As I chose a song by an artist I was already familiar and a fan of,
researching into the artist wasn't too difficult. Jake Bugg is a 19 year old English singer-songwriter from Nottingham. He takes influence from various different bands and artists including Jimi Hendrix, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Donovan and Johnny Cash. After releasing his first and only EP to date 'Taste It', his debut self titled album was released towards the end of October 2012 and includes hit songs Trouble Town and Lightning Bolt. At the age of just 17 years old, he was chosen by the BBC to perform on their BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury where he went on to get a recording contract with Mercury records. Singles from the album include: Country Song, Taste It, Lightning Bolt, Seen It All, Two Fingers and of course Trouble Town.
On several occasions he has been dubbed the 'East Midlands answer to Bob Dylan' and has also made appearances on the hit music television program 'Later with Jools Holland'. As well as this, Bugg has supported the ex-Oasis man's solo project Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds on their American tour and the Stones Roses. After the release of the album, Jake took part on a tour across the UK and Ireland selling out venues from over 10 locations.
On Wednesday 20th February, Jake was nominated for
the 'Best British Breakthrough Act' at the Brit Awards but narrowly missed out
to fellow folk/indie-pop singer song-writer Ben Howard. Here is a short clip of
the teenager being interviewed shortly after the awards, giving his opinions on
the awards themselves and pop boy band One
Direction.
As Jake Bugg's song Trouble Town I wanted to use for my music video was copyrighted it was important for me to try and get in some form of touch with the artist before I used it. In order to try and get permission I used social networking website Twitter and email. I found the email address via Jake Bugg's official website.
Here is Part 1) of the message as Twitter only allows you to send 140
character messages at a time.
Part 2)
I also contacted the artist via email using Microsoft Outlook after finding an email address of Jake Bugg's management on his website in the 'contacts' section.
As of yet, I have failed to receive a response from both forms of communication.
At first, I thought choosing a song for my music video would have been an easy task but it turned out to be the complete opposite. I was adamant I wanted to use a song inside that fitted into the indie/alternative genre. Also, after researching my target audience I knew I wanted to create a narrative based music video that featured the artist but without any lip syncing or performance throughout. Also, the song has to be around three to three and a half minutes in length. Personally too, I wanted it to be a song I quite enjoyed as I felt I'd enjoy creating and documenting it much more. I used YouTube, Spotify and Last.fm to search for the right song. Last.fm was probably the most helpful as it allowed me to search by genre meaning I could find a lot more songs I may not have already been aware of. As I'm familiar with music within the genre I wanted to focus on, initial songs I chose were from solo artists I was personally a big fan of, Miles Kane and Jack White. One of the songs I found were 'I'm Shakin'' (Jack White), originally an early 60's blues song by Little Willie John. The other, an original song called Inhaler (Miles Kane) from his debut album Come Closer. Both of these songs were quite lively and upbeat. I eventually came to an initial decision to use Inhaler as the song for my video. I managed to come up with a few initial ideas and even started to film some footage but I found it quite hard to fit a narrative to the style and speed of the song and realised I needed something much slower.
Jack White - I'm Shakin'
Miles Kane - Inhaler
Final Decision
Finally I made the decision to use a song by 18 year old folk singer songwriter Jake Bugg. The song was called Trouble Town and I had been aware of it for a while after coming across it earlier in 2012. It suited what I was looking for perfectly, it was the right pace and met the genre requirements. The only problem was that it was a few seconds under 3 minutes but this shouldn't of been too much of a problem and the video ended up being a good 15 seconds over 3 minutes when finished. I also really like the lyrics and I felt I could make quite a good music video that related to them well. The original song and music video can watched here:
The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of The Understatement
This is the music video for Alex Turner and Miles Kane's side project The Last Shadow Puppet's single 'The Age of the Understatement'. It's directed by Romain Gavras and is 3 minutes 14 seconds long. I chose to analyse this video as I planned on making my video of similar length and also wanted to use a song within the same genre. The video is quite hybrid, it features a narrative, the artist themselves and it's performance based too. The music video opens with an establishing shop of an ice rink. This creates an enigma as the audience would want to find out what happens next. When related to Todorov's Theory for example, this shot also sets up a state of equilibrium of the narrative within the video. Next, the audience begins to feel quite tense as the build-up of sound is met with the close-up of a young girl putting on her ice skates. Shots of her worried and concerned facial expressions leave the audience as ease. The young girl then begins to skate on the ice rink to he pace of the music which has quite a strong rhythm whilst the cuts in the video also
correspond to the beat of the song. This helps build tension and adds to the
enigma created by the opening shot. It is important that this is done fairly
early on in the video in order to keep the audience interested and intrigued
for the rest of the video.
Unsuspectingly, the camera then cuts to another long establishing shot of two men standing by soviet army
tanks. It is at this point that the two main artists of the band are introduced. Slowly, the camera steadily zooms towards them again in beat of the music. They are framed in the centre of the frame portraying their importance and
status. The video shows a medium shot of both them in front of two tanks just as the lyrics in the song begin to start. The band member's clothes are fairly stereotypical of the “indie/alternative” style as they sport long trench coats and Beatle-esque haircuts. Many people watching this video especially fans of music within this genre will be able to relate to the band members through the use of iconography and other elements of mise-en-scene. Again, the camera changes to a medium shot Miles and Alex walking with the rhythm of the music. The mise-en-scene of the soviet tanks in the background can still be seen which makes the audience consider whether something quite serious is to happen next. As well as this, the general setting is quite desolate with
snow which perhaps connotes the isolation and loneliness of both characters.
The mise-en-scene in the video also implies connotations of age and create quite a dated kind of feel towards the video. For example, the lighting is quite dark throughout and appears to have a sepia tint. Many other indie videos tend to be quite similar as many bands inside the genre tend to get their musical influences from older generations including band's from the 60's such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Animals, so in general this video sums up the type of
music they produce.
There is then a setting change when the camera cuts to the band members driving through a brightly lit Russian
city, this is quite a contrast in comparison to the previous empty setting.
Again, the importance of the two band members is highlighted through a low angle shot which looks up to the characters. This relates to the audience of the band as many of them are young and look up to them as idols. Throughout the music video, Alex Turner and Miles Kane tend to dominate each frame even when stood in front of the large menacing army tanks in the snow. The setting then changes again
to a church. Again, this contrasts with the original settings of the tanks and also creates a binary opposition between religion and war.
As the pace of the music picks up towards the end of the song, the amount of cuts increase too. This helps create a pace between the visuals and which both the eyes and ears can follow. The girl ice skating is also re-introduced towards the end too. Like at the start of the song, her
movement fits the pace and rhythm of the song and she slows down as the
beat changes. Finally, the video shows a high angle long shot of the Russian army standing in formation.
This shot could be showing the new equilibrium, as towards the beginning they were out in a so called 'wilderness' with the tanks yet now they're back at what appears to be important government buildings after overcoming their problem/task.
Despite the fact that many people consider the vinyl record to have already died, recent data according to the Official Record Store Chart suggests otherwise. In the first quarter of 2013, results show that vinyl record sales have increased by a significant 78 percent. This isn't random nor a shock rise however, as last year (2012), vinyl sales surged up by 15 percent across all genres to an impressive 389,000 copies sold, the highest since 2004. Although independent record stores only accounted for thee percent of all albums sold in 2012, they managed to contribute towards more than 35 percent of all vinyl sales in the UK. With data collected by the Official Record Store Charts company, it takes in account sales from some of the biggest stores in the country including London's Rough Trade, Piccadilly Records in Manchester and Crash Records (Leeds) among others. The official weekly chart is published each Sunday, last week it was announced that folk band Mumford and Son's hit album 'Babel' was the biggest selling record in the last 12 months sold by independent record stores. The other four top selling vinyl records of 2012/13 include Emelie Sande's 'Our Version Of Events' (2nd), record store day ambassador Jack White with Blunderbuss at number three and albums from The xx and David Bowie at to finish of the top 5. This news in general is great for the music industry and community, especially after the recent actions taken towards HMV's future. Also, these results and data bring forward that it isn't at all the end for the vinyl record but potentially a new beginning. Sales will only continue to increase and no doubt that 78% rise will significantly be exceeded especially with Record Store Day fast approaching.
The full UK Official Vinyl chart for 2012/13 was as follows:
Mumford & Sons - Babel Emelie Sande - Our Versions of Events - Jack White - Blunderbuss The xx - Coexist David Bowie - The Next Day Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls Alt-J - An Awesome Wave Jake Bugg - Jake Bugg Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Push The Sky Away Richard Hawley - Standing at the Sky's Edge
I felt a questionnaire was an effective way to reach my target audience as it is a quick and practical method to collect quantitative data. Participants don't have to spend too long answering the questions as they only have to tick a box. They don't have to think too hard about their answers as they are picking from a multiple choice and the questions are closed ended, therefore meaning those involved not having to expand on their answers. It is also easy for me to make observations and conclusions from the final results.
I used an application on Facebook called 'surveys for Facebook'. With over 900 friends on the social networking site, I thought this would be a much better way to reach my audience especially as the majority of my friends tend to young. It allowed me to add the questions and answers and invite the people I wanted too. This was great as I specifically wanted to ask certain questions and I decided to invite certain people who I knew were interested in the genre I felt I wanted to focus on (indie/alternative/folk rock).
Step One - Creating the Survey
Here, I created the survey, giving it an appropriate name (Your Ideal Music Video) and inserting a description so the audience have some instructions on what to do, etc.
Step Two - Adding the Questions and Answers
Here is the finished questionnaire after I added the questions and answers. I included age and sex in order to split up my audience and see if males or females tend to prefer one thing from the other. Other questions included what sort of videos do people prefer and whether they prefer to see the artist feature in the video.
Inviting Friends to Answer the Questionnaire
Finally, I selectively sent certain people requests to answer my survey. These were all people I knew had a similar preference in music that suited the idea of music video I wanted to make. Overall I selected 60 participants to take part in the survey.
My Results
After sending requests out to 60 people to fill out my questionnaire on music videos I received roughly 30 replies which was great. After collecting and bringing the results together I found that overall people preferred narrative based music videos that include the artist. Generally people also felt 3-4 minutes was the appropriate length for a song but didn't really like videos that featured the artist singing or lip syncing the lyrics. Finally, the average age of my respondent audience was 16-20. However, this was expected as the majority of people I have on Facebook have a similar age as me.
There are various different genres in Music today and with each typically comes a different style of music video too. I have researched four different music genres, Rock/Metal, Pop, Indie/Alt, and R&B/Rap and highlighted what makes them different from each other. Rock/Metal Music Videos - Avenged Sevenfold - Nightmare
In general, Nightmare by Avenged Sevenfold is quite typical of it's genre. As a whole the lighting throughout the video is very dark and has quite a mysterious tone which you'd expect when watching a metal video. This video, as well as other similar videos is performance based, with the band performing throughout the song and lead singer lip syncing alone at various points. The video is hybrid however, the video doesn't just feature the band performing but there's a narrative base to it too. From the song and meaning of the lyrics, the narrative re-creates a nightmare inside what appears to be a mental asylum. There are lots of quick cuts when the music becomes faster and louder and shots of blood and patients in the hospital are quite shocking for the audience. The general mise-en-scene in metal/rock music videos tends to include people with tattoos or piercings and again the lighting is always dark and mysterious.
Pop Music Videos - JLS - Everybody in Love
The video for Everybody in Love by JLS and practically every single other pop music video is the complete opposite of those in the rock/metal genre. Rather than being very dark throughout the video, it's much more bright, lively and vibrant. The video is also performance based and the band seem to dance to a routine throughout but pop videos generally tend to focus more on the appearance and image of the artist in order to appeal to their audience. (P.s. Please take into account I had to listen to this song as least once the whole way through in order to write this. Oh, the pain).
Indie/Alternative Music Videos - The Courteeners - Not Nineteen Forever
As music in the alternative genre is so widespread there aren't particularly any codes and conventions of indie music videos rather than them being quite unique and different. In this case, The Courteeners sound fits into the 'lad rock' section of indie music. The video includes the lead singer Liam Fray lip syncing in a cafe and the video seems much more genuine and authentic than a typical pop video. Other indie music videos can often be quite symbolic and picturess.
Rap/R&B Music Videos - T-Pain - Church
Common characteristics of rap and R&B videos tend to include the artist centre stage throughout the video often driving expensive cars or surrounded by half naked dancing women. They are fairly similar to pop videos in the way that the artist's image is the most important thing. Music videos in this genre usually include the artist miming as well and if any feature narrative it's usually based on the lyrics. As a whole, rap videos are quite positive and upbeat rather than dark and grim in comparison to the metal/rock genre.
