Tei Daratsa playing his songs

After we had decided to go with our local artist, Tei Daratsa we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at his work, this is why we have created a video of him singing his own song and another song which is a cover of Ed Sheerans 'Give Me Love' song. We thought this would be a good idea as it would give us an idea of what the song goes like and how we could start planning the music video to the song.

From this piece of work I have learnt that he is a very confident performer. It also gave us a bold idea of what the videos going to look like. Now we have found out a few of the lyrics we can start planning props to use and think of clips which we can create when in the making of the music video. 

History and Development

In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and others to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child" Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illistrated song, the first step toward music video. This was the beginning of the musi video history.

In 1902 the phonoscene era began- The phonoscene was a forerunner of sound film. It combined a chronophone sound recording with a chronograph film shot with actors lip-synching to the sound recording. The recording and film were synchronized by a mechanism patented by Leon Gaumont in 1902. The first phonoscènes were presented by Gaumont in 1902 in France. This allowed artists to now lipsink to a song and then show there songs.

In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. A talkie was a short film which had music over the top, this is where the start of Music videos began. It meant that people could start to make things that relate to the song and play them at the same time.

One of the first people who created a music video was Bessie Smith, she was a very soulful  singer. This was created in 1929 so the lipsinking had not come into this section of the music video yet. In the video it contains the singer herself, this is also because the use of actors and actresses in music videos had not been thought of yet. Simply because it was new to the face of the planet.

Another form of early music video is called a promotional video, this was created in the early 1940's it was called a visual jukebox. This would usually be a band on stage, many of these were made and usually for jazz music. Once these were up and going many different sections of film wanted to do it, such as comedians, torch singers and dancers.

In 1981, MTV went on air, this was the first ever channel which was based solely on music, hence the name Music Television.

This channel went on to revolutionize the music industry and became an influential source of pop culture and entertainment in the United States and other parts of the world, including Europe, Asia and Latin America, which all have MTV-branded channels. They all have there own different channels on which relate to the culture of the country.

In the early days of MTV it was used for basic videos of short music with background images. As people could see this had potential people started to invest money into it and then people started to make cutting-edge videos. In the 1980s, MTV was instrumental in promoting the careers of performers such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and Duran Duran, whose videos played in heavy rotation.

For the last two decades of the 20th century, the music industry rotated along the axis of MTV. The company represented a direct line into the hearts and minds of music consumers around the world, and their main form of expression was music video. This was when the music videos really became popular, and have ever since.

When MTV launched in August 1981 and blasted “Video Killed the Radio Star” through American households, it represented the ambitions of a company who wanted to significantly influence popular culture. It succeeded in a big way, earning millions of pounds. It remains a critical part of the music industry by leveraging music videos to help flesh out the image of acts as diverse as Michael Jackson and Green Day, Guns n’ Roses and 2Pac.

It was the digital revolution in the late 90s that really put the pressure on the entire music industry as it was. Music videos, which primarily served as an advertisement for record sales, feared losing their pillars of support as the big labels worried about declining CD sales as a result of availability of music online, for free.


Technological developmentsOver the past 5 or 6 years, it is fair to say that technology has increased greatly, this has had a massive effect on the music industry. I believe that the advance in technology has effected the music industry in a very positive way. It has allowed artist to increase the standard of not only the music itself but also the music video.

Not only has it allowed the standard to increase it also has made new places for artist to publish their music. For example, Youtube,
Youtube has become one of the biggest online sites for where people view music from.
Many artist are found on Youtube, for example, Conor Maynard has become a world wide star and it was all down to youtube.

Recordings of the song

Due to the bad quality of the footage in the videos of which we captured we created a voice recording which picked up his voice more than the guitar, we hit a snag when trying to do this as the voice recordings wouldnt transfer onto a blogger post. To do this we would have to create a background for the recording and put it into a video format this way we were able to change it into a youtube folder and put it onto this post. We did this to get a better insight into the song and so we can hear the lyris clearly. 




From listening to the audio clips we believe that the song thats created by Tei would be a better option, this is because of the lyrics that are included in the song. As you can hear, some of the lines of which he uses are to do with 'coming back to me' and as if its to do with a relationship, these types of music videos are always easier to make because of the conventions being the same for a lot of them. The other song which is a cover from Ed Sheeran was our other option when approaching Tei, we opted out of choosing this song due to the difficulty of creating a music video to it. Plus there have also been many different covers created, therefore by doing our music video to an original song there wont be a sense of competition as such.

Case Study - Tzvetan Todorov

Tzveran Todorov - Narrative Theory

- Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher.

- He was born in 1939 

I did this as I thought that It would be good to find out the different types of media and the different ways in which theorists see it. By looking at how different people thought a media text should be shown I thought that we could mix them all in to create a better product.

Tzvetan Todorov created a theory called the narrative theory, he believed that a story should have a beginning being normal a disruption where all the action takes place and then an end where there is a new normality.

What are the key points of his ‘narrative theory’?

The way that stories and characters are seen in media texts

5 keys ideas…                                                                           

1.    Equilibrium – Normal life/balance

2.    Disruption – Normality is disrupted

3.    Realisation – Characters accept disruption

4.    Reparation – Fixing the disruption

5.    New equilibrium – balance, but different  

Example – Spiderman                           

1. Equilibrium - Normal student, geek, works hard to try and get the girl of his dreams. 

2. Disruption - He is bitten by a spider, gets many attributes a normal human wouldn't.Then he has to fight someone evil. 

3. Realisation - When he gets used to the fact that he is a human spider.

4. Reparation - Stops the evil person from killing everyone and becomes used to the fact hes going to be spiderman from now on.

5 - Carries on with normal life as Spiderman.                                

Why is this important in studying media?

This is important to my course as I can see whether there are many other music videos that have used this theory and see whether they have worked out well. I believe that more of the music videos that have a background story have this sort of narrative besides the ones that end on a sad note.

How can you apply his theory to your research/project?

I can apply this to my research by looking at some example of music videos with his theory and seeing if I want to make I similar one or not. Most of the music videos we looked at were very interesting and kept you intrigued all the way through, this is what we'd like to do to our audience.

I think that after looking at a lot of videos that have this sort of storyline we decided to use it. In our music video we are thinking about having a couple that are together a lot and have a lot of fun, this would be the equillibrium after this they would be taken away from each other, maybe due to a problem at home with there family, therefore being disrupted and then they will end up back together somehow and this would be the new equilibrium. This is clearly a very basic version of the music video but it does replicate his theory.