Different Types of Music Videos

There are 3 main genres of music video's-

Firstly is narrative based videos. These videos consist of a storyline that closely follows the lyrics of the song. These videos are often very engaging for audiences as it gives a visual to the meaning of a song. A good example of narrative based video is Sam Smith's 'I'm not the only one'

I like this video because of the way it tells the story whilst sticking to the lyrics. Also the use of costume is very effective as the white dress has connotations of a wedding which further emphasises the heartbreak of the character. 

Secondly is performance based videos. These focus on the band performing to either an audience or camera. This enables the audience to feel like they are at a gig watching the band live. An example of this is Hudson Taylors 'Battles' 

I like this video because it shows actual footage of fans, venues and performances, which creates a personal and honest simple video. 

Conceptual videos such as Ok Go 'This Too Shall Pass' create a fun and interesting video to watch

This example, very similar to their other videos, is amazing but holds no narrative, something which might be interesting to try depending on the genre of music I chose. 

First Storyboards

Below are some brief, rough sketches which shows my initial plans for my music video. It will have approximately 4 scenes each containing differing shot types, movements and locations. It is extremely important to storyboard even simple sketches in order to help with pre-production stages, production stage as you often need to refer back to them when filming your shots and post-production stage as during the editing process you can see where shots are meant to be. The reason I didn't draw them to accurately as my idea is always changing, so my idea may not look at all like this when I'm finished, but it's important to record my development as I continue with my project,

These basic drawings should help me when I start to film my music video

Mood Board

In the early stages of production its important to think about what kind of tone you want to create. In order to do this I have created an on-line mood board

Here's the link to my mood board-http://www.gomoodboard.com/boards/gMEsm6EW/share

I have chosen quite a dull blue colour scheme, keeping colours muted creates a darker tone to my video. I also have included lots of water in my piece as I want to be an important part of the video. Lense flares would create a really cool effect within the video and would reflect the madness and confusion of my main female character perhaps. 

As I continue to develop my music video I want to keep on updating my mood board in order to record my ideas as they change and develop.

Experimenting #1

In pairs we took inspiration from a music video or short film and tried to create shots which we liked and then go out try to use the techniques they used in their video. We took our inspiration from Mystery Jets - Someone Purer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XILvOrna0RA.What we really like was the editing effects such as layering and also the various colour treatments and flashes of colour or lens flares. As both of us are looking at using similar techniques this was really helpful to gain more understanding of how we can create such things. 

Below our several of our own attempts.

These first three attempts I think work really well as we experimented a lot with different backgrounds in terms of our shots. I particularly like the second and third tries as I feel the subtle graffiti and brick layering in the background give it a very urban indie vibe. The colour treatments in each of them are different and we experimented with lots of layering of colour treatments in order to get quite a washed out grungy feeling which I really like.   

Experimenting #2

Here is part two of our experimentation with layering and colour treatment. In the first video we just took a simple medium close-up then changed the colour treatment to what we thought would work well with a flash of red colour. Although we thought that this would be a hard to do, in practise it worked better and much easier than what we thought it would. 

The second video we took a medium shot of someone sitting down and then layered a slightly altered version of it  onto the original shot. We thought carefully again about our colour treatment and I personal think this was our best attempt. The use of black and white, I think creates a more edgy vibe and almost creates a ghostly shadow behind the actor.