Music Videos & Youtube?

Out of curiosity I decided to look at the Youtube music video listings and find out what sort of videos were at the top, and to see what sort of narratives or performance shots they used to achieve the finished product.

The first 2 music videos, excluding TV shows, were both performance & narrative based videos.

Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Coldplay - Viva La Vida

Bleeding love, while coming out over 2 years ago, has over 20million more views than the next most popular video tagged as music. This clearly demostrates that the populace like strong narrative based videos with performance shots of the artist. It is for this reason that we've decided to make our own video into a performacne and narrative based production.

Shots List

Added More shots outlining and finished all the sections.

Rough Timeline
00:00 - 00:31 = Stop Motion / Journey to Skatepark
00:31 - 01:01 = Narrative
01:01 - 01:31 = Performance
01:31 - 02:01 = Both
02:01 - 02:30 = Both

Shot List 00:00 - 00:31 [Narrative]
1 - 3 - Waking up in Bed [Stop Motion similar to practice video]
4 - 5 - Eating breakfast & Postits [Stop Motion - Side shot - Postits band title]
6 - 8- Fridge magnets [Stop Motion - Song title]
9- 10 - Going out the door [Stop Motion then speeding up to normal]
11- 13 - Skateboarding to Park [Normal / faster speed] / fade out

Shot List 00:31 - 01:01 [Performance]
14 - 17: Fade in at skatepark [Long tracking shot]
18 - 22: Numerous performance shots with clips of skateboarding [360 shot, panning quick high and low angle shots]

Shot List 01.01 - 1.31 [Skateboarding Narrative]
23 - 26: Skateboarding narrative part [Long shot, close ups]
27 - 30: skateboarding stunt (ollie over the drums) involving two shots slow motion and normal merging the two [tracking + panning]

Shot List 01.31 - 2.30 [Skateboarding/ Performance]
31 - 34: Performance shots - [high and low angle - 360 and panning shots]
35 - 39: Skating - [tracking]
40 - 45: Performance
46 - 47: Sheep shot [Fades out on sheep eating grass]

Musicians split when it comes ot Piracy...?

Recently the British Government have released plans on how they plan to deal with the piracy problem at large.

Persistent file-sharers could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy

It is about time that the government stepped in to deal with the problem, but like the FAC (Featured Artists' Coalition), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild I think this is in fact an over reaction. Not a heavy sledgehammer as the 3 musical bodies put it, but rather an atomic bomb.

"It's going to start a war which they'll never win."-- Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien

I myself am a small time pirate. I've spent time downloading music before going out and buying it due to having a very select taste. I also know that the chances of the government, even if ISPs (Internet Service Providers e.g. BT) stepped in to help, that catching and recording illegal downloading will be nigh impossible. That's without taking into account the difficulty of telling the difference between legal file sharing and illegal.

This is all before the fact that by doing this many people will most likely be put off music altogether and go for alternative types of entertainment as mentioned by the Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.

[ Information from the BBC ]

However, 11 days after this statement Lily Allen stepped forward to rally stars against piracy. Taio Cruz, James Blunt and Tim Rice-Oxley all put forward their support to Lily as well as congratulating her for stepping up.

"File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others" -- Taio Cruz

Taio Cruz is a prime example of how music piracy can be damaging, by having his debut album being leaked almost 3 months before the scheduled release date he and his music label were not sure whether to continue. The amount of money lost for both was most likely huge with many people hearing, downloading and listening to the song for months before it came out.

Also like in the article it states that due to the label losing out on money it will also mean that they will have less to spend on supporting new artists, which while I don't feel it is damaging them the artists themselves do.

[ Information from the BBC ]

My own opinion on this situation is that Piracy is a bad thing, however they need to sort it out by moving forward in technology and time. Sites such as Spotify and Me7 are the starting point, however for a student such as myself who wants to listen to music on the move the chances of me actually wanting to listen to hugely long adverts is small. Spotify premuim is also a rip off in my opinion, £9.99 a month equating to £119.88 a year is to much for those who only listen to the odd song from an odd album.

Itunes is my current favourite legal way to obtain music, due to being cheap and enabling me to buy a single song off an album and not all those fillers. It will be interesting over the next couple of years to see what other unique ideas and concepts appear.

Music Video Storyboards

Above you will find our current storyboards.

Shooting Schedule.

Location Scouting

The first video is a full 360 degree view of the Skatepark from on top of the central box.



The second video gives you an idea of the layout of the actual skatepark.

For a greater idea of our location planning please look to the Shooting Maps & Music Video Planning posts.

Cast & Costumes.

For the performance based part of the music video we plan to have 3 people imitating the actual band, they will be Owen, Ryan and Jake as explained below.

On the left we have Owen Taylor as the Lead Singer and Ryan Hayward on the right playing the Bass Guitar. We also have Jake on the bottom right playing the Drums. We've chosen this setup for 2 reasons, firstly Ryan and Jake are both in our media group enabling us to easily get together and secondly because Owen has the right authentic feel of being a singer, especially due to recently being scouted to be a model.

Furthermore they fit in with the genre of New Wave / Indie by having a ridiculous amount of hair and the colourful clothing.

The skaters we plan to base the performance shots around are currently Toby Roper on the left as well as Jake on the right. The main character performer shall be Toby because we do not wish to overlap the performance cast with the band itself to much. We also choose to involve Toby because he is good friends with Jake and an exceptional skater, as shown below, fitting in with our initial music video ideas.

We may also include some random sheep to add some humour into the music video.

Costumes

To keep with the same feel as the band, as displayed in the above image, we plan to have a smart/casual look during the performance segments of our music video. By doing this we will attract a more wide ranging audience by looking unique but not to unique to be put into a specific genre pile such as 'Goth' or 'Emo'.

We currently plan to have Owen in a shirt and blazer similarly dressed to the image on the left where as Jake and Ryan will be more leaning towards casually dressed such as on the right. This will create a contrast between the singer and other band members thereby connoting the importance of the lead singer. The reasoning for wanting to make Owen stand out more than the other band members is because he will be the voice as well as the face for the entire band. By making him better dressed we draw attention to him further which can also increase his overall appeal especially to 'aspirers' who are attracted to him via his looks and musical talent.

Our current costume for the skater is the stereotypical hoodie type outfit. The look of the skates connotes their way of life, not very flashy or high maintenance, this will also enable us to relate to the audience as well as the genre. New wave is a semi-laid back genre which has a wide range of clothing styles however the hoodie and casual look fits into it perfectly. By dressing like the audience.