JS: Video Ideas

Sonreal – For The Town

This is a video that I believe a lot of elements can be taken from in the production of our group music video – it has a constant narrative yet also fulfils performance and disjunctive based action to maintain the audience’s interest levels. I feel it is very effective in doing this as, whilst there is a single coherent narrative, the action changes setting and characters fairly regularly – keeping you on edge as a consumer. Moreover it promotes Sonreal’s character to the audience as a fairly cold-hearting and impassive character. The video juxtaposes impossible action with performance based action, this is done through the artist being presented in the background of nearly every frame lip-syncing. Another key aspect I like is the fact there are no clear cuts and it seems like one continuous shot – something I feel we can emulate in ours. Moreover I think we could pick a similar style of initial location – dependent on choice of our final song – but I think from an aesthetic point of view it would be interesting to have somewhere like that, although we will need to ensure our locations are in fitting with our genre conventions. An issue with us trying to do something completely similar however is the cost – the amount of people, CGI, location costs,  and amount of props involved would by far surpass our budget and also probably our technical skills also.

 

 

Earl Sweatshirt - Grief

 

This is another video that similarly seems to have performance embedded within the narrative, in the sense that the artist seems to be involved in actions unrelated to the song for the most part, whilst lip-syncing throughout the video when they are in the shots. I like how this video has an almost metaphoric representation of the lyrical content – exploring the artists “Grief”.  This has been done even through the subtlety of how it has been edited stylistically also – being given a very dark and grainy style; it has been filmed on a thermal camera and then had a black and white filter on it, making the surroundings all dark and bleak and the characters barely recognisable in almost pure white which provides the inference of cold nature. This could also perhaps present a high practicality issue in the sense it would be fairly hard and fairly expensive to acquire a thermal camera, however I do think it opens up some interesting questions as to how we can use colours and filters in after editing perhaps. Whilst I think this video is good for this song I don’t think that it would be a particularly strong style to reproduce – the artist perhaps but maybe a song with a different mood because with this sombre tone it could end up being just a copy or maybe even boring due to a relative lack of actual action and events happening as the song is about him feeling alone ultimately.