A-level coursework Idea
For my A-level media studies coursework I have decided on creating a music video for a local band. This is my choice because I believe a music video can give a whole new approach and feeling to a song through visual devices, thus I want to implement my own feelings and ideas into a song through different visual techniques including editing, lighting, mise-en-scene and so on.
I have taken inspiration from other music video directors, one of which being American Mark Romanek. Mark is one of the most successful and well known music video directors of today and has worked with many different artists spanning from Michael Jackson to Jay-Z. However, the one video in particular that has inspired me is “Can’t Stop” for Red Hot Chili Peppers. The video features many random actions from the band members themselves as well as being blended with a live performance from the band. For the random actions, Mark had found inspiration from Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, and has attempted to re-create Erwin's abstract “One Minute Sculptures". The original “One Minute Sculptures” featured normal, everyday people being given random, everyday objects and being told to create something in a minute, what they came up with at the end was the “sculpture”. Mark has reenacted this by having the band perform random scenes, which fit no purpose to anything using random objects that vary from a chair to a giant, purple moose head. He used this inspiration for this song in particular as the lyrics are themselves quite random and don’t necessarily go together.
Mark Romanek has also continued this theme into the live performance scenes in the video and has the band dancing and jumping about randomly. He has also managed to create a clean-cut, contemporary atmosphere to match the Erwin Wurm style through using simple lighting and a plain orange backsplash with minimal furnishing. For editing, Mark as used straight cuts and lots of short clips in the verses to go with the rapping and the up-tempo melodies. Then, for the chorus and interlude he has slowed the editing by using longer clips to compliment the slower rhythms in these sections of the song. By editing the video in this manner, Romanek is continuing his clean-cut atmosphere by having both the visual and audio media matching one another.
Another Director I have taken inspiration from Joe Hahn and his video for “Numb” by “Linkin Park”. The video, unlike Mark Romanek’s “can’t stop”, features a story of which the audience follow the social and domestic problems of an unpopular, outcast female student. The story and the lyrics of the song are very similar, by which they both tell the audience of social problems and feeling different. For example, The song quotes “With someone disappointed in you” and “every step I take is another mistake to you”. So as both the song and story are linear to one another, Joe Hahn as edited the video so that as the song and story progress together. The video is not all the story following the young, female student as the video features the band performing in a church.
With both the song and the story being gloomy and based on negative emotions and problems, Joe Hahn has given the video a similar tone. The band and the female student wear dark clothes. The student in particular has a dark look; she has dark, straight hair to give her a bland look, representing how the people she is outcast from see her. Also, the fact that the band are playing in a church is a stereotypical view of darkness. The video uses a “speeding up of time” effect when the song speeds up and instruments are added to fill the song up. This is used on the scenes with the student to emphasize her problems and how isolated she is from the people around her, for example, when she trips on the stairs nobody stops to help her up, and that when she tries to join a group of girls at a lunch table they immediately get up and leave. It is a really effective effect as it is used in key points of the song and highlights the main message the story is trying to convey.
Both Mark Romanek and Joe Hahn have given me some ideas that I wish to apply to my own work this year, in both their technical editing and filming and their designing and construction of the videos.
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