Category Research

RESEARCH: Survey + results

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In order to gain some insight into what people want to see in a music video, I decided my best approach would be to create a survey in which I ask people some very basic questions regarding music videos and genres. This way I was able to get idea of what sort of demographic I was working towards, as well as getting some ideas for what to make my opening dialogue about.

Here are the questions I put forward to the general public:

I kept the survey open for a week, and by the time the allotted time was up, I was inundated with responses; 126 people took part in my survey, and although some of them weren’t very useful, the rest gave me a very good boost in the right direction for what to do for my music video. Although, I didn’t really have enough time to go through every single response, a lot of the answers I got were relatively similar for some of the questions.

Firstly, I asked some basic, tick box questions. I began by asking for a rough age for each person.

From this I can see that the majority of the people that took my survey were within the age bracket of 15-21 years old, which, therefore gave me a rough age demographic for my video. By using this primary research source, I can try to make decisions surrounding my production, based on this demographic.

My second pi chart ended up not being all that necessary; I asked if the audience knew what I meant by a music video with an opening dialogue.

I realised, after releasing the survey that everyone that answered no, went on to not answer the following questions. Noticing this, I went on to add a little description of what I meant in order to get a response from everyone.

My first open ended question was asking if the people knew any examples of videos including an opening narrative.

After watching a few of these videos, it helped me to gather some ideas of what a music video, such as this, should look like. Most of these videos were very good examples of what I should be looking to aim for, so I was able to gather a few ideas for my own video.

My third pi chart was a good indicator as to whether or not I should even bother doing an opening narrative for my video. I then went on to ask why they answered how they did.

With the majority of people answering “yes”, it was safe to say I was okay keeping my original idea for this project. Despite this, I was curious to see why people don’t like them to see if I can work around this.

I saw that a lot of people didn’t like opening narratives because they can be too long. In order to combat this, I will attempt to keep it relatively short and snappy; it will add to the main story of the music video to get some more background into the intentions of the lead actress. Another reason was that they’d rather just listen to the music, not watch a video. Not exactly helpful, might I suggest Spotify?

A lot of the positive responses were the same; from “more background context” to “more interesting and opens a story”, the responses are the same in that it provides more background story to the main video. In my video, I will probably use my opening dialogue to start off the story, and give a reason for the reason my actress is angry.

Finally, I asked what sort of vibe “bad guy” gives off, before asking if they had any ideas of what I could do an opening narrative on.

From these responses, I have been able to create a few ideas as to what I want to do, and what I definitely want to avoid doing.

There is definitely a common theme of relationships gone wrong, and relatively dark themes, such as murder, death and robbery. I want to try and incorporate these ideas and make one theme, maybe a story of revenge on a cheating partner, or a heist gone wrong. One things for certain, I want to try to avoid anything too cringy or cheesy. I want it to remain relatively creepy and serious.

Inspiration for my FMP

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For mostly everything in the modern media, you don’t have to delve to deep to find where a creative has taken inspiration from older pieces of work. Whether it be through plot line (e.g. The Lion King and Black Panther) or genre tropes (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), similarities can be found everywhere in the media. Some might argue that it is in fact idea-stealing, but unless it’s an exact replica, or practically the same, everything has it’s own differences.

That’s being said, it is clear where I have taken inspiration for my final project. Considering I chose to create a music video, there is endless possibilities of what I could have done. I could’ve stuck with a purely narrative video, or an entirely performance based video, or even a mixture of the two.

As previously stated in my proposal, I intended on keeping a relatively creepy feel to my video and what better place to look for creepy inspiration than from the artist of the song I’ve chosen: Billie Eilish. Her videos are laden with creepy aesthetic, a lot of her videos carry a darker colour palette (with the exception of her “bad guy” video which subverts the tone of the song), as well as having some quite gruesome themes throughout all her videos, including one shot where she is seen to be crying out a black liquid, and another where a tarantula crawls out of her mouth.

The main sort of aesthetic I’m looking for it dark and ominous, and the best example of this in Eilish’s videos is “bury a friend”, arguably her scariest video to date.

Throughout the entire video, it is pretty dark; there aren’t many moments of lightness, if any at all. This helps to keep the vibe pretty macabre, not to mention all the use of horror film tropes such as black eyes, creepy walks and flickering lights. The director, Michael Chaves, also uses a lot of strobe lighting within the video, as well as keeping the editing pretty choppy, which is what I intend to do with my own video.

It’s basically a horror story set to music, it’s designed and produced to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and scared. Considering my song choice, I want to do a similar sort of thing for my FMP. I don’t want to copy this style exactly, plus I always had it in mind that I wanted to keep the colour themed around reds and blacks, but this is certainly one of my main influences for my FMP. I’ve always admired the style of Billie’s music and her videos, and I want to make sure that I do her song justice when I create my version of the “bad guy” video.

“Stressed out” by Twenty One Pilots is probably one of the best example of what format I want my video to follow. It includes a nice balance of dialogue and performance video. Not to mention, it also uses subtitles (if only once in the video) which is an idea I’ve had to develop during the process of editing my final production. It also has one of the creepiest face shots in any video I’ve seen. From this, I’ve drawn the idea to do a similar thing in my video. I will have my actress in front of a dark backdrop, mouthing the lyrics to “bad guy” in a intimidating sort of way.

If I want to find an example of the exact formatting I want to follow for my FMP, I have to look no further than Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “The Kill”; not only does it have an opening dialogue, but it also follows a similar layout to my idea and the Twenty One Pilot’s video, seeing as though it uses both narrative and performance clips. It also has a sort of creepy “The Shining” story running through the whole thing, so again, my main inspiration that I take from this video is the horror genre and the way it is presented.

The video is a homage to the Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining based on the Stephen King novel. Several scenes are based on the film, such as when Shannon Leto enters Room 6277 and encounters the woman in the bathroom and another when Matt Wachter is served drinks at the bar by a doppelgänger apparition. The video culminates in an elegant ballroom in the same manner as the photo at the end of the film.

En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). The Kill. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill [Accessed 3 Jun. 2019].

This video has taken direct inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, so clearly this was a good example of a horror music video to take my own inspiration from. It, like bury a friend, also uses choppier cutting techniques and strobe lighting in places in order to create an air of mystery and the lack of comfort.

LAST MINUTE INSPIRATION

Due to not having a mic whilst filming, I wasn’t able to record an actual dialogue for my video (to be fair, I don’t think I would have been able to anyway, but that was purely due to the competency of the actors involved). I needed to find a way of conveying the story of the video, so it made sense to the rest of the plot line. Then, it occurred to me that I in fact knew of a video that manages to do this perfectly: Radiohead Turn.

In this video, they use subtitles to show what the characters are actually saying to one and other. It’s clearly used just so you are able to hear the music over the top, but from this I wanted to create my own stylised version in order to convey the thoughts and speech of my characters. It creates a sense of ambiguity to the character’s voices, as well as emphasising the emotion of the music behind it rather than the actual speech.