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.

Audience Research

Below we have created a video of some of our Audience research, in this section we asked a group of people a range of questions which related to the genre of music video we are planning on doing. We asked these questions as we wanted to get a feel of what we should have in our music video. 

From this post I have learnt that we are going to have to look at how people have reacted to the questions and cater for them as this is what they expect to see in this sort of music video. For example for the question 'What settings would you expect to see?' We had many answers saying that they would expect to see a beach or a forest and remote locations. This has always been a thought running through my mind when looking to do the music video as their are many like it. Due to the amount of people saying this we believed that It would be a good idea and will probably go ahead with it. Another example of our findings is when we ask 'What would you expect to see in a music video for a Folk/Rock genre music video?' We had a lot of the same answers in this section aswell, most people said they would expect to see guitars. When we were looking through this genre of music video we also found that the guitar has a lot of screentime in comparison to other attributes. Therefore we will also focus a lot on the use of guitar throughout the song. The final example of which I am going to talk about is when we asked the question 'Do you prefer music videos with more of the artist or the background story?' When we asked this question we had a variety of answers but the most common was to have both of them equally focused upon, this keeps people more interested as they want to see what the story ends with but also like to see the artist sing.

Permissions

Due to copyright, to do the song we wanted for our music video we had to gain permission from the artist and record company to use the song. There were many ways in which we could have tried to contact the chosen artist and we tried all of them, as to this date none of the methods of communication had worked. After conferring with our media studies teacher he said that we are allowed to use the song as long as we made recognisable effort to get the permission. After showing them all of the different types of cummunication we tried to use they accepted that we had made an acceptable amount of effort.

 Below are the different methods of communication we used to try and gain permission. The first method we used was via facebook. By liking Newton Faulkners page we were allowed to message him privately.

Another method of which we tried to use was twitter, this method wouldn't let us message him privately as he did not follow us back. Instead, we would have to tweet him. This turned out to be a bit of a pain as you are only allowed to 'tweet' up to 140 characters so we had to cut it up into separate tweets. Unfortunately we didn't get a reply.

We also tried to get in touch with his record company to allow us permissions to use his song, after trying to find an e-mail address or just an FAQ of which we could get onto there was no way of getting into contact with them. The record company of which he is signed to at the moment is Sony BMX. This label deals with a lot of famous singers and performers so they must have a way of getting into contact with them. I have spent hours of my own time trying to get into contact with the lable but can not find any way besided calling them on the site.

After all of this, me and my partner decided to choose a song of which hasn't got any copyright by a local artist called Tei Daresta who is also under the same genre as Newton Faulkner. He seems to be a very friendly and flexible young man who will be keen for us to film him whenever in need.

Conventions of a Folk/Rock music video

The conventions of a Folk/Rock genre of a music video have a lot of the same thing in a lot of the time. There is always a lot of focus on the instrument and slow paced shots of the artist throughout the video. I would say that the main convention of this type of video would be that it is usually based on a story. There is always a background story in one of these songs, I think that this is because the song is so slow that there has to be something to concentrate on during the song. Its not fast paced enough to have fast cuts in it so it has to be something that you can have long lasting shots.

There are also other conventions of this genre of music video such as the way in which people dress, in the videos of which I have watched most of them have dressed in a very casual way, this is in comparison to genres such as techno as they are usually very smartly dressed with lots of sleek looking instruments. In the Folk/Rock genre they are mainly in baggy jeans and just a casual hoodie, this gives them a sort of laid back look which goes well with the music. If you have a slow paced song with acoustic guitars in it would be weird to see someone wearing a suit.

There are also conventions to do with the instuments used in a Folk/ Rock genre music video, there is usually a guitar shown in the music video as there are a lot of pieces of these types of songs which only have the guitar being played at parts. There are also a lot of other acoustic instruments used to create a form of sound which bound together to create the same type of tune throughout a song. These woulds usually consist of instruments such as the cello, the banjo, the ukulele and a piano.

 

By looking through all of the conventions of this genre I have learnt that we should include some of these instruments when filming to make it match the conventions of the genre.