Analysis Of The Verve- Bittersweet Symphony.

The artist is trying to portray an 'I don't care' Image by walking down the street staring straight ahead no looking at anyone (sight lines), not caring about the people he is bumping into. His outfit is just plain black jeans with a black leather jacket to show he is quite plain which goes well with the 'I don't care' attitude he is portraying. The colours used within the video are almost black and white with all the colours faded out and everything is made to look dull and gloomy. The main positioning of the camera is a slightly low angle long shot of him walking towards the camera down the street.


His careless attitude draws the eye immediately as its quite apparent through the way he is bumping into everyone and he doesn't seem to notice or care about his actions. The music acts well with the video as both are fairly slow paced. 


Genre: Brit Pop, we think this as it takes some inspiration from other genres such as punk rock through the clothes such as the leather jacket and careless attitude. The song is mainly targeted at males from 20's to 30's.


The video starts with a close up on the lead singers feet as he is walking and approaching the edge of the pavement, then the camera goes to a medium shot of his upper body and then moves out to a long shot to show off his whole body which is taking across the street to show him standing there. Once the music starts to pick up, there is synchronised editing involved to make sure he starts to walk across the road as the music properly begins. After the main shot is a slightly low angle long shot of him walking towards the camera. There are a few other shots like perspective shots of showing how the public are reacting to his careless and reckless attitude. 

Final Music Video Evaluation

This is our final 30 second music clip remake of The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony. To start off we thought it would be fairly simple to recreate this music video, however as we started to film it, we encountered many difficulties such as traffic always being in the way of the shot, keeping the camera still while moving and the main problem was timing it correctly with the music itself.

The advantages were that it was fairly easy to find a location, and as we were only doing the first 30 seconds we didn't need to travel far to film in somewhere like London. The lighting in our clip was close to the original so there was not much editing needed, also our editing techniques were quite effective in the video.

If we were to redo this project, we would film for a longer time and vary our shots more as we only used four; close up, medium close-up, tracking and a long shot. Also, if we were to go into more detail, we would have to find a bigger and better location instead of the high street of the village.

Rock Music Videos.

I chose the genre Rock but the new style of rock and focused on bands that are around today, these 5 bands I have selected have very similar music videos.

This is We Are The Ocean- The Waiting Room.

 

This is Young Guns- Crystal Clear.

This is The Blackout- Higher And Higher.

This is Lostprophets- Last Train Home.

This is Billy Talent- Rusted From The Rain.

Firstly the conventions of these music videos are normally black clothing, instruments, long hair, skinny jeans, about certain people struggling, tattoos, piercings, the band doing a performance in some way sometimes with a crowd and other times without and sometimes they include a bit of black and white within the video.

The camera shots mainly focus on the lead singer and the band, show a lot of close ups on the lead singers face so the audience can connect with him also show emotion but to reflect the words of the song with the movement of the lips of the lead singer. When showing the band doing their performance they are normally medium/ long shots. The camera moves to track the band as they move so there is a fair bit of panning, tilting and the camera zooming out from the lead singer so you can suddenly see the rest of the band. 

The cutting rate is normally fast so it matches the song and the movement of the band members which are normally jumping around therefore they need to have a fast cutting rate otherwise it would look weird with fast tempo music and the band members jumping around but moving from shot to shot was really slow. There is also a lot of jump cuts jumping from one thing to another just to keep the video up to speed with the song.

Sound wise there isn't much that is additional sound as the song is the main sound throughout the video therefore there isn't really much need for sound effects etc.

Rock videos have developed over time as back in the 80s they use to just play on stage to a crowd and that would be there music video but today with rock bands they try to portray a story within there music video so it keeps there audience move involved as they normally do both just cross cut between the two.

Verbal Evaluation Of Our Digipack.

Here is Me, Sean and Sam present our digipack to the class.

Our Digipack.

Progress In Digi Pack.

We have to create a digi pack for the genre of Country and Western and this is the stage we are up to within this project. 

Ignore the surrounding as when I tried to upload the pictures we have been working on to blogger it wouldn't work so I took a picture of the digi pack on my phone. This is basically the front cover at the moment, conventions of a Country and Western album cover with the checked shirt, acoustic guitar and cowboy boots but we stuff an effect of the picture to make it look like a bit of a wash with a yellow tint to it. Dead Or Alive is the name of the album we thought it fitted in quite well with the theme of wild west.

Here we have the back cover of the album it is due to have some song titles on the back plus we need to edit it and apply the yellow tint to it to create the effect of an old photo of a man walking down a carvel track. But this is the back cover for our digi pack. We will upload more photos once we have complete the digi pack also with an evaluation to go with it.

Filming and Developing.

We are in the process of filming and developing our copy section of The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony also creating our digi pack for the genre Country and Western. We are having a slight difficulty with the opening shots of the video as we need to keep it steady but also move back at the same time and zoom out so we may look into using a wheelchair to keep the camera steady. Our digi pack is coming along nicely we should have some picture up very soon.

Creating Our Own Album.

We have been given a task to create a Country and Western album in our groups and we begin by looking into conventions of Country and Western music which we posted earlier on.
These are just rough idea at the moment:
Props: acoustic guitar, cowboy hat, black boots, denim jeans, bandana, rugged clothes and checked shirts.
Shot list: side on to show the man sitting down with his sight lines starring off into the distance. A long shot of his back, with a acoustic guitar slung across his back, with him walking down a rough track. A close up of just his hand strumming a acoustic guitar and focusing on the cowboy boots perhaps.

We decided to all go home and sketch out a whole album each and then put bits together to make the best overall album. Here are 3 sketches of a possible front, back and inside cover of a Country and Western album I created.

Country And Western Conventions.

Country and Western music is a mix between tradition and popular US musicals and traditionally found within South America and Canadian Maritimes that came around rapidly in the 1920s. 
- It takes inspiration from the wild west of America.
- As it has evolved it has become more and more stereotypical of what people expect.
- Usually features buildings such as old saloons and barns this relates back to the cowboy era and barn dances.
- Artists usually wear stereotypical clothing such as cowboy hats, checked shirts, cowboy boots and can sometimes have the artist dressed as bandits.
- They use American flags which could reflects to patriotism associated with America.
- The instruments used are normally acoustic such as acoustic guitars, banjos and violins which are seen as quite lively instruments which reflects back to the energetic music associated with the genre.

These are all stereotypical views on the wild west, especially John Wayne and Clint Eastwood who are seen as the original stereotypical cowboys.

Practice

We are doing a bit of practice by copy 30 seconds of a music video and re creating it, the video we have selected is The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony. Above shows the shots we need to copy, in what order and how long the shot lasts for. The second line is an illustration of how the actor moves throughout the 30 seconds and the bottom two sticky notes have the location, props and actors written on them.

Eminem Curtain Call

This is quite an odd looking front cover for a rap artist as its got the standard blond writing across the middle of album but he is dressed in a suit with flowers on the flour which isn't like any other rap artists albums covers. This is showing he is different to everyone else. The roses on the floor could imply he is upset or something bad has happened as roses are normally gifts to girls. It appears that he is taking a bow which could imply he has just finished talking to people, The pattern around 'THE HITS' is quite feminine this could be relating back to the roses. The blue background also goes with the suit and that he has just done a speech as it is very unlike Eminem to do a performance in this outfit.

The back relates to the front as you can only see part of the body and it has roses all over the floor to imply sympathy that maybe something has gone wrong. The song titles are very bold to match the front covers title. It has the title of the cd up the right hand side of the album to remind us of the name of the album. The back of the album looks more sorrow than the front which is odd for a rap artist as normally its all about rough hoods and hard up bringing's but this is more hitting on the sympathy side of things. The suit in this case looks more like he has been left by a girl or something like that, The bottom bits are just standard advertising which is very common with rap artists. 

In my production I'm going to make sure that when our group creates the cd cover for our project that we construct a lot of research on similar artists cd covers to see how the relate to one and other and make sure we include these things in our album design otherwise it may not be popular because it is all just completely different.

Stars

Richard Dyer is a theorist and is basically saying stars are not real people as they are made up from many different aspects, he is saying that the star we see on tv, on youtube, in the news, on the internet and in their music videos are made up from other things. He said that the stars we see are partly made up from what the audience wants them to look like for instance with a rock band they want to see a fair bit of black in there, normally wearing jeans and t-shirts/polos so the audience can relate to them also how the producer would like them to look as the producer has a fair bit of input of making the stars we see. They control how the star looks in front of cameras, in interviews etc so how the media would like to see this star. So the stars we see are nothing like how they are in real life the star is created up by many things so the star is famous and people look up to them. I'm going to use this information in our group piece by making sure when we select what sort of genre we do that we include certain things that the target audience would like to see within the video so it is successful.