Music video Conventions

Our first project, a Converse Commercial, is over! I really enjoyed the filming process and editing as a group! I loved filming the most because it was the most collaborative part of the project, while when editing only two people could crowd around the phone to edit together. I hope that with this new project we can get the chance to edit using Pinnical Studios, as I feel it will give us less problems than IMovie did. One part of the filming process I think we can fix, is using a tripod more often. When filming the commercial, we only used the tripod when reshooting and it really messed with the overall quality of the commercial. When planning, I made sure our storyboard was very in-depth, and generally we stuck to it. I want to make sure our storyboard for our next project is just as good as it was for our last project!

My group, thankfully, decided on a song with little argument. In order to come to this easy conclusion, we started off with a theme. We wanted a soft, chill song with only a bit of beat. This lead to a few song suggestions, almost all of them by the artist Khai Dreams. The suggestions included Ultimately, Time to Time and Sunkissed; additionally there’s was one other song called Grow by The Oh Hellos that was more lively than any of the other three songs. In order to decide, I thought everyone in the group should come up with their favorite, and then a second favorite. Eventually, we each had our list prepared, and it turned out there wasn’t much need for discussion. Everyone chose Sunkissed as their favorite! Sunkissed is an indie pop song, although it doesn’t seem like one from listening to it. We all decided on this song because it was optimistic while still being chill. It’s lyrics were easy to put to any visual, and we already had a possible filming place. For the setting, we chose Winwood in Miami, and Fat Village. They are both artsy places with some graffiti, to capture the planned aesthetic. 

In class, my group had to research the usual conventions used in indie pop song music videos. We came across many, and most didn’t suit our visions of the music video. I was beginning to think that we may need to step out side of the conventions to achieve the aesthetic set forth by the song’s lyrics and tone! Until I came across one music video that caught my eye. The video in question was awkward in a sense, it was edited to be funny and approachable in a sense. It wasn’t overly professional, and it didn’t focus overly on the band. A little later, I found another video with the perfect aesthetic. It was simple, with clean cuts from one still shot to another. There wasn’t a lot of movement in the shots, but their use of lighting was exactly what I was looking for. Their shots had a color scheme, so when the shot changed to the musicians the color change was hating and added an extra element to the production. Other things I noticed in the music videos was their general use of lighting and color in tandem. Color schemes went with specific places, as so when the shot changed from one to another it would be easy to tell them apart. Lighting was also used to highlight specific parts of each shot, which is something which I hope to use in our commercial a lot. The colthign died in the music videos was causal, their jeans were cuffed and jackets were a must. This is something   we might not need in our video, as we don’t intend on having many people in any shots. For sound, I heard that little to no dive tic sound was used, the main thing was the actual music. Although, for our project we could use some dive tic doing for the into and ending. Our project has a time limit of 1:05-1:10, and our song is about 2 minutes long. We had to cut down the song, so we decided to stop at the chorus.