"Find an example of a music video that is filmed in black and white"

Today in lesson we were asked to pick a question and answer it on our blogs. I picked to find a black and white music video, so here is my favourite one: PVRIS - My House.
The black and white element is this video is really important as it adds to the unnatural and ghostly element that the video is centred around. Due to this, it links really well with the lyrics and the imagery used, creating an even more mysterious feel to the video. Here it is!

Indie Genre - Lana Del Rey

Here is Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness. Lana (Lizzie Grant) has been signed to a variety of labels, including Stranger, Polydor and Interscope and is established as an indie pop, sadcore and psychedelic rock artist. Lana Del Rey would be perfect for our artist because the group all loving her music and her being female, however due to her being so well known and mainstream we wouldn't use her.
The video Summertime Sadness is a narrative video with abstract elements, which is something I really like. I also like the vintage feel to the shots and how they look like burnt film, as I think this makes the video quite unusual and interesting. The variety of shots and the transitions between them also makes the video interesting, as they all link together to create a strong narrative.

Prelim task

So this is our preliminary task of Bruno Mars' Uptown Funk! 33 seconds of pure entertainment. (Just kidding). We came across a few hiccups in our prelim which has helped us decide what we will and won't include in our actual music video, such as the fast paced editing required at 0.13. We really struggled to find a way to create the shot, and ended up spending around 3 hours figuring it out. In the end, we decided to open a new project on iMovie and played around with splitting clips and mixing them up which really helped with creating the final product. We also struggled with lip-syncing in and having everything edited to the beat, but we managed to overcome a lot of those struggles by slowing down a few clips. We wish we had taken a few more shots though, as it would have made the editing process a lot less daunting and stressful.



Further explanation of what went well and what didn't go so well:

Góða Tungl

Although not part of the indie genre, Samaris' Góða Tungl is one of my all time favourite music videos. I really like the sequence of shots at the beginning and end of the video, especially as they're all edited to the beat. I also really like the 'oddness' of the video, such as the match of the beach with a bed and the dance continuing through the mix of shots. This something I'd like to inspire my groups final music video, although our lack of Icelandic beaches and hospital beds could make that a little difficult. We could potentially use a song like this for our final video as the song falls under electro, however a band like Samaris would not be ideal as (unfortunately) none of us can speak Icelandic very well.

Indie Genre - Bon Iver

Bon Iver is an indie rock band that was created in 2007 by Justin Vernon. The band has released two albums: 'For Emma, Forever Ago' and 'Bon Iver, Bon Iver', along with a B-Side entitled 'Blood Bank'. Justin Vernon released first album 'For Emma, Forever Ago' independantly, however is now signed with label Jagjaguwar. The band has been nominated for 4 Grammy awards (won 2), nominated for 2 Brits and also 1 MTV Music Award.

The music video Calgary by Bon Iver doesn't conform to common indie characteristics, which usually includes a performance of some type. Instead, the video is quite abstract while still containing somewhat of a narrative, which is something that I like in music videos as I think it makes the video really odd and captivating. Even though I like the how strange the video is, I don't really like how slow it is and is something I hope to avoid when creating our music video.

Planning and filming the prelim task!

After a lot of discussion, my group has decided to go with Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' Uptown Funk for our preliminary task. We really like how upbeat the song is and hopefully the strong beat will make it easy for us to edit along to it. The video also has a variety of shots and a lot of content, so we hope that replicating this video will challenge us and help us result in a better music video when it's time for the actual final coursework product! Although pop isn't the genre that we want to use for our final music video, we chose the song because it was easily recognisable and the video was more technically challenging than the videos that we looked at from the indie genre. We've had a really fun time filming half of the video so far and it hasn't appeared to be as daunting as we thought it would be, so hopefully the rest of the filming will go smoothly as well!


Here is the original Uptown Funk video:

Genre Planning

As a group we've decided that the genre we're most likely to pursue for our final music video is the indie genre. The group all enjoy indie music, so we'd all be satisfied with the song chosen and hopefully there'll be no squabbles! Along with this, we feel that indie would be best for us as the lyrics are usually quite slow and therefore we'd be able to lip-sync them a lot easier. Also, indie music usually holds a strong beat which will allow us to edit to the beat easily and hopefully produce a good music video!
In addition to the indie genre, we've had a look into electro-rock/electro-pop as these genres also have good beats that we can edit well to. These genres also don't produce a lot of videos and when they do they're pretty abstract, so that will stop us from trying to subconsciously replicate anything and help us to produce a more original music video.
For now, we aim to focus more on the indie genre, so I've collected a few music video conventions common to the genre indie:

• Often uses a narrative
• Occasionally includes diegetic sounds (i.e. birds chirping at the beginning of the video)
• Shots tend to include close up, establishing, long, wide and are usually cut up with fast paced editing or are slow (depending on the beat)
• Emotion is conveyed
• Black and white is commonly used