Research

What is a music video?

A music video is a video to accompany a certain song, and some covering the full album. They’re mainly used for promotional or artistic purposes. Its primary purpose is to help sell a song and generate income for the artist. However in some cases it can be used for synergy and used as a movie tie in, as well as this it can also be a piece of art or to make a historical artifact in some cases, and finally it can be used to construct an image.

The history of a music video

A common misconception is that Queen made the first music video however that isn’t the case. It all depends what peoples interpretation of a music video is. Some people say its the first video on MTV, other say its Tony Bennett's "Stranger in Paradise” from 1953, and others may say it is something like Steamboat Willy from 1928. 

Tracking shots in music videos

A tracking shot is where the camera follows the subject, so in short it tracks them as the name would suggest. In the film industry and high budget productions the most used piece of equipment for this would be a Steadicam, the main one being produces by The Tiffen Company. However as time has gone on and we have gotten better technology another product has been created called a gimbal. These are a smaller and lighter version of a Steadicam, that doesn’t have to been worn by the camera operator. Gimbals exist for both DSLR/Mirrorless cameras and also mobiles and they have a variety of manufacters, such as DJI, Zhiyun, The Tiffen Company,   and Joby.

 Some examples of music videos that feature tracking shots are ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, ‘Hideaway’, ‘This is America'

Artist Profile 1

Name: Olivia Rodrigo 

Year Formed: 2020

Bio: Olivia is a 18 year old singer from California, USA. In her early days she did some acting for some movies and then also a couple of Disney shows. Olivia’s acting career began at the age of only 7. It wasn’t until she was 18 when her main claim to fame happened when she released her debut album which was an instant hit with everyone.

Exclusive Trait: Her debut album went straight to number one in both UK and US music charts. She also broke the record for the most Spotify streams in one day (not including holiday songs). This was with having no prior chart experience.

Music Focus: A lot of Rodrigo's earlier music focused on relatable situations such as break ups, and her experiences. She gained popularity from this by being able to make songs about situations we have all been in and as she is young she can make it appeal more to the ages of the people going into these situations.

Song Example: The song 'good 4 u’ was from Rodrigo’s debut studio album ‘Sour’. The song fits the album well and is described as ‘the album explores her perils and discoveries as a 17-year-old’. The song itself is based upon her past relationship and how she was able to overcome it without any difficulties, it is also weaved with sarcasm throughout with what she says.

Editing Style: In this music video a lot of parallel editing is utilised to show almost two different sides of her. As well as this the aspect ratio is 4:3 this is most likely done to give it a retro look, similar to a VHS just without the artifacting VHS normally has. The editing itself is rather slow paced too and most of this is to go along with the parallel editing. The main theme they were going for (as seen in the BTS video) was ‘Cult 90s Feminist Horror Movies’.

Music Video Strategies: I believe this is a demographic centred music video, this is because the topic of the video is all about her ex boyfriend moving on very quickly and not really caring about her. This could be relatable to her type of audience, which are teens who are often going through these issues with ex partners.

Colour Theory: The colour of this music video goes along with the VHS style and the 4:3 aspect ratio. The colours look very washed out and not very accurate, this is similar to what a VHS looks like as the technology wasn’t that good back then. Also as they wanted it to look like it was from the 90’s the colours are also in style with that era.

Camera Movement: There are quite a few different camera angles used here, also with some tracking shots too. At the start we get some close up and extreme close up shots, whilst the rest of it is mainly medium and wide shots. During the school half of the parallel edit we can a lot of dollying in shots, with some dollying out too. In the shop scene, the other half of the parallel edit we can see some use of trucking left and right in those shots.

Sound: As with most music videos it primarily is non diegetic sound based. However at the start when we see the first cut in the parallel edit we can hear the roaring fire, and when it cuts back it is just silent. So sound here is used to portray her two sides almost.

Artist Profile 2

Name: Ed Sheeran 

Year Formed: 2004

Bio: Ed Sheeran is a British singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and actor. He has sold over 150 million records worldwide, he also has 2 albums in the list of best-selling albums in the UK. He also has worked with countless other artists on their music too. He first started back in 2004 and his first piece was called ’Spinning Man’. Ed also is good friends with Passenger (another English artist) and they played gigs together in Ed’s beginnings.

Exclusive Trait: Ed Sheeran is often named as one of the largest popstars on the planet. As well as this he also does many collaborations and can sing in many different genres of music making all of his albums very varied and he almost has a song for every mood you can feel.

Music Focus: When Ed first started making music he did quite a bit of rap music, which he still does on some occasions today although most of his music is mainly pop focused and features a lot of guitar. Most of his music is quite fast and upbeat too which can make it a good background sound for a lot of people.

Song Example: One of Ed’s more recent songs ‘Bad Habits’ is one of my personal favourites as it is quite different from Ed’s usual style of music. While on the outside its an enjoyable modern song, the lyrics reflect back to nights of constant drinking for him and that no matter how pure his intentions at the start of the night were they always end up bringing a bad side out. Ed says in the BTS video that this song is about ‘getting into a hotel room after a long night and smashing a cheesecake with Stuart, you’ve gotta commit.'

Editing Style: The editing style here is a lot different to the previous video, where that was 4:3 in the aspect ratio, this one is 21:9 (also known as ultrawide). 21:9 is the standard aspect ratio for movies so by choosing this its almost like it was edited to be more of a story. As well as this they also make it very hyper realistic by used the cables to make it look like Ed is actually flying, in the edit they would’ve keyed these parts out. The overall pace is quite slow to match the overall song, although there are quite a few cuts in one scene to add a bit of diversity to it.

Music Video Strategies: I believe this uses the thought provoking strategy. When you look into the lyrics the song is about Ed reflecting on him spending nights out drinking, as well as this it also shows the dark side of him with his ‘Bad Habits’. Now as he is a father he wanted to curb the habits so he was ready when it was time to take his wife to the hospital. With this it raises the issues and effects that drinking can have on some people.

Colour Theory: Colour in this video is quite an important part. The main colours we consistently see throughout the video are pink, yellow, and blue. As the rest of the scene is quite muted due to it being England at night, this makes these colours a lot more obvious to the eye and also as Ed is in a pink suit it draws the attention to him. The pink in the suit is often used to represent the youthfulness in going out and partying every night. The cyan colour of Ed’s eyes could be used to show the relaxed effect people get when drinking and partying. However the yellow used at the end in the sun and the balloons could be used to represent the sickness and hangover the day after.

Camera Movement: The camera work in this video is very impressive. There are many moving shots that involve rolling, the usage of a dolly, and also most likely a steadicam rig. The camera spends a lot of the time following Ed in quite a wide shot. There is also a variety of close up shots of things such as: Ed's eyes, his teeth, and the black rose. These mainly feature at the start of the video itself. Also present in the video are low angle shots on Ed’s friends at 1:08, this was done to show that they have more power over the normal people we see in the wide, long shots.

Sound: In this video it is predominately non diegetic sound. However 2 parts I found that could contain some potentially diegetic sound, the intro and outro. In the introduction the camera flies in from the top of an industrial estate where some of the sounds we hear could be vehicles moving. In the outro we can see Ed on top of a car park and the sound could be, again, more vehicles in the day this time.

Artist Profile 3

Name: Kwabs 

Year Formed: 2011

Bio: Kwabena Sarkodee Adjepong (best known as Kwabs) is a 31 year old British soul and R&B singer. His career started in 2011 on the show 'Goldie's Band: By Royal Appointment’ hosted by Goldie (also known as Clifford Joseph Price MBE). He then signed with Atlantic Records, then got signed with PMR records.

Exclusive Trait: Kwabs’ career first began on a BBC TV show back in 2011 where it looked for the best new artists in the UK. He was one of 12 shortlisted to go and perform a special piece at Buckingham Palace.

Music Focus: When Kwabs first started making music he mainly did covers before getting signed by any major record labels. After this he then started to release EP’s and singles. His more modern music is mainly of the R&B genre, however most of his latest music has a more pop oriented sound to it.

Song Example: Kwabs’ biggest hit ‘Walk’ blew up when it released and was also used in the game FIFA 15. This was mainly due to its pop sound signature that is used quite a bit in his 2014 & 2015 music. This song also topped the German charts and got quite high in most of Europe too.

Editing Style: Like the prior music video this one is also in a 21:9 aspect ratio. This music video also features some advanced editing techniques such as jump cutting. Another advanced technique used is tracking of some parts of the video, similar to the Beats By Dre Powerbeats Pro advert. The usage of special effects also plays a big part in this song to name a few we have: pulsating buildings, mirror effects on the stairs, jump cutty effects with colour changes.

Music Video Strategies: I believe this music video is purely made to entertain, when it was initially released Kwabs himself said  "Had a real fun time making this one. Here it is, the new video for Walk”. Also the lack of any sort of BTS video also gives me the impression it was made purely for entertainment purposes.

Colour Theory: In this music video colours play an important role, in each scene we can see different colours used throughout.  These consist of: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and White. These colours all have different meanings and are all utilised in many ways. To begin, Red, this colour is often associated with energy and wisdom (in the christian religion) otherwise its used to capture our attention. Orange is all about strength and endurance, with yellow being about awareness and cheerfulness. Green is often in the background with only 1 or 2 moments as a main colour although it represents growth, health, and nature. Blue is quite present in the backgrounds and is often done as it symbolises peace and calmness. White is also there to symbolise purity.

Camera Movement: In the main part of this video the camera follows Kwabs in a medium shot of him walking, with a slight low angle. In the cutaways we see many different shots including tracking shots, wide shots, long shots. These cutaways also help in showing the additional colours that we see often 

Sound: In this music video there is no diegetic sound, the only audio we hear is the music which kicks in from the start.

Artist Demographics and Market Factors

Kwabs was always wanting to expand his audience. He would’ve used both psychographics and demographics to work out more about his fanbase. Music taste would be considered a psychographic, so he was wanting to appeal to wider tastes by releasing more ‘pop-py’ music in 2015. He also helped do this by having his song put in the game FIFA 15 to appeal to younger audiences (which would be a demographic)

In relation to most artists Kwabs has quite a small following with one major hit, ‘Walk’. To this day it has around 185 million views, and is gaining around 50,000 a day now. He has had 2 songs in the charts, and has spent 2 weeks in the top 75. ‘Walk' got to 71st in October 2014, and 'Willing & Able’ got too 70th in August 2015. After ‘Walk’ most of his other tracks have quite low views, only 9 having over 1,000,000 views as of 20-10-2021. This was most likely because none of his other music made it into any other games and ‘Walk’ was quite a unique track for his style.

Editing Styles

When we edit a music video it is normally the final step before the video is done, there are many things done in this step. They are as follows: cutting down the scenes, adding special fx, colour grading, and creating a narrative by putting the clips in an order. 

There are many styles you can create while editing, a main one is about the pace of a song. Some music videos have fast paced editing, while some have slow paced editing. Rammstein's ‘Du Hast’ is a great example of fast paced editing, whereas Joji’s ‘Slow Dancing in the Dark’ is an example of slower paced editing.

Another editing style often used is jump cutting. In short its removing some frames from a clip, this makes it look like its jumping back or forward in time but it can be quite disorienting. It can also be used as an alternative to cutaways in some cases. A very extreme example of jump cutting in a music video is in Wang Chung’s ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’.

Parallel editing is also another editing style frequently used in music videos. It is where the video itself cuts between at least 2 different locations, to tell 2 different stories. A prime example of this is ‘Happy’, by Pharrell Williams.

On top of all this one of the most common parts of a music video is timing the cuts to the beat of the music, which can be very hard at times depending on the complexity of the track itself. An example of this is in STORMZY's ‘Big for your Boots

Music Video Strategies

There are 4 main strategies used when producing a music video. They are: controversy, entertaining, thought provoking, and demographic centred. 

An example of a music video to cause controversy would be ‘Fatty Boom Boom’ by Die Antwoord, with the music video being directed by Ninja/Terence Neale/Saki Berg. This music video has a lot of black face in it and it generally is rather unique comparing to most videos. As well as this some of the lyrics being quite strange too. This is what caused such controversy.

Entertaining music videos are designed purely to be funny and just nice to watch for anyone. One of the prime examples of this is ‘Tribute’ by Tenatious D with the music video beign directed by Liam Lynch. This music video is quite funny to watch, hence the entertaining nature the director took to approach this video

A though provoking music video is a video type often used to raise issues, in Avicii’s ‘For a better day’ (Directed by Avicii and Levan Tsikurishvili) the issue of child trafficking is raised. Ideas for these videos can mainly come from events going on in the world at that time and its from people who want to make a change.

Demographic centred music videos are target a select amount of certain people. For example Little Mix’s ‘Shout Out to my Ex’ is a good example of this. Directed by Sarah Chatfield this video is targeted at teenage girls and talks about the process of a breakup.

Record Label Strategies

In music there are 3 main label types, major labels, independent labels, and artist produced.

A major label is mainly focused on making revenue, as well as this they often can have large budgets due to the size of the company. This means that the music videos done by major labels can have a lot of special effects and other work to make them get the millions, and billions of views they can raise. On top of this they often have many contacts so they can get other artists to be featured in the music video. An example of a major label music video would be BLACK PINK’s 'Du Du Du’, directed by Seo Hyun-Seung.

An independent label are less focused on revenue as opposed to a major label. As well as this the budgets are a lot smaller for videos so they cannot create as flashy videos as the major labels. This forces more creativity for the team behind it all. On top of this the producer may only specialise in a certain genre of song so not every song can be covered. Arctic Monkeys ‘IBTYLGOTD’ is a great example of a music video produced by an independent label.

Artist produced music videos often have the lowest budgets of all the types and they can only do a few flashy parts at most. However it often allows for cheaper film making, and also you get complete creative control; this gives you rights to your own music. These are becoming more prevalent too as technology has advanced over the years. An example of this would be Battle Tapes’ — ’No Good' (directed by Josh Boardman) 

Single and Multi Camera Productions

There are two main ways to film anything in Media, it would either be with 1 camera or multiple cameras. Each production type has its pros and cons, also some may be more suited to certain types of film over others.

A single camera production is very self explanatory it is just one camera. The main disadvantage of this is the fact that it may take a while to shoot all the required shots for one production. Also you only have one place where the data is stored so id the SD card corrupts then you loose all your footage. Many productions, such as films and music videos are often done using this technique.

A multi camera production is also more or less quite self explanatory, where it uses more than one camera. In this production type there is a lot more camera angles. Multi camera productions are most often used in things like soaps, gameshows, and chatshows. They also would be better for live productions when you can’t use one camera to get multiple angles on something at any one time.

Colour Theory

Colour is a very important thing in media. Different colours can create many different emotions and feelings within different people. For example the colour red often connotes to anger, passion and warmth, whereas blue connotes to coolness, sadness, or calmness.

There are two main ways colour can be introduced into a music video. The first way is when the video itself is styled; so clothes, props, or scenery. The second way is in post production through colour correction methods.

However sometimes no colour can be better than using colour depending on the usecase. In the example below using black and white can make it feel older, or it can make it feel sad and dark similar to using blue.

Music videos often use colour palettes to decide what should be shown in the video. The below video uses the ‘Clownfish’ colour palette. It does have some additional colours like the green but overall it keeps very well to those 4 colours, and similar shades.

Camera Movement

There are a variety of different camera movements in a music video, so there is a lot of examples of this too. One example is in Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ music video at 0:58 there is a lovely example of a rolling shot.

Sound

In music videos sound is also used, not just the music itself but other sound effects. There are two types of sound, diegetic and non diegetic. Diegetic sound is where the sound comes from the same universe that the action is taking place in. On the flip side, non diegetic sound is sound that has been added in during post production that isn’t in the same universe.

A diegetic music video would be one where it would have a live performance as the base for it. Whereas a non diegetic music video would be one where the artists is lip syncing to the song itself.

Billie Eilish’s ‘Bury a Friend’ music video has a mixture of both diegetic and non-diegetic sound, particularly in the intro. As well as this Daft Punk also did a non diegetic music video, but framed it as a diegetic video in post using audio effects. His video was ‘Da Funk’.

Tropes

A trope is a characteristic or a cliche of a certain genre of music and they are often quite present within most genres. They’re usually done to help define a certain genre of music and have certain characteristics unique to that music. They’re quite prevalent in the grime and rap genres, usually showing flashy clothing or expansive jewellery. One example could be Country Dons’ ‘Sticky Situations'

Music Video Styles

There are 4 styles of music video that can be used when creating one. They each do different things to have a different effect. They are: Surrealist, Pastiche, Parody, and Homage. 

There can be some issues when making a pastiche, parody, or homage video because if you don’t recognise the source material it will not make any sense to the viewer at all.

A surrealist music video is often considered to be unsettling or strange as the word surrealist derives from surrealism. Surrealism is a term that was used to refer to the art movement from Picasso or Salvador Dali, they often created art that was non sensical, and far from reality. An example of a surrealist music video is ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden.

A pastiche music video is where someone has taken ideas from another music video but then represents them in a more disrespectful way. An example of this would be Foo Fighters’ ‘Walk'

A parody music video is one made to poke fun at the original video its based off. It often doesn’t take itself seriously and often mocks itself too. An example of this would be 'All the Small Things’ from Blink 182

A homage music video is one very similar to both a pastiche or a parody but it is often used to pay tribute and respect to the artform thats being referenced. An example of this in use would be ‘Buddy Holly’ from Weezer.

Symbolism in Music Videos

Symbolism is mainly used in music videos to give a deeper meaning, they’re mainly subliminal and harder to spot although they’re great easter eggs for some viewers.

For example in one of Wiz Khalifa’s ‘Black & Yellow’ there is imagery of Baphomet. Baphomet is a deity worshipped by the occult. Other examples can also be seen in Taylor Swift’s ‘Look what you made me do’ as seen in the video below.

Audience Classification 

Socioeconomic Science is what we study to get our target audience. A large variety of factors are taken in to help narrow down who our video is targeted towards. They can be put in to 3 main categories; demographics, psychographics, and geodemographics.

Demographics are in short just facts, so these could be the location of where someone lives, their household income, their job title, their age, and their gender identity. Psychographics are more opinionated so this is things like personality, opinions, attitudes, interests, hobbies, and political affiliation.

Another part of this is Ethnography which is where you do a study by spending time with a group of people to observe any pattern in their behaviours and interactions. This would need to be done over a variety of groups in order for it to be most effective as a primary research source.

Mind Map and Mood Board

Green Screening

Green Screening is a technique used to put a subject in a background without having to go to a specific place. It is usually done in front of a green wall, however blue also can be used, the main reason it is those colours is because they’re not common for people to wear. After it has been filmed we then have to digitally remove the colour green from the scene then we can put the people over the new clip to make it look like they’re in the scene.

The technique was first displayed in ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ in 1940 with a bluescreen, it was used to make a horse fly. With more modern technologies we moved to green screens and can do much more advanced things with them too.