For our music video, it is important that we keep it legal, and don't commit fraud through copyright. In order to certify this I wrote this letter to CLM Entertainment.
Colin Lester, for CLM entertainment, signed the band in 2007. Colin Lester is a British artist manager of R&B, Pop and Rock Music acts.
He has managed the careers for numerous commercially successful British and international artists. He was awarded 'The Peter Grant Award' for outstanding achievement from the United Kingdom's Music Manager Forum in 2002. In 2007, Lester was awarded the prestigious 'Gold Badge Award' by BASCA (The British Academy of songwriter and Composers Association) for his work with UK songwriters.
For star image I’ll be looking at the band '30 Seconds to Mars' and 'Lordi'. I’ll be comparing the music videos and ‘This is War’ and 'Blood Red Sandman'. I will be comparing the both videos in relation to who gets most screen time in videos and why.
‘This is War’ is a video about Jared Leto as a soldier in war. He is the main actor in the music video, there are others acting as other soldiers but the focus isn’t put on them. Jared Leto is a former actor and model so it’s no surprise the screen time goes in his favour. They take advantage of Jared Leto’s sex appeal by using a lot of close ups of Jared Leto in action. They show him in clips shooting as what we presume are terrorists. By showing the bravery and manhood of Jared they are enticing the younger female audience to purchase/watch the video. During this video Jared gets about 30% of screen time, which is a great amount of time. With the good looks and acting skills Leto posses due to his past careers, they producer of the video felt no need to hire a lot of actors to play the roles that Leto could.
‘Blood Red Sandman’ is done by the band 'Lordi'. The screen time is shared between all the band members but not because of the same reasons '30 Seconds to Mars' had. 'Lordi' are guys dressed up in monstrous suits much like the band 'Slipknot'. In the video 'Blood Red Sandman', the meta narrative is about a girl stuck in this haunted house and there are monsters trying to kill her. In this case the Monsters are the band. The band are shown about 45% of the time due to them in the performance aspect and all members acting as main characters in the video. The time split between the monsters is fairly equal to show all the monsters. They have done this because as each band member is essentially a character, the fans will naturally pick a favorite character (band member). This way by showing all in the music video, it keeps everyone happy. The song 'Blood Red Sandman' is about supposedly the greatest demon/monster that there has been and he's being summoned or is coming back from somewhere once again to murder/haunt earth. By having all the band members in this video it could fit in with the lyrics that these demons (the band/followers of the 'blood red sandman'), are haunting this girl and bringing back the message that the 'blood red sandman' is coming back. Therefore by having all band members it shows the greatness of this demon they're singing about.
I decided to research some music videos that could maybe give us an idea for what to do in ours. After a couple of hours of research we found the song ‘1985’ by the band ‘Bowling for Soup’ helpful to some extent. Through out the majority of the video the camera is focused on the band members playing in the garage. This gave us some ideas for angles to use and where to place the camera, but unfortunately the lighting and costume that they used in this video did not fit the Meta narrative that we wanted to create. The lighting was too bright and they used Intertextuality in the costume area. The band dressed up as lots of different acts like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Manson. In our video we want to go for the Indie look so we won’t be using the costume ideas or the lighting as we need that to be low-key. So despite not getting everything we wanted from this music video we did at least see some good camera shots and angles in this video.
The next video I saw was a song called ‘Skyway Avenue’ by a band called ‘We the Kings’. This video and band were exactly what we were looking for. The basic story line is a boy calls a girl from the previous night (we presume he met her at some sort of club), he then goes on a date with her with her not thinking it going to work out and him really eager to see this girl. Towards the end of the video their points of view switch as he doesn’t want to be a rebound for this girl and she begins to really like him. At the end they walk away happy together. Now although this isn’t the story line that we’re looking to create, it is a long the line of a teenage hook up. The actors are very similar to what we’re looking for as well. Only one main guy and one main girl. Through out the video there are a couple of friends that you briefly see but they don’t play a major role. These are the roles that we are looking to fulfill in our video.
Not only is the story line somewhat similar, but also the performance aspect is exactly what we are trying to recreate. The performance is based in a garage with low-key lighting. The garage has old bits of cars and basic junk surrounding the band members either on the floor, or on the wall. This is what we will be trying to do to make it look as if the band hasn’t made it; they’re not big and are willing to practice anywhere to fulfill their love of music. The camera angles used are what we want to use as well. In the performance aspect the camera is mainly held at a high angle looking down on the band from the front. I like this view because you get the entire band in the shot but obviously the lead singer at the front will be the focus of the shot. This allows him/her to go up closer to the camera or step back a little to show emotion about what he’s singing about. With this camera angle you can also see if the singer is jumping or swaying, these actions will reflect the pace and tempo of the song. The lighting will be low-key in our video, much like the one in the ‘Skyway Avenue’ video. We chose to use this lighting because it represents the fact the band is out of the lime light and are undiscovered in the music world.
The costumes used in the acting part of the video could be used in ours. I like the casual look that is used with just jeans and a t-shirt, but if we are using our lead singer as an actor we may have to go back to the indie look once again. As we want to create the look of the ‘not so popular’ group of people, we would prefer to go back to the indie look as we want to give off the impression that the band are trying to fit in with others by the way they dress (the common indie look).
The plan is to use the indie look throughout the video. This is why the costumes ‘We the Kings’ used in the performance aspect of their video can’t be copied into ours. They went for the casual jeans and tight t-shirt throughout their video where as we want the indie look. The costumes we will want to use will be very similar to what ‘The Kooks’ use in the majority of their videos. Such as ‘Seaside’ and ‘She moves in her own way’.
Video Camera with (Zoom in and out features) Detachable from tripod
Tripod Detachable and adjustable
Portable lighting sources such as torches ,lamps and fire (Only used in cation as well to show natural lighting )
Computer program preferably Imovie on the macs for editing.
Instruments:
Guitar + 2
Drum set
Two bass guitars
Microphone adjustable to height .(with microphone stand )
Other equipment lists :
Glasses
Alcohol (Preferably beer)
Bar setting with barman
Handheld camera
Furniture settings
Multiple of lights placed in the background
Setting plans:
(Birds eye view image ere)
The Pub setting plans:
Basic list
Other Equipment list
The pub setting for our music video will require materials in which can be provided in the pub itself also in the pub will require space for several members of the band as well as background actors. Also in this certain setting the back ground has been kept as it has to keep the pub image more natural .
In this setting will involves most of the narrative theory side of the music video so the lighting and placement of the actors is very important to this part of the music video also the pub has a confined space which makes camera moving shots a problem so this will require tools of wheels to be attached to the camera to get a more swift tracking or moving shot .
The Garage Setting plans:
Basic lists
Instruments
Requires a garage with enough space for the instrument equipment list as well as the basic lists also the set out of the design will need to be placed in a certain way to make sure that certain band member are more enthused than other band members .
Background design in the music video will show a messy but not too trashy garage which shows not too much class but not too trashy to make the audience think they are dirty. Also the background will show lots of different light colour to make an image of begin at the concert and uses the dark background advantage to illustrate the lights as star creating a conflict of rising over the abilities making them ultimately visible to the viewers .
This part is where we had decided to choose a certain image for our band and by trying to choose the right image for this indie style rock band we had to do our own reasearch into the actual background of the bands and the messages they are trying to get out of there music.So by doing this we needed to decide what kind of image we want to pertray to our audience .And doing this we had decide some parts of the bands image with the use of our own youth knownlegde of todays (hip) music and by doing this allowed us too decide what genre is our band .Which helped us decide the physicail appearance of the our band .Which resemables alot of the indie style look.The image i would say that or music video band member most resemables is a band called 3 doors down a popular band which is most well known for there song (What if i could ) and the music video alone show similairites of clothing design aswell and the age group in which the band had attracted with the slow but catchy tempoed music.The only problem in using this band as a way to compare or inspire or band is that the age difference of the band cannot be ignored due to the fact this will effect the actual audience we attract along with the style and message we are trying to bring to our audience.
This would be all effected due to the fact that the concept of having the hero image talking in the propps theory and having a the bands age become similair to the hero image the audience itself will begin to use the hero image as an idolized image ulitmately changing there aspects to the hero image.
The similairites we have are that kinda of style of clothing very normal almost nothing is shiny just a causal checked shirt along with jeans and the odd jacket. But the clthing is the same the way our band wear the clothes is different in a way to match our youthly style of dressing to create a connection to the audience.Aswell as the band appearance 3 doors down gives out a message of typicail teeanage problems with alot of narrative theory music with songs such as 'loser' talking about the struggles of a teenage boy. Which helped us anaylsis them with careful evaluations of the lyrics. Aswell as using brown and dark colours to shows a some what emo like theature which is not too dark to seem emo but not too light to enthize the maturity.
We decide to do some research in order to improve our own music video by analyzing other successful music videos such as fire files by owl city which a popular video with over a 1,000,000 views .
