​JACOB FLOWERS
Narrative and Perfromance.
Thought Beats- Seeing the Sound.
Firstly, we took into account the structure of the song. We broke the song down into peformance in the coruses and verses and then narrative in the instrumentals. This gave a clear outline of when the narrative was and gave a structure to our video. This would make it easier for the audidence to understand our video.
Secondly we took into account the voice of the song, an artists voice is very unique and we needed to portray this through the video. Our arists voice featured whispering, and sounded very sad and distressed. I tried to portray this through my charcters facial experssions in the perofrmance as well as my presence. For example at some stages I was kneeling, sobbing shouting to pass the emotion across to the viewer.
Goodwin also hilights that mode of adress is also very important. Songs can be seen as stories and the artists being the story teller. I tried to tell a story through my performance in the video. Looking directly at the camera and showing my different emotions throughou the video was essentisal in this aspect. We had a clear storyline and I we used the main artist to express it, as the viewer goes through his experiences.
Like our video Slipknot takes a character through a journey here is a comparison: here is the ending shots of my video and slipknot's. In our video my charter goes through a journey though his past memeories, like in slipknots video where the character goes underground and goes through a journey, linking the the lyrics of 'dead memories'.
Goodwin identifies that narrative and perfromance should work hand in hand, the artist acting as both narrator and participant helps to increase the authenticity however lip sync and other mimed actions remains at the heart of music videos. The audience needs to believe this is real. Our video sucessfully uses this theory as our artists acts as the narrator and perfomer in the music video, our artist commits a murder and is the main character in the music video, we mixed the narrative with lip syncing to make it look like it was real. This defianlty made the video authentic, my mined actions and experssions matched the narrative as they interliked with each other.
The video Zombie Slam by Pain does this very well linking the narrative to the perfromace, for example there is a scene in the video in which the main character is talking to a boy in the video while singing, and in our video i talk to the priest and sing directly after:
The Star image is a vital aspect in music videos. This is shown effectivly whith stars in our genre such as Marliyn Manson, Slipknot and Gary Numan. We took inspiration from these stars and tried to give our artist that star image through the use of costume, personality and camera angles/shots.
We made sure our lyrics had a direct link to the visuals in our track. For example our lyrics included words related to religion, also words such as cold, scared, scream. We related the chorus 'here in the black it comes, here in the black it comes for me' to the narrative. His sins he has commited are coming back for him and hauting him, he has no where to hide or run. This also related to the prest killing me in the end. Relationship between the lyrics and the visuals is shown in video such as Death Stars Cyanide, as the lyrics of posion and murder link directly to the music video. The narrative in this video and lyrics also links to ours.
Star Image
Relationship between the visuals and the song.
CONCEPTS:
My first step in my research was to get ideas from ceratin theorists in the music industry. These theories would be beneficial to my reserch and planning processes. The thoeries I found give the foundations of a sucessfull music video that are crucial in connecting with your target audience and creating a brand image. The main theorirst I looked at was Andrew Goodwin, he identified there are five things an audience should look out for when watching a music video, these are: Thought Beats- Seeing the sound, Narrative and Performance, The Star Image, Relations of visuals to song and Technical aspects of a music video. These ideas helped me create not only a visually interesting video, but one that connected with the audience and my particular genre.
