CW - Responding To a Music Track

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPGZddFSsQs

Artist: Late of the Pier
Album: Fantasy Black Channel
Track: Broken

The band Late of the Pier play mainly Rock or Alternative tracks in their genre. But, are also occasionally said to be in the indie-pop genre. This can be told from the heavy use of the guitar in the melody, and a synthesiser used as a backing track, which is common in alternative music. It is also a four man band as opposed to a single artist, this suggests further that the band is in the alternative genre, as single artists are usually confined to pop, rhythm and blues and rap music. While Rock and Indie/Alternative artists are confined to bands.

The track represents high-fi kind of video due to the grain of voice not being gritty at all, with the backing synthesiser conveying a more techno theme to it, which negates the possibility of a low-fi video, this creates more of a feeling of colour and excitement, which is usually used in more hi-fi videos as opposed to low-fi videos, which often use a lot of grey tones.

Videos to be compared with this track would be Space and the Woods, also by Late of the Pier. Due to the track sounding similar to the above mentioned track, and the band and music being of the same genre. A common aspect of these videos all of the same artists are that many of them are located in woodlands, strangely enough, they also contain retro style animations when the location is not in the woodlands. This gives two very different and contradictory images to the band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iudSY7tOrq8 - Focker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMUUIWryE8Q - Heartbeat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFQKZp2D-LY - Bathroom Gurgle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YeF_Iu0bzg - Space and the Woods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFIyPZnmcyo&feature=fvsr - The Bears are Coming

I was unable to find the budget for the Space and the Woods video, but the video mainly used animation and so may have had a low budget. As no payment had to be made on location and props. Heartbeat by Late of the Pier however used expensive locations in their video, and extravagant props, and so had a high budget.

An outline of a treatment for this track would be to take the lyrics of the track extremely literal, e.g. when the lead singer sings ‘the cold water running past my window kept me crying out’ show a man yelling next to a window with water running down it, fast forwarded to convey excitement and a disconcerting feel. And when ‘its all evolution’s fault now’ show someone pointing and making aggressive movements to a picture of Charles Darwin. At gaps between lyrics a conceptual approach will be taken, to split the video into many segments and maintain interest in the viewer. During the beginning of the song there is a small instrumental introduction to the track. Here I could use this time to start a conceptual narrative to tell a story in between lyrics. An example that I could do during this section could be a chase scene. The song is about drugs and prostitution, making a statement about how sleazy the world has become 'echoes in the crowd' could be spelt 'echos' is a slang term for ecstacy. Which is half of the chorus directly after 'It's all evolution's fault now.'

Grain of voice is not gritty or rough at all, and is fairly high pitched and soft, although masculine. This means that characters used should be that of a less obviously/aesthetically masculine man, perhaps skinny, with medium length to long hair to conform to the genre also. The character should be a white, young adult male to fit this grain of voice and wear clothes conforming to this genre of music, this would be clothes such as cardigans, slim fitting jeans, plimsoles or converse. However in many of their videos they are seen topless, and so may not be required to wear shirts.

Pro-filmic effects that would be used in the production would be lighting effects, pouring the water, perhaps glitter, and perhaps breaking items/props while filming. Later in post-production, effects used would be to put music with the picture, put in any animation, and put the images onto where the green screen was in the shot. I may also need to consider black and white effects and a fade as a transition between two shots.

Others I may need to ‘employ’ would be characters or actors to help play the roles I have chosen in the video. Others I may need to use may be for people to hold the lighting, or general runners needed to help run the set. I may also need to hire musicians to play instruments during a performance piece, e.g. a guitarist, drummer. I would of course direct and edit the footage I shot for the video on set and so would not need to hire a camera man or an editor.