Inspirational Music Videos : Research No. 1

For a part of my research, I simply watched some music videos of various genres so I could select the most effective ideas and conventions for the music video Nikil and I were going to create. I also thought that it would be a good idea to view songs that had a similar theme or melodical mood. For this, Nikil and I had a kind of film-night/sleep-over where we watched several music channels for a long period of time, mainly MTV2 and Kerrang in the hope that our selected song "Everbody's changing"would be portrayed on at least one of the TV channels ..... fortunately we were'nt disappointed. At the same time we also noted down our top 3 most favourite music videos of the night: Green Day-When I Come Around, Red Hot Chilli Peppers-Under The Bridge and Incubus-Drive. The purpose being to use these as inspirational tools when we were to construct our own music video, in particular the effective use of camera angles.

Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Under The Bridge
Under The Bridge was released sometime in March 1992. It begins with the guitarist (John Frusciante), playing his guitar on a small platform inside a studio. Behind him is a view of a desert and an inverted sky. This lasts for the whole first introductory solo. The guitarist is only ever seen in this position. The singer (Anthony Kiedis) then appears, coated in purple light with a starry background behind him. After a while, a city skyline appears below him.

In several clips of the video, the bassist (Flea) and the drummer (Chad Smith) can be seen, playing away at their instruments. A lot of superimposition is used for these moments (several clips being placed over one another so that all of them are visible). One technique used for this is to position the clips in different sections of the screen, e.g. the drummer will be playing on the right whilst the singer is standing on the left. This ties in with the idea of "Mise-en-scene", a key camera shot where you can see many things happening all at once. The singer then walks through the streets of a city, while the camera focuses on different people throughout.



The director of the video, Gus Vant Sant, said that this was vital as they believed the studio portion would not convey enough emotion. He also said that it is needed to be combined with "an outdoor, streets-of-Los-Angeles theme." Near the end, the singer is seen running along a river, and an atomic bomb is going off in the background. Around the same time, the other members are shown through superimposition.

Near the end of the video is a clip where a car is driving down a road at night. This clip is in slow motion but the frame rate is significantly cut down. This makes the many street lights look more dazed. The video ends like it started, with the guitarist playing on the pedestal. Now, the background is an inverted ocean instead of a sky.

Green Day - When I Come Around
When I Come Around uses a lot of cameras which are 'tracking'. It uses the conventional format of having a storyline running parallel to the band, but the band is not performing. They are just walking through streets. The singer, is still lip syncing. This supports the idea that the singer is most important as he is in front and he is the only member doing what he would do while performing.



Whenever the band is shown, the camera is in front of them and the band is following the camera. The story is quite original - a person is standing in a house, and he looks over the street through the window to see someone else. That person is then looking at another person smoking in the streets, while he is looking at a couple kissing. The cycle continues until the last person looks back at the first person the viewer saw, making a continuous cycle.


Incubus - Drive
Drive is a more modern song than When I Come Around and uses an interesting effect throughout the video. The lead singer is shown 'drawing himself' on some paper. The video shows the band performing, but only the guitarist and singer are shown playing their instruments all the way through. Most of the time, it shows the band relaxing, however, sometimes the turn-tablist, bassist and drummer are seen playing.

There are almost no still camera shots because the camera rarely stands still, usually zooming in or panning round one of the band layers, for example, during the guitar solo, the camera is upside down, giving the video a very peculiar image to it. The guitarist is shown the most here, but all the other members are seen as well, also playing upside down. The drummer has been filmed playing but has been slowed down by editing the clip into slow motion, which can be easily noticed due to the drumstick which he is spinning with his hands. This not only looks awesome but the clip has to be in slow motion because if the drumstick was spinning rapidly, it would not fit into the slowish tempo of the song. As the solo ends, it switches from the Guitarist playing upside down in a smooth transition to the singer standing the correct way up.



The music video draws to an end when the audience is able to visualise the iconic animation of the singer ripping up the piece of paper he had originally been drawing on at the start of the music video, showing a full circle to the baseline to the video's convention. The location of the video was shot at the fairly modern McNamara Alumni Centre.

After carefully and thoroughly examining these renowned media videos, I hope to utilise and adapt some of the techniques used in these videos for the benefit of our video as they are professional and look highly effective.

Song Ideas

We began to plan what song we were going to select for our music video almost immediately after we finished our AS Project. Nikil and I discussed what songs we wanted and how we could attach some filming to whatever song we had chosen so that we could create a music video.

Our first chosen songs:

• ACDC - Black in Back
• Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son
• Jimi Hendrix - Purple Haze
• Stranglers - Hanging Around

At the very start of the project, Nikil and I thought about what we could do to create an ideal music video. We had originally discussed about the idea of incorporating some footage from 3 video games we both knew and played quite a lot; Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2 and Battlefield Vietnam. A close contender for the music video was the track "Purple Haze"written during the Vietnam War (1965 - 1975) by the legendary Jimi Hendrix. This game play (footage from a video game) would have ideally fitted into the video as it illustrated genuine historical combat footage and hence clearly demonstrates the war. It portrayed this in two ways firstly at a certain time of the year in Vietnam there is a natural purple haze that forms in the top canopy of the rainforest. Secondly, it has been well documented that due to the horrors of this war many very young soldiers turned to drugs in order to cope and block out the scenes of warfare, and therefore this led to them functioning under the influence of drugs and their thought processes being hazy.

The starting point of planning of our project was to combine the selected song we would have carefully chosen with various types of different military/battlefield footage, for example, air strikes by high-speed jets mixed with the gritty ground combat and the addition of naval combat too. We had planned to create and obtain the majority of this footage from using a screen capture software called FRAPS that we were both very familiar with and knew exactly how to use. We would then use this computer program to record the audio and visuals from our gameplay whilst playing military action games such as Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2 and Battlefield Vietnam. These three video games are very realistic in comparison to a real battlefield and depict an idea picture of what we wanted. We know it is realistic because they were reviewed by game testers and people who genuinely fought in these particular battles. These reviews both stated how realistic all 3 games are.

Our idea was to compare the combat from the times of World War 2, the Vietnam War and Modern Warfare. The songs that we were going to choose were also made and released around the time of the Vietnam war, so it would suit the style of the video we wanted.

To obtain some actual military/battlefield based footage, Nikil and I had planned to go to an air show at Duxford, Cambridgeshire. Attending an airshow would enable us to observe and film different war planes from the various ages. They would be on display and would fly insane stunts and flybys over the area and in front of us. We would film the planes as they flew over perilously low doing stunts and simulated dogfights. This real-life footage would be absolutely ideal to enhance our music video and to help portray the devastation and reality of war.

One of the camera shots we wanted to use was to a "Mise-en-scene" camera shot. Ideally I would have had someone dressed up in a military uniform, preferably the singer, positioned and stationary at the end of a runway whilst a plane is taking off directly above them. We would have then edited this clip by slowing it down and mixing it with a sort of purple-haze effect.

Below is a screen shot from the ideal video we were going to use:

However, after we analysed the songs, we realised how they would be difficult to approach in consideration to making a music video. This is because the lyrics to the songs did not really give us a clear picture of an ideal story upon the results we found through the questionnaires. But all was not lost... I was listening to my friends I-Pod when I first came across the song "Everybody's Changing" by Lily Allen.

I had recognised the song as it was originally sung by Keane. After listening through the entire song I knew that this song would be the ideal piece of music to create a video. The rationale was that upon hearing the lyrics I knew that I could easily create a story-board. I personally don't like this version of the song sung by Lily Allen. My preferance is the original release by the group Keane, but their track was too lengthy and therefore, wasn't suitable to make an effective video, whereas Lily Allen's version of the song is just the ideal amount of time.