Music Video

What is a music video?

A music video is a short, visual production that is used to accompany a pre-existing song for the purpose of boosting sales of the music in another format. E.g. Vinyl, CD, Streaming or Spotify. These videos are often called 'promos' because, they are promoting the song and in some cases, the imagery that it's with. Nowadays, music videos are also A marketing device to not only promote the song but, tie-ins and merchandise as well (and in some cases, toys and food).    

 What is its main purpose?

It's main purpose is to boost the sales of the song and the music artists reputation. After all, It's a lot easier to make people remember something if the visuals accompanying it are 'unique' or eye catching. Each music video obviously has its own style and approach. However, from the ones I have seen, they do seem to have a sort of pattern (albeit a pretty obvious one). The visuals seem to be very quick, what I mean by that is, almost every second there's a new shot, a new angle of the people in the video. I think that this is used to keep the viewers attention by constantly switching up the visuals (Though I feel like they switch up the shots a bit too often).  

What other purposes?

While the main purpose of a music video is to boost sales and promote the artist. There are other reasons to make one. For some, music can be considered a piece of art. Art isn't strictly visual of course and it takes a great of time to create a piece of music. So to transform and combine that into a visual form, you can not only have a better appreciation for the music but, the visuals that accompany it. That's why there's so much work that's put into music videos. It's important to know that music and visuals don't automatically together. You can't just thrown in some flashy visuals and put the music with it and call it a day. All songs have a theme, (relationships, hardship, etc) so you have to think what would fit that theme, making it look appealing to eye and also make it interesting. Another purpose of a music video is the potential tie-ins with a third party. I briefly talked about this but, bands and the songs that they are associated with sometimes have tie-ins with movies, or just any other collaborations. An example of this would be the famous ghost buster song.

History

A Music Video I admire

Below is one of my favourite songs, 'Mr Fear' from a band called SIAMES. This was originally one of the songs from their first album 'Bounce Into The Music'. In 2018 (2 years after the album released) this song got an animated music video. Sadly, there isn't a behind the scenes video like with 'The Wolf' which is another SIAMES song that got the same treatment as 'Mr Fear'. As to why I admire this video. Well first off, the visuals are really nice. it's crisp, clean and just well animated. The animation also just looks really... unique. Like a mix-up of a comic and Japanese manga. This video has a story with a lot of symbolism in it, even it doesn't seem so at first. Picking it apart just adds a greater appreciation to the visuals and the work that was put into it, even though some might not even notice it (thank god for YouTube comments). For the story itself, it's simplicity is what makes the whole thing so charming. In a nutshell, two 'lifeforms' make contact each-other and find out they have the power to transform into a beast which is hinted to be the embodiment of their fear. This is an oversimplification but I don't want to explain the story (just watch the video). Through almost the entire duration of the video, the story is basically out of place. You see the visuals cut off to not spoil anything and the timeline of events out of order. This whole bit is basically a sort of peek into the future, and then you get to the beginning of the story. I really like this, it makes the viewer question what's going to happen and in the process, intrigues them to watch what happens till the end. Now onto the music. it's really, discomforting? It fits well of course, the whole song is about fear after all so it's smart to make viewer feel something accordance to fear, something that all of us can relate to which makes it easier to empathise with. The music and lyrics also just fit really well together, there's something about it that I don't know how to explain but it just makes the song even better.             

Tracking shots in music videos

We watched 4 music videos which are all made with tracking shots. The ones we watched were Massive Attack - "Unfinished Symphony", The Verve - "Bittersweet Symphony", Kiesza - "Hideaway", and Childish Gambino - "This is America". These 4 videos were very well made production wise and all incorporated the tracking shot technique in their music video. What's amazing about these videos though is that the tracking shot technique is used through the entire video. Meaning, the camera is always tracking them. But what is a tracking shot? Well, a tracking shot is a camera technique, where the camera is moving along with a subject. This is not to be confused with a trucking shot though, which is a type of tracking shot where the camera is simply moving left or right along a track to capture the subject. a tracking shot can move left, right, forward or backwards during a shot. A tracking shot can be done with multiple pieces of equipment. Namely, The dolly and the steady-cam. The steady-cam is pretty self-explanatory. It simply stabilises the camera with weights and gyros which counterbalance any movements by the camera person. In short, it reduces the camera wobble caused by the camera-man. A dolly is a piece of equipment that allows the camera to be placed on wheels, and can be moved around. Think of it like a camera being put on a spider, and being able to move that spider around. 

Tracking shots can be used in two different ways, one is in a type of film and the other is in a music video.            

Types and Genres of Music Videos

Performance-based - A performance based music video is a type of visual production where the artist or band featured will 'perform' to the camera. These performances vary, but the ones that you'll most often see are the artists singing or playing along with their instruments. A small thing to note. There are two types of performances. One being a regular performance, where the band or artist is being recorded with a camera and will later be edited and uploaded to a video website. The other is a live performance, where instead of the artist or band being recorded, they play live either in front of an audience or on a streaming website.       

Narrative-based - Narrative-based music videos in simple terms, are music videos that have a linear or non-linear story which has a meaning behind it. While it may not seem like it, the narrative for music videos can be very flexible. The story can either be based on the lyrics or something else up entirely. The choice is completely up to whoever's writing it. Since Narrative music videos have a heavier emphasis on the storyline. It's a lot more time consuming than some of the other types of music videos, since you need to be a lot more thoughtful and considerate to what kind of shots you want to create, how long each shot is going to be and what are the actors going to be doing. And plus, you need to make sure that the overall length of the story and visuals fit in with the actual song so that they both finish at the same time. (This is coming from personal experience so excuse the oddly specific details). Overall it's a lot more labour intensive, time consuming and expensive to make than what most people would think. Another thing to note is that while the actual song is in the music video is important, the visuals are often given a higher priority. (I.E the visuals are the main focus and not the song)  

Interpretive - Interpretive music videos are music videos that can interpreted in different ways by it's audience. Now this may sound a bit confusing but let me give an example. 50 people watch the same exact music video, but each 1/5 of them interpret the music video in a different way. 10 people may see the music video as a message to someone, while 10 different people may see it as the artist venting to their audience about something, and so on and so forth. That's basically what an interpretive music video is. Something that each person sees something differently in. Now there are two ways of creating an interpretive music video. One is through the visuals and the other is through the audio. But both are considerably tricky to do as you have to twist both in a way where it's 'open' to the audiences mind.     

Animated - An animated music video is one of the more unique type of music video. While there's no difference audio wise, the visuals are either hand drawn or animated graphically using a computer. This, out of all of the other types of music videos, is the most time consuming because of how long it takes to draw every frame. While on the subject, it's important to note that it's one of the most expensive types of visual production to make because of how long animations take to create.    

Surrealist - A surrealist music video is little hard to describe. It's more akin to how the video is styled rather than what type it is. The music video has to have surreal imagery or audio (surreal is a mix or symbolic imagery, dream like scenes, and distorted figures and objects).       

Pastiche - A pastiche is a type of music video where it tries to imitate or copy specific features that are prevalent in a different music video. These things may be the type of style, theme or just little little things that the other music video may be known for. While some make Pastiche videos to make fun and or criticise another music video, others see it as a sort of plagiarism.     

Parody - Parody music videos make fun of something by greatly exaggerating it. This shouldn't be confused with a pastiche though, pastiche's imitate the song it's making fun of and directly copy certain aspects of that song while adding their own thing. A parody video takes inspiration from a song and do their own sort on of twist on it. A parody music video doesn't have to take inspiration from a song either. It could be a musical genre from a different time, the actors could be gender swapped compared to the actors from the music video their making a parody on. Or they could recreate a music video, shot by shot but put their own twist on it.   

Homage - A homage music video is actually very similar to a Parody music video. However instead of making fun or exaggerating it, A homage is paying tribute or respect to something. This could be a song, movie or literally anything else. 

Storyboard Practice 

This was a practice of a storyboard that I made for my music video. Even though this was a practice, I didn't make a storyboard of the song I was going to choose as I haven't actually decided yet. The two you see above are just songs I may consider choosing. At first, I thought that this practice was unnecessary as I've already made a lot of storyboards for my other media projects. However, this was a bit different from the rest as I had to be a lot more detailed with what I wrote. I had to describe what kind of shot I was going for (Long Shot, Close Up etc.) and how I was going to make that shot happen. While it doesn't sound like a lot, It really makes you think a lot more realistically with how your shots are going to turn out and what your going to need and do to make that happen. Overall, even though I had done this before I learned a lot more by simply going into more detail about what I wanted.       

Audience Classification

One of our class tasks was to find an artist and song, and think about whether that song would belong or associate with a class (lower, middle, upper). I chose the song 'Buttercup' by Jack Stauber. It's honestly pretty hard to discern which class it would associate with because music itself is very subjective to each individual. So because of this, I will discern which class this song belongs to by it's genre

Audience and Market research on ThunderCat and his audience.

Regarding ThunderCat's audience, I would say that they are probably around the age of 16-30+ who like R&B, jazz, pop and funk. I believe that this is the right demographic because while ThunderCat might incorporate all these genre's that are considered trendy, the theme's of his music are melancholic. Talking about depression, dealing with the loss of a loved one and some political subjects, which I feel only older audiences would understand. Considering that ThunderCat has collaborated with a lot of people like Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dog, and Flying Lotus. I would also say that some fans may also be interested in rap too since some of his songs do have that. Most people that listen to ThunderCat are probably lower-middle class as the type of music that he produces would have a higher appeal to them.   

While I didn't manage to find statistics on ThunderCat's audience, I did find this chart that shows the top genres in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103873/entire-music-album-consumption-by-genre-worldwide/). With this chart, we can see that R&B, which is the main genre that ThunderCat incorporates is third on the chart. Considering that ThunderCat is an American musician, it's likely that most of his audience would also be, so the information in these statistics I feel are relevant and allows us to see and give a very rough estimate of how many people may listen to him. ThunderCat's album 'It is what' also won a Grammy award, this shows that his music appeals to a large amount of people.