The media product I will use to analyse for genre will be the music video I made as part of a group. The existing song we chose to create a new music video for was ‘Banquet’ by Bloc Party. This song and band are traditionally recognised to belong to the gene of Indie/Rock and alternate. We chose to work with this particular genre as it was the favoured music style of the members of the group, and we as a group felt as this was the genre we enjoyed listening to we could achieve the highest grade that we were capable of. The band ‘Bloc Party’ are widely renound for their collaboration of Rock and Indie music and they are perfect example of what this particular genre entails.
When thinking of an idea of how we could also portray the same genre as the song in the visuals of video just as Bloc Party did with theirs, we felt it would work best if kept our music video similar to the original in the way we present the band as ‘This is who we are’ and not a disjuncture video which takes the music video away from its original genre as we found in other existing music videos from a similar genre had done with bands such as ‘Arctic Monkeys’, ‘Kasabian’ and ‘The Cribs’ creating simple music videos and being very successful as artists, and we took inspiration from videos from these bands and decided a performance video would suit our song and our particular music genre choice best.
I feel we have portrayed the Indie/Rock music genre and created a certain mood and style by shots we produced in the video, as everything we have in the video indicates what genre we are trying to create. We took inspiration from The Cribs music video ‘Hey Sencesters’ which is considered to fit the Indie/Rock genre completely as we took the dark background with small lighting projected onto the stage and recreated a similar lighting effect in the studio we rented. This was to capture a similar mood to the video that we felt linked back to our song choice. The video is set and filmed all in one location which is what we did as we found many successful music videos we analysed had done this, and we wanted our video to be instantly recognisable in terms of the genre. The camera angle were important to us when trying to portray and create a video that fits into this genre. We found during research that a lot of quick changing of shots were used and close ups of the band playing were also frequent. Videos such as ‘Hey Sencesters’ by The Cribs and ‘Brianstorm’ by Arctic Monkeys were brilliant examples of how effective camera angles can be when trying to show you are of a certain music genre. These videos had many different but short shots of the band members playing as their particular instrument could be heard in the song. There was also a lot of emphasise on the drummer in these particular videos as the Rock genre relies heavily on a backing drum beat to almost lead the song. This is why we had many quick paced changing shots as it has shown previous success with similar song videos.
We also felt that a key factor in representing the Indie/Rock genre was how the band were presented. This included the style in terms of how we dressed them. Our research from The Cribs ‘Hey Sencesters’ video suggested that a band of this genres clothing is usually very plain with patterns on the clothing often seen. We tried to have all four members of the band dressed in similar clothes with jeans, plain t-shirts and jackets instructed to be worn to follow what we had found with Rock bands, it also gave a cool and edgy look which allowed the audience to immediately have a rough idea of what genre and style of music they are going to hear. We wanted the frontman of our band to be the focal point of the video which is again an obvious feature from the majority of bands and not just of our specific genre. We felt that we could capture the look and style of how we wanted our band ‘Lo!’ to be like just through our frontman. We wanted an energetic frontman that lead the style, something similar to Tom Meighan from Kasabian as he makes the band interesting and stand out from his performance alone, and we wanted to carry this into our bands video.
I feel we captured the Indie/Rock music genre which was intended, mainly due how we conducted a performance video which we have researched and found to be successful within this genre. Also, the style and how the band are presented allows the audience instantly recognise the genre being portrayed.
Jack- this is more like i, well done! The only thing you would need to add here would be a reference to an approriate theorist, such as Glenhill - ' one advantage of genres is that they can rely on readers already having knowledge and expectations'.
ReplyDelete