Concept for Music Video

After conversations with the lead singer of the band, we decided the song was about loneliness and emptiness. The lyrics of the song are all about the death of the lead singer's close relative, and girl troubles. We therefore decided that the concept of the music video would be "Emptiness". This wikipedia article describes what we mean by "Emptiness" as a concept.

Expect a storyboard uploaded fairly soon.

UPDATE: The band are re-recording the track I plan to do, with slight differences (hence the delay in the story board upload). I have had several in depth conversations about the structure of the piece with the lead singer of the band and I am currently writing a shooting script based on my ideas and for the purpose of using as a plan for my story board.

Response From Audience Questionnaire

(The link to the results)

The results were by and large very interesting. The fact that the average rating for the 35mm film look was only 2/5 is probably due to the fact that i failed to mention the genre in the questionnaire, as i only originally planned to direct fans from the band and readers of this blog to it. The fact that most people watched music videos on Youtube was not a surprise to me.

I am going to speak to the lead singer and generate a concept for the video and talk about more shot ideas from the results of this poll.

Home Made Fish Eye Lens

After researching how to make a fish eye lens, i found this website about making one out a pair of glasses and some duct tape.

I am going to make one for my camera out of a pair of broken glasses, as i've had an idea for a shot using a fisheye camera, but i don't currently have one.

Audience Questionnaire

I have created an online survey for my target audience to fill in. This can be viewed here.

The results of the poll can be viewed here.

I am putting the link on the band's Facebook and Myspace for people to fill in. I should hopefully get a larger target audience. I have also used tinyurl.com to make an easy to remember link to follow for people "http://tinyurl.com/fhwpoll".

UPDATE: I have also posted the link to http://www.reddit.com/r/wearethemusicmakers, which is a forum for people involved in music production and composition, to get an "inside" opinion from producers and record label owners.

Idea: Guitar With Attached Camera

I had an idea whilst fixing a broken web cam of playing with the wiring, making a new case for it and attaching it to my guitar. The resulting footage is below.

I am going to use this idea in my music video because it gives really distorted footage, because of the poor quality of the camera (it only captures about 5 frames per second, because of me altering the wiring of the camera to limit the maximum amount of data (or bandwidth) it can output). This is reminiscent of the psychedelic genre.

Getting That FIlm Look With DV Cameras

For my music video i really want parts of it to have that look of film, such as in the My Bloody Valentine's video for "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (The video can be viewed here). I really like the look of it, and it draws on the genre conventions of psychedelic rock music videos and gives the video a "vintage" feel which is currently very popular. However, i am going to be using a DV camera.

After researching it, what people on forums and advice websites suggest is keeping down the frame rate to 24 frames per second, because that's what 35mm film is shot in, planning the lighting well so that it the censor in the camera has to compensate in an extreme way, and using film and colour effects to get the right look in my editing process. Other sources suggest manually controlling the aperture and exposure levels on the camera whilst shooting.

iMovie Video Effects Trials

I am going to be using Apple's iMovie software to edit my music video. One of the codes and conventions of psychedelic rock music videos are strange video effects, so i thought I would do a trial video to try out what effects I can create on the piece of software, and what they look like when they are compressed into web streaming quality.

The effects I like the most are the "Colour TV", "False Colours", "Newspaper" and "Edges".

My Brief

The band that i am going to be making a music video for are are Bristol based physchadelic rock band called Fly Honey Warehouse. They would like me to make a video for their song "Pick Me Up (To Go, Please)".

I have spoken to the band about the purpose of the video, and they want a promotional video for their myspace page, and to put the video on youtube to direct possible events managers and PR people towards. The video should promote their alternative image and should draw on conventions of their psychedelic roots and be a combination of performance and concept based elements. The target audience for the video will be later teens (16+).

The lyrics to the song are as follows:

Do you know how it feels,

To phase out from what is real?

I need a pick me up to go,

'Cos if theres no lights then there's no show.

And I'd give you whats mine to share,

But you wouldn't even care.

All the little things I hold,

How can i trust they won't get bought and sold out,

Cast away their souls just torn out?

And you,

You aren't the one for which I care.

But you're the only one,

Who's really there,

In this old heart of mine

Now i'm just going through a hard time,

A hard time.

"Going To Hell" The Brian Jonestown Massacre

BJM- Going to Hell

"Ladies Of The World"- Flight Of The Conchords

I chose this video because I feel it follows most of Andrew Goodwin's six music video conventions.

The visual/lyric matching runs throughout as this is where the comedy element is created. For example, when they are listing different types of women, they show them (but are only actually showing 2 or 3 women on a loop)

"All You Sexy Hermaphrodite Lady Man Ladies"

The video follows Genre characteristics of comedy music videos. There are comedy elements to the video, created by parodying the 70s and the folk/jazz genre.

There are intertextual references to the era of the 70s- roller skating and sun-kissed film style colours. This creates a very memorable stylisation to the video and add to the surrealism of the video.

There are close-ups of the stars of the video as they sing, parodying conventional music video stars, in poses and pulling strange expressions etc

The music video is very fitting to the genre and tone of the musical content of the song. The overall brightness of colour and lighting and the general lighthearted nature of the video strongly reflects the song's message ("If all the soldiers in the world put down their guns and picked up a lady, the world wold be a much better place").