Thursday 4 September 2014

ER: Lonely Boy - Planning, Production and Evaluation

Lonely Boy - Group Music Video



Evaluation

Our group had the first section of the class video so we essentially got to introduce the song. We originally had a strong narrative planned out for our music video, which is common in many of the Black Keys videos such as "Tighten up" and "Howlin' For You". This was going to be an illustrative construction, very much based around the lyrics and title of the song, "Lonely Boy". Due to technical difficulties however, our footage got deleted and with the deadline so close we decided to perform our own adaptation of the original "Lonely Boy" music video. This involved a fun and simple shot of a man dancing to the song, all caught in one shot. The footage is slightly wobbly and seems to be shot by handicam to give a "home movie" feel to it, taking away any professional edge. We thought this would be perfect to recreate as we didn't have much time or resources to make the video look professional at all.

The Black Keys - Lonely Boy (2011)



We recreated this among the 5 people in our group which brought some diversity to the video. We made sure to shoot in different locations each time to keep the audiences' interest. We wanted to use a variety of camera techniques, instead of copying the original one, long shot, including close ups of specific features like Alex's singing mouth and Ben's dancing feet, long shots and stills. We also used a fast cutting rate, switching between establishing shots of each of us and then of each of us dancing. This was to create an illustrative relationship between visuals and sound by matching the fast cutting rate with the fast beat, as we could no longer go ahead with an illustrative relationship between lyrics and visuals. We ended our section of the class video with Alex lip syncing with the first few lines of the song, a very generic feature of popular music videos. We didn't have much control over costume or location because we were in school, but decided to shoot it outside mainly to create a summery vibe, adding to the fun theme of the video. The fact that the band was absent from the video is similar to the original video which was an effective approach that we wanted to keep instead of pretending to be the band.

Transforming a song into a visual piece is a new skill I have learnt and I know this will develop throughout the year the more research and planning we do.

We learned that we don't have to follow the popular route and create a narrative for the video, it can work just as effectively by constructing a more conceptual piece. We also found that it's hard to find the right length for shots if we want the lyrics and tempo to match up with the cutting rate and visuals, this is something that we need to plan more.

My idea for my final music video is to not focus on one style, and to involve a conceptual aspect, a performance aspect and a narrative aspect. I think this will be a lot more interesting in the final outcome and it leaves room for a much larger range of ideas.

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