Rascal video i did, a wider range of shots is essential as the same shots can become boring.

Each of the shots is shown to the left and as you can see there is a wide variety of them, the most I have seen in all the student videos I have looked at.

I overall like this video the most as it has an immense amount of camera angles, the lip syncing works excellently, and the character in the video performs well and is confident - which is also vital to pull off an effective music video.

Music video animation

I then looked at a different way to do a music video, which isn't as commonly used as much as other types, but is still used by Michel Gondry etc to create music videos. This type is animation, and can be successful the downside is that it can be highly time consuming.

On the animation below, the long road group uses drawing as animation in order to help explain the song. There is alot of movement within the animation, so it clear alot of work has gone into making the video. The video goes perfectly with the lyrics, and this is why the video is effective as it matches very well. The video is called 'milkmaid' and if you watch it, you will see the match between lyrics and animation. It is clear that with an animation, alot of work needs to go into it for it to be effective, like the one shown below.

Student video analysis

I then found two more student videos which I think are very effective in matching with the myrics and one is very effective in terms of visual effects.


The first video is very effective in terms of visual effects. The 4 parts of the screen is an effective way to attract the audience and matches well with the upbeat song. This is a good effect and maybe something like this would be a good effect to use in my video. After watching the video for a while, text is added to go with the 4 separate videos.

The four separate videos each explain a different part of the story, for example there is a girl's feminine eye with the text 'She cast her spell', along with the girl drinking a drink with a straw, the singer's lips singing and the singer from a mid shot, and these are all happening simultaneously. I think this is a great effect and is helpful in terms of explaining the song. There is also another picture above to again show the 4 different things happening simultaneously during the song.

Student music videos

After the myspace videos, I then looked on youtube for some student lip sync videos, to try and see if there were any effective ones and what style of video they had created.



The first one is a long road student music video, and is the song 'Plan B - Charmaine'. This song is incredibly hard to lip sync too because of the pace of the lyrics. However, i think this media group did very well in creating the video, using lyrics to match to the videos, and with a variety of different camera angles to match the video.


The next video is a video to the song 'Au Revoir Simone' and is done by a female lead this time. This is also a Long Road student video, but this time is a slower paced video to the previous one. I think this video is also effective, the video and the various angles go extremely well with the song, aswell as the good lip syncing. The transitions, fade in and outs also go with the slow pace and type of music.

Myspace research

After looking at some dance videos from youtube, I started to look for some music i could possibly use in my video, for example some unsigned acts etc. The pictures below show some research and print screens of some of the pages I have found and some music i have listened to on the pages.

Some are independent music record labels, such as the 'SR' group from the pictures above. Most are unsigned music acts, so something like that would be perfect for my music video. Most of the above were in the R&B, hip hop etc section my myspace music. Next I will look for indie music and see if there are any independent acts i like the sound of.

Britney music task

This week we were given a task as a group to re create a Britney spears music video shot to shot. This was very complicated as our video involved a lot of dancing and lip syncing. Our music video was Britney spears - Hit me baby one more time.

Firstly, we had to create a storyboard, shot by shot in pairs. Me and Ash had the first 8 shots and further pairs had further shots. We had 55 shots in total, and we were only doing the first minute of the video as the rest was far too complicated. The video we had to do was the first minute, of Britney in the school hallway dancing and in the classroom at the start. Loz was Britney, as he was the most confident in the task and wasn't afraid to do the lip syncing.

My involvement was to choreograph the dance with philippa and ash, but the dance moves were complicated so we simplified them a bit. However at the actual rehearsal, it didn't go as well as planned and the dancing was then done shot by shot as we thought this would be easier.

Overall i think the task went well and the group worked together effectively, although there was a little lack of organisation. On monday we will all edit seperate versions of the video and see what the outcome is.

Further dance video research

The dance video displayed here and from the previous post are both from a television series of 'So you think you can dance?' and each show varying levels of dancing. The choreographed black eyed peas video, (below) shows a much faster paced and more energetic video than the one on the previous post (Ne-Yo). Yet again, the dancers match the dance with the music which yet again is immensely hard to do, something like these videos would be ideal for my music video, however as I have explained previously it would be very hard for me to find dedicated and reliable dance students with enough free time.

Another video I am going to add is in comparison to the above video, a slower dance routine but with more attention to the lyrics of the song, especially the lyrics "And she shines just like a star" there is a star created out of the choreographers. In the music video project, attention to lyrics is not vital as it sometimes overshadows the whole idea of the music video. However, while doing some online research I found this video and thought it was yet again useful and relevant as it pays particular attention to the lyrics.

Initial ideas

Initial idea

For my first idea when we were told the music video project, I thought of doing a dance video, adding dance elements to the video. Therefore I researched some dance videos on Youtube.com to see how well music and dance fitted together. I thought the element of a dance video would work very well, and it would be something different.
Problems

However the main problem facing a dance video is people willing to dance and to perform well, without having to pay. I first thought of asking the performing arts block at Long Road, but this may be a problem in terms of time, willingness and what they would get out of it for actually doing it. I was not sure about whether if i had a group of dancers, whether they could be reliable, and whether I can get them all at the same place at the same time, without anything going wrong or messing up. It would also involve the group creating a new dance routine to the music track chosen, and this would take up time - with the increasing A level work and pressure I am not sure whether they would be able or willing to have so much time dedicated to the video.

Nonetheless, I have looked on Youtube and have found some excellent dance videos, with some slower dance performances to some faster paced and more energetic performances.

The first one below is a slower paced dance video, from the artist Neyo, with the track called 'Mad'. On this video i think its clever in which the dancers match the dance with the music, and i think they are very effective in the way they do this. This way of dancing would be perfect for a part of my music video, but it is a very advanced level of dancing.

Feedback for music video exercise

After showing the music videos to the class, we were given feedback about what we could do better and what went well, in terms of performance, camerawork and editing. For my video, I got some negative and positive feedback.

Performance

• There were a variety of different dance moves,and this added variety to the sequence.
  
• However, it was an upbeat song and the cuts weren't quite fast paced enough to mix to the music.
• The lip syncing was effective, and my group worked well together.
• There was effective framing, and the shot with us all together worked well.

Camerawork

• There were static shots but they were at interesting angles, such as the recording on the macbook with all of us in the frame.
• There was interesting framework and it was also effective.

Editing

• The video needs more cuts, as the video is very upbeat and sometimes it did not mix as well, it would need to be cut faster.

Overall..
From the task overall, I gained an insight into what music editing would be like, as I did in the previous lip sync exercises. The exercise was very good as i learnt how to lip sync effectively, and realised how to link the video up with the music from watching everybodies finished tasks. After watching Matt L's video of the same track, I realised he had cut the video alot better to the music and this helped me learn how to intertwine video and music together.

Other groups feedback

Dave
Daves version of 'Im a believer' was edited very well, although sometimes the lip syncing was not right and did not match. However, Joe and Matt H did a good performance and felt comfortable - this came across in the video. They knew the words and they were exposed well in the video.

Joe
In Joe's version of 'Im a believer' there were alot more cuts (roughly 2 seconds a shot) and it worked better with the music. The video was cut between the lyrics and it worked with the rythym of the track. The performance was good as with Daves, and there was a good variety of shots, with more close ups.

Philippa
With Philippa's version of 'Im a believer' she had cut well to the music, focusing on gestures to fit with the llyrics etc, The cutting was effective and the group performed well.

Alex
With Alex's version of 'Roxanne' the group had a good performance and worked well together. In terms of editing, there were different abgles, positions, places and a character to each person. There was good editing, with close ups, long shots and effective cutting with the music.

Tim
With Tim's version of 'Roxanne', the performance came across well and you could see the group had gotten into the song and the idea of filming it. They worked well as a group. The editing was done very well and you could see it was clearly cut to the music track.

Loz, James, Hayden
With their performance of 'I fought the law', the performance was effective and they looked like they were enjoying themselves, their performance was very physical with alot of running etc. In terms of editing, there were a few shots which showed the start of variation, but they were all infront of a greenscreen and this made the performance all a bit too similar. The transition's were done well, and they added a bit of pace to the video. However, the videos were only half finished and they all had a 'ran out of time' element to them. It was clear they had tried to do too much but had simply not had enough time to do all of what they hoped to.

Dizzee Rascal music video exercise

Here is our finished video for our music video task.

Music video Lipsync Exercise

For our third exercise, we were asked to choose a song in groups of 3/4, not knowing what the song was at first. We were then told the song and asked to do a lipsync video in our groups.

I worked with Matt L, Alie, Mike and Kirk, and we were given Dizzee Rascal - Dance With Me. This was in my opinion the hardest song to do, as it was the fastest, had the most lyrics, and we had the longest period of the song to fill up compared to everybody else. However, this was a challenge but we thought having a good attempt was the best way to do it.

The pictures show stills from our lip syncing video, the lip sync timeline on Final Cut, and the markers we added to the song in order to lip sync correctly. We then had to find a location and were given 45 minutes to an hour to complete the task. We chose the woods outside and we then had to mime or 'lip sync' the words to the song, we could even sing it if we wanted to, as the original track had to go over the top anyway.

As a group, we found this extremely hard as we had to lip sync the words, which were very fastly spoken. In the end, I think we did a good job in terms of our completed video. This exercise really made you think about the importance of mise en scene, location, camerawork and editing in terms of a music video and how they affected the final outcome.

'You wanna what?' lipsync exercise

For our music video, the second exercise we done was to get the group to understand how lip syncing worked and how the video and sound merged together. We had a demonstration in class about how to lipsync on Final Cut, and it was explained what process you would go through in order to do it.

First, you would have to obviously upload all the footage. Then using the CD player track on the actual footage sound, you would find a part in the song which would be significant, for example a chorus or a particular word. Then, you would mute the CD player sound from the actual footage and add the audio track in.

Finding the same part of the song, eg the chorus, (Also showing the music wavelines) and marking it with a marker, would enable you to place the video and music together. Providing the video is lip synced or sung right, the track would match. You would then add other performances in and cut away unwated parts, enabling you to be able to cut from different angles, locations etc and different characters - this would make sure you had a correct lip synced video.

The video was just a starter exercise, but made sure I knew how to lip sync correctly and I learnt that the correct timing and lip syncing is effective is very important in terms of making a music video.

DJ Format footage exercise

For our first exercise on the music video task, we were given various footage and asked to cut the footage together with a song, from which we could choose the track from various different songs. The footage contained no lip syncing, so would therefore be able to use with any song. The footage was cut up and contained black parts of space in between each clip, so it would ensure we cut the footage right - so there were no remaining black parts or space left between them.

The exercise enabled us first to see how video and music go together, and what works and doesn't work. After the time was up in which we had to edit the video, we walked round the classroom and got to see everybody else's videos they had made. This helped me to see what I was doing right, wrong, and to know what to do next time. I found some had been cut expertly with the music and the beats in the track, and this helped me to progress in my work next time.

At the end of the lesson, we were shown the real video, and I found out I had actually used the correct song for the video. We saw how the real video was put together and whether or not ours were similar, and what parts went where, what fitted well and what the real editing was like. Overall, this was very effective for our first music video task as it helped us to see what putting the correct music and video together was like and how to edit them together.