Inspirational/Creative Music Videos

Michael Gondry 

This music video is made and directed by Michael Gondry,The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar.  It's a clever music video as when the beat comes up objects in the background  come up too. The audience can see the items when he beat comes. Michael Gondry is known for video's like this, as he has filmed and directed other video's for Kylie Minogue. Her video for 'Come Into My World' was ran on a loop concept. Where at the end of the video there was 4 Kylie's! We also took inspiration from another of Michael Gondry's creations, but this time it was The White Stripes' The Hardest Button To Button. This is a music video in which lots of pictures were taken and then edited together to make it look like the person is moving, this would be similar to our stop motion that we would create. All of these video's below are Michael Gondry's creations, we did take some inspiration from these and we might take some inspiration from these video's for our own. 

Something more our genre would be Frank Turners' Recovery. At the beginning of this course we watched this video and took inspiration for our own music video. We partially liked the split of the screen so that we could get more footage in one shot. We knew that in order to do this we would need three times a much footage than normal. We later realised that we didn't have the Final Cut (editing  software) in order to complete this. But we still took inspiration to this nonetheless. 

We had idea to incorporate a stop motion into the video as we had experimented with this before (as you can see in another post). We would only add chunks of stop motion as the experimentation stop motion was only 1 minute long and we had 550 photos taken to edit together. We thought that it would be hard for the audience to piece together the scenario will only a stop motion, so from here we thought that we would only include small amounts of stop motion. 

Another technique that we had in mind was a tilt shift. This is when the camera has height it then takes footage of the people, buildings and movements in general, then makes the perception blurred a little so that things look like models and not actually full scale things. At the initial design stage, we attempted to figure out a place to do this technique, but we are limited in Hartlepool of high enough places that weren't restricted to shoot. In the example video below, they also used a time lapse to speed things up so that it could be cut where necessary, this is a good technique to use and something that we are looking into for our music video. 

This physical music in this video is the oppersite genre that we are going to use, however the technique is there and it's something that we can take inspiration from. 

Andy Shackleford

Stop Motion is something that we might consider using in our own music video. After watching a few stop motion music videos we gained a greater understanding of how to make them look seamless. The more photos the better with the smallest of movements between each image that is taken. We looked at many different music videos including Newton Faulkner's 'Indecisive', Lisa Mitchell's 'Incomplete Lullaby' and Ryan Keen's video for 'Focus'. Below is the video for 'The Making of Focus' which is one we looked at in more detail. This was directed and animated by Andy Shakleford, who has worked with big artists creating music videos, but also in children's animations like: Fifi and the Flowertots, Postman Pat and Rupert the bear. The video for Focus won an award for the Best Music Video in the Limelight Short Fim Awards 2012. 

After speaking to Andy on Twitter I come to find out that 'Focus' took around six months to create, from the planning to the release. He also mentioned that the live action (briefly at the beginning and end of the music video) was filmed in a day and a half, but the animation took a whole month to film. The rest of the time was focused on the planning of the animation and the creation of the models and props. It is obvious from this that we would not have enough time to create an animation of this level, but we can use the same technique and the same planning to create something seamless. Below are the screenshots from Twitter showing the contact we had with Andy regarding the music video for Focus.