Working in the same groups as last week, myself, Dean and Alice decided to think about a song we could relate our music video to. Alice recommended a song by Fever Ray. It’s a remix version of the song Triangle Walks. After listening to it on YouTube, we brainstormed our ideas under the following headings:
§ Representation of Instruments
§ Target audience
§ Theme
§ Tone and feel of music
As illustrated above, these are the brainstorms we produced to cover our ideas.
We didn’t note our thoughts in detail because the song is quite ambiguous and after I heard the song, I didn’t even know what it was about. To look up the lyrics, we went on the internet then we were able to jot some notes under lyrics. This activity defiantly helped us give us a clearer picture for building the foundations of our planning folder. It helped us visualise the song in relation the 6 areas mentioned above.
As a stimulus, we watched Mystery Jets – Hideaway. A group of students from the past year at Bilborough college produced a video that was graded a B overall. It was quite interesting to watch because the story line was a narrative and it was different in the sense that the story line wasn’t cliché. The video was about a man cheating but not stereotypically with another person, put with a hover! After watching this, I believe developing a narrative music video would be hard. Even our media teacher Mel said narrative music videos are challenging and the group who produced the ‘Hideaway’ video had to film extra scenes last minute.
What I thought was quite fascinating is how lyrics can be interpreted. Before watching the video, we all got a copy of the lyrics and we had to annotate what you would expect to see. The lyrics were straightforward so it wasn’t hard to analyse.
Unfortunately, the following lyric sheet cannot be enlarged. Source: Mel (Teacher at Bilborough College).
Unfortunately, the following lyric sheet cannot be enlarged. Source: Mel (Teacher at Bilborough College).
Our interpretation of the song was completely different to Mystery Jets interpretation of the same song. This exercise proved quite useful to our group as it made us realise that we should make our video appealing to our audience and not just develop our ideas based on what we like because if our final product doesn’t appeal to our intended audience, then we would have failed part of our initial brief.
Following this, we had to close our eyes and listen to the track teardrop by Massive Attack. After listening to the song, our group discussed what we thought. We thought that the location could be set in the woods, field, abroad or someone peaceful and with emphasis of a heartbeat. Personally, the track made me feel relaxed because of the singer’s ‘velvet’ tone of voice.
The link to the video is:
The video showed an unborn baby in a womb, enclosed in its own world. The next stage was to think about the tone and feel of our song – Fever Ray ‘triangle Walks’.
We also looked at representation of sound. The clip we watched managed to successfully match he image to the sound. It made our group think how we could visually represent the sound especially if we don’t use instruments.
The link is below:
On the subject of narration, Mel (our teacher) gave us an example of narrative music video. For me, the video didn’t catch my interest and I thought it was boring even though the video illustrated two characters ‘swopping lives’ and ‘reversing’. It has given our group the opportunity to think about what kind of music video we would like to produce – whether it be along the lines of performance or narration.
End. Ashleigh.
Outcome of the lesson: we have defiantly decided what song we are going to use for our music video.
End. Ashleigh.
Outcome of the lesson: we have defiantly decided what song we are going to use for our music video.
To enable you to listen to the track, I have attached a link below:
