Genre research: indie music video examples

Here is an array of songs within the subgenres of 'indie' which I am familiar with. Hopefully, we can take inspiration from these videos, both conforming to and challenging the typical conventions of an indie music video.

Indie dance


Indie electronic


Indie folk


Indie hip hop


Indie pop


Indie rock


The artists/ bands I selected in this research post were mostly female, however this did prove difficult as the indie genre is heavily dominated by male artists/ bands, especially in subgenres such as 'indie hip hop'. I have now realized that finding female artists may be more challenging than we expected. However, it was very useful as each music video contains some elements we may use the production of our own music video, which will also feature a female star.

Genre research: indie

Mac 5 have started thinking about the genre we would like to research for the production of our music video. Keeping our current research loose, we have decided to explore the indie genre.

Independent music (indie music) refers to music produced independently from major commercial record labels and their subsidiaries. However, the term indie also describes a genre which may include music that is not independently produced. Indie music artists may create music that can be categorized into other genres, usually composed of singing and acoustic sounds.

Indie music contains many sub genres...

• Indie dance, or alternative dance, a type of dance music rooted on indie rock and indie pop
• Indie electronic
• Indie folk, a music genre that arose in the 1990s from singer/songwriters in the indie rock community showing heavy influences from folk music scenes of the 50s, 60s and early 70s, country music, and indie rock
• Indie hip hop, hip hop music that primarily exists in the independent music scene
• Indie pop, a genre of alternative pop music
• Indie rock, a genre of alternative rock music

This leaves us with many options when it comes to choosing a song.

Since indie music strays from mainstream artists and songs, exploring this genre allows us to find a less popular song, which is unlikely to be known by our audience - in doing this, we hope our audience will be less distracted by the song choice allowing them to focus on our video.

We would also like to chose a song that we are less familiar with, to make the production of the music video more reflective of the creative ideas within our group rather than our personal preferences in music taste - we think a song without an existing music video might allow us to be more imaginative.

 Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_music

Prelim: bloopers and outtakes

Here is some of our BTS footage - we clearly had a lot of fun filming!

The prelim

Here is our final prelim! Overall, we found the process a lot more difficult than we expected, but we really enjoyed it and we think it looks pretty similar to the actual video.

We felt quite prepared when it came to filming, as we had a detailed plan of the shots we needed and Hannah knew the song well, so we didn't waste any time learning lyrics.
We also found it easy to operate our equipment as we used a similar camera for our AS practical coursework, so we were familiar with it and managed to set up quickly.

Actually framing the shot and trying to get the correct camera angles was really hard. Our actress found it really hard to stay in the same position for a long time, so continuity shots proved to be more time consuming and difficult. Matching Hannah's actions to those in the video on cue and lip syncing the track to our video was also a lot more difficult than expected.

However, we found it was a really helpful task and we have learned a lot for when it comes to filming our final music video. We feel we are more familiar with the process so gathering our shots will be easier (and hopefully our camera won't run out of charge). We also plan to practice more lip syncing and matching tracks to visuals to help us through our editing process.

Prelim: second filming day

Today we filmed the last few shots needed to complete our prelim.
The locations we had in mind for this were the park, or the garden behind our school.

While we styled Hannah to recreate Sabrina Carpenter's look, we noticed a blue screen on one of the interactive whiteboards in school. Our plan was to use the chroma key technique to insert a floral background, like that in the video, rather than filming outside as it was raining.
Sadly, the reflection of the projector was too bright and Hannah looked violet on screen, which didn't look like an accurate recreation of the actual video.

Here are some pictures...

Our stylist, Daniella

Violet Hannah

The blue screen

 

Luckily for us, the rain stopped so we managed to film in the garden behind our school! Here is the background of our frame...

We think we managed to get all the shots we needed in this location, so hopefully we can finish editing by Wednesday!

Prelim: first filming day

Today, our group began gathering shots for our prelim. We filmed in Enfield Town park (a convenient location in case we need to re-film) which is the closest setting we could think of, similar to that in the music video.We had our storyboards, and the actual music video close by when filming so we could compare our shots to those in the video.

Here are some pictures from our filming day...

Unfortunately, our camera ran our of charge but to make our next filming day less stressful, we decided to practice the hairstyle Sabrina Carpenter has, on Hannah, for the shots in the other location. 

Here is Hannah observing Sabrina Carpenter's hairstyle in comparison to the one we styled for her...

We have the majority of the shots in the sequence, but we still have to find another location for the other shots in the opening 30 seconds. We plan to begin editing the shot taken today over the weekend, and film/ edit the rest on Monday so we hit our deadline!

Prelim: storyboards

Our prelim task was to recreate a short 30 second section of an existing music video.
The song we chose for our prelim was Sabrina Carpenter's 'We'll be the Stars' which is largely based on performance.

Here is the actual video...



We chose this video because although it is quite simplistic, the arrangement of the shots and change of location was something we felt would be helpful to practice, before filming our real product.
We also saw an uncanny resemblance between our star (Hannah) and the artist of this song (Sabrina Carpenter)!

We also completed storyboards, which we felt would be helpful to take with us when we filmed...