GENRE CONVENTIONS: Cinematography & Editing

Possible Influences:

• The layering of the band onto narrative performance or just one of the band members
• Have black & white for some of the shots 
• The editing pace should link to the track pace 
• Have a limited amount of special effects

Layering:
The layering in music videos in the Indie/Alt - rock genre contains mainly performance footage layered on top of narrative or a cutaway shot or a scene of some sort. This gives a good visual effect alongside still haveing performance in the music video which is key to this genre. Below are a few examples on how it is incorporated.

Bishop Briggs - River

In this track you can clearly see the lead singer being layered over some interesting landscape. This happens throughout the video however it isn't consistent and there are both shots with just the landscape and just the lead signer.

The Cure - Picture Of You

The whole music video is the band which are distorted and layer into alongside onto a background consisting of a cartoon style of nature. This is basically just performance footage but to liven it up and keep the audience engaged they have used this layering technique instead of having a variety of close ups/ medium shots of each band member.

The Smiths- Panic

Like The Cure, the performance footage is layered onto scenery. However this time it is a black and white background with a coloured tint on the performance footage. There is a larger shot variety on the performance footage compared to The Cure however the layering is literally just the performance footage clipped on top of background scenery instead of being incorporated/blended into the background.

Colouring:
As blogged on previously Indie/ Alt - rock commonly has black and white footage.

The Cranberries - Zombie
(this music video has a mix of coloured and b&w footage)

Oasis - Wonderwall

Catfish and the Bottlemen - Twice

Kasabian - Underdog

Sam Fender - The Sound

Notice how all the B&W footage is of the band and performance footage. The 'Zombie' music video has coloured and b&w footage of both the narrative and performance. These bands have also done music videos with colour as well.

Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger

The Smiths - Ask

These are two examples of coloured footage from Oasis and The Smiths. This signifies that Indie can be both black and white and coloured and that it doesn't have to be one or the other. Both of them work and both of them can connote Indie/ Alt- Rock. Notice how The Smiths also has tinted layering of performance footage over the narrative footage with a close up of the lead singer.

Pace:
Generally the editing pace reflects on the pace of the song. Slower in the calmer parts and then when the beat drops it speeds up to make the drop more powerful visual.
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In this example of 'Sun Goes Down' by Arctic Monkeys you can guess where the drop is with the sheer increase in editing pace and the shakiness of the camera. The takes become much shorter than before and they become more action movie like. Compare the medium shot of the woman in the snow which is quite a calm shot and a longish take to the POV shots in the car of short takes quickly followed by one another. The next example (Barns Courtney - Fire) you can see the change in pace as well when the drop happens. this time the background changes and there is colour correction at the drop to make it more vibrant. The combination of changing the cinematography and editing to match the pace of the music video is part of Andrew Goodwins theory on how the music links to the music video.
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Special Effects:
Considering budgets for Indie music videos aren't very large due to the whole origin of Indie being independent and the do it yourself attitude. special effects won't be as prominent or at the same variety as a mainstream band or artist who has many companies backing them up for a music video production. Sometimes the most special effects you are going to get is a b&w filter with layering which are two of the common conventions for this genre anyways.
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Oasis - Wonderwall

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The focus is on the band and what they can produce/ how they play the instruments. The focus is not on visually striking special effects that are hard to produce and require a large budget. 

GENRE CONVENTIONS: Genre Specifics

Possible Influences:

• Black and white in some of the shots
• Low key lighting/ naturalistic lighting
• Follow the typical Indie costume for the band 
• Have the performance reflect the Indie attitude with some members
• The narrative to be non linear/ abstract 

Performance

Playlist we put together with Indie/Alt Rock
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The performance of a music video in the Indie genre is quite unique. Above is a playlist with all the music videos we have analysed. The most common is to have performance with the whole band and sometimes split up the band. 

Black and White
This was a widely used convention when Indie was an emerging genre. As Indie is seen as quite sinister and dark at times black and white or monochrome footage would fit perfectly with the theme these bands where trying to create for the audience to interpret. Below are a few examples:
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Joy Division - Atmosphere 

Oasis - Wonderwall

The Cranberries -  Zombie

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The black and white footage is also an easy trick with low key lighting. Low key lighting is also commonly used as it brings out a more naturalistic look to the performers and doesn't glamorize the band in any way. This is the opposite of high key lighting used to glamorize in pop music videos.  The music videos aren't always black and white as seen with a couple of examples below:

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BUZZCOCKS - Ever Fallen in Love

PIXIES - Bagboy

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It could also be argued that the monochrome footage is to reflect upon the silent cinema era of the early 20's where it was only black and white. Indie stands for independent and this means there can be quite a lot of abstract meanings and reflecting on what once used to be modern. This is also seen with the record player in Oasis - Wonderwall. The record player was out of date and seen as old fashioned when this music video was made in 1995. This could link into the Stuart Hall's Preferred Reading where everyone has their own readings of a text and some will understand the intertextuality or the themes being produced whereas someone else will understand the text in another way. Nowadays, the record player seems to be the new 'hip' way to listen to music as it has made a huge comeback!

Oasis - Wonderwall (Record Player) 

Costume

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Moodboard made by JC

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As seen with this moodboard created by James, the Indie costume is quite distinctive.

The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

 Here the costume is quite clearly:

• Dark
• Conservative
• Messy Hair 
• Leather Jacket
• Black trousers
• Dark Blue shirt (connotes seriousness)
• Black heavy boots

Another example of this is:

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey

 The costume here is:

• Dark
• Conservative
• All of the band members have messy hair
• Black t - shirt on lead singer
• Leather jacket on bass guitarist 
• All have black trousers/jeans 
• Black boots/ black sneakers

There is a noticeable trend in the costume for Indie. Generally quite dark clothing and more conservative than other genres such as Pop. The lead singer is also predominately a tall white skinny male.

Attitude:
There is an emphasis on the performance and how the instruments are played in Indie music videos. This is due to the audience wanting to see if the band can actually play these instruments as that is what can separate the good from the greats.
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The Jesus and the Mary Chain - April Skies

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• Shoegazing common for the guitarist
• where he looks at the floor
• Singer and guitarist are the more energetic part of the band 
• Show their meaning and emotion through expressing the lyrics
• Drummer also expresses beats 
• Generally the attitude used to be more moody and gothic/punk
• Has moved more towards a pop like attitude in recent years with band members showing more enthusiasm and emotion. 

Narrative
Even though most of the music videos contain most performance footage there is still some narrative in Indie/ Alt Rock music videos. 
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Clothing: 

The clothing is similar to the performance but can be a bit more quirky. There is not much focus on glamour as this genre comes from punk and the lyrics have quite deep meanings. One of  Goodwin's theories of the lyrics and narrative linking also have an aspect in this. As seen with the example of Pixies - Bagboy the proppian archetype of the central protagonist is a teenage boy who has no glamour with a messy haircut and is wearing generally dull/dark clothes. 

Location/Setting:

Same as performance. In a rundown area or an area that is seen as more gloomy than others so and abandoned house, graveyard, underground carpark etc. It is also important that there is low key lighting as this helped generating the sinister mood as well as avoids glamorizing the characters. 

This is Arctic Monkeys When The Sun Goes Down. Notice how the area looks quite run down and again just in general not a very glamorous setting. Note how the costume is also quite conservative and dark in general. 

Props:

There are no specific props which are used in narrative as a common theme throughout the genre. However it can be a quirky item such as a mask or a colourful aspect of some sort but again in a quirky and sometimes sinister/moody way.

Nothing But Thieves - Sorry

PIXIES - Bagboy

Makeup: 

As with the other aspects of the narrative, the genre is not about glamour. Makeup can be quite limiting and in some cases there is none. However some females can have makeup such as purple lipstick and dark eyeliner to refuse and block out the stereotyping and male gaze of red lipstick and glamorous make up. There are some cases where there is makeup which glamorizes the female however this is rarely the case with the Indie/ Alt rock genre. 

Conservative, Not much make up, no glamour

Male gaze, glamorous, red lipstick 

INDUSTRY: Welshly Arms Record Label

(SS)
Position Music

Website
Based in LA in 1999.  "We are an independent publisher, record label and management firm, redefining what it means to be a music company." This means that they not only produce the music they also publish and distribute their artists' music. They have many licensed songs. One of their more popular songs for TV is 2WEI's cover of Britney Spears' Toxic which has been used for numerous instances eg. Dancing with the Stars, America's got Talent and a Trailer for the second season of Riviera.
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On their website you can see when any of their songs have been used in TV, Film, Video Games and adverts.

In their contact page they link their social media and Spotify, Youtube and Soundcloud
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This is their Instagram, as you can see they only have 1,230 followers so they are quite obscure

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This is their Facebook, here they have a slightly larger audience with 7,739 likes on their page.

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This is their twitter. 4,066 followers and a total of 1,486 likes

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Here is their youtube channel, they only really post audio's of songs. Then all music videos are on the Artists' channel.

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As you can see in total no more than 10,000 people like or follow this record label. If we compare this to one of the big 3 we can just see how obscure this record company really is. Next you'll see screenshots from Universal, one of the big 3

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We can see here that Universal have 215k more followers than Position Music

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Their twitter has 525k followers.

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Facebook has 552k likes

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And their YouTube is similar to the Position Music's in the way that they don't upload a lot but promote their artists videos.

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In conclusion by comparing this "Big 3" conglomerate with the smaller indie label you can see not only the difference in size but also marketing possibilities. Being signed to a big label gives you many advantages such as: simple connections to other artists working within the same label or a subsidiary of the label, increased benefits and funding (aka payments) and an increased amount of opportunities for exposure from a larger audience. Currently, social media carry almost all power when it comes to advertisement for target audiences and having a large audience on social media is such an advantage, and right now Position Music is at a very large disadvantage by having so few followers/likes/subscribers.

INDUSTRY: History of Digitization and the Impact

History of CD 

The digital format of a CD became public in 1980 with the first commercial CD player being created by Sony in 1982 released in Japan. The Sony CDP - 101 became available in worldwide in 1983. CD's where rising but still seen as a niche until the British rock band Dire Straits released their "Brothers in Arms" album alongside their new tour sponsored by Philips to advertise the CD format. The album was the first time a CD had outsold the vinyl format. This is seen as the album which kick started and made CD sales skyrocket. The sales quickly overtook vinyl and in 1991 overtook cassettes and became the leading form of distributing media.

Rise and Fall of CD sales

CD sales kept rising and rising with some experts claiming "indestructible industry" it rose to over 1 billion sales worldwide in early 90's all the way up to 2 billion in the mid 90's. Part of the reason for this was because people had bought 1 album on vinyl, then bought them on cassette and final bought the same album on CD. Artists and Bands had convinced many people to buy the new format as it became mainstream. The industry was booming. The big three where getting huge profits.

CD Sales from 1991 to 2015 (in millions)

There where people who predicted there would be a fall and who where developing the fully digital format know as MP3. This could be downloaded from the new world of the internet. Peer to peer file sharing became available with the launch of Napster in 1999. The online distribution method being so easy to access and free led to the first decline of CD sales. The highest selling point of this new form of distribution through Piracy was that it was free, and you could access it anywhere.The physical media format was disrupted by the digitization/convergence of the new age of Web 2.0.

The iPod

The invention of the iPod in 2001 also greatly affected the physical media sales. The sheer difference in size making this device extremely portable compared to the previous mainstream portable music player of the Sony Walkman. The iPod also had a whopping 5GB flash drive as storage which was huge compared to the other MP3 players at the time. Another major factor was the MP3 format, you didn't have to bring other physical media with you or chose which album you wanted to listen to before your commute as they where all downloaded onto the iPod. iTunes was introduced alongside the iPod which became the largest market place for digital media quickly. It was also easy to rip previous CD's and download them to your iTunes library. “Before that the MP3 was an inferior good, “Once you had the iPod, the CD was an inferior good. It could get cracked or lost, whereas MP3 files lasted.”  Quote from Stephen Witt. The impact wasn't large until smartphones where introduced in 2005 when people really began to exploit the piracy sites. The release of the iPhone was what made iTunes extremely popular.

Streaming
With the fall of CD sales and the rise of digital media through web 2.0/convergence and digitization, there was way of listening to music bound to arrive. YouTube was founded in 2005 and set the benchmark for streaming to come. Streaming was a legal and (sometimes) free way to access media and music across all devices with an internet connection. YouTube to date has over 1.5 billion registered accounts with the largest music specific paid for streaming service Spotify (launched in 2008)  having 87 million users subscribed with an estimate of 5 times more people using the free version. Streaming overtook global revenues for the first time in 2017 to become largest source of revenue for the global music industry. Streaming became the new mainstream and easiest way to listen to music still at a decent quality. 

Digipak/Monetization 

Monetizing music had already become harder due to digitization so artists and bands thought of new ways to earn money such as Merch and special editions of physical formats as seen with the Slayer example of limited edition Vinyl (as seen by the example on the left). It became more mainstream to have a promo package/digipak as it was harder to earn money from streaming. Streaming has caused controversy through low payment rates. Artists and Bands just aren't earning the same amount of money for streams than from previous singles or album sales on CD. It doesn't help that 80% of all music sales in the global industry go back to the big 3 as they are the ones profiting the most from streaming. It is calculated that Spotify (the largest paid streaming service for music) pays the artist $0.003 to $0.0084 per stream depending on a few variables. This is significantly less than what was earned before with an artist earning about $0.12 per single sale on CD's. 

Summary

The music industry boomed in the 80's and had the largest revenue with a total of over $38 billion at the end of the 20th century. A figure that is yet to be touched since. The Cd industry rose extremely quickly and fell down at almost the same rate, due to digitization and web 2.0 opening up many new opportunities for consumers to get a hold of music. Devices like the iPod also making digital music much more accessible helped alongside the piracy and streaming services which were emerging. The streaming services may get more hits or views but the revenue generated is no where near what was generated when CD sales were at their peak.  

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Vodcast to go here

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AUDIENCE: Questionnaire Summary

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Age group:
15 - 24: 23
25 - 34:1
40 - 49:3
50 -59: 0
65+: 0

Gender:
Male: 38.5%
Female 61.5%

Question 1 The 6 bands:

1 (Artic Monkeys):

• 12 (54.5%) people knew the band
• 10 (45.5%) people did not know

2 (Joy Division):

• 6 (27.2%)people knew the band
• 2 (9.1%) people recognise them
• 14 (63.4%) people did not know

3 (Nothing But Thieves):

• 3 (13.5%)people knew the band
• 5 (22.7%)people recognise them
• 13 (63.8)people did not know

4 (Oasis):

• 20 (73%)people knew the band
• 5 (23.2%)people recognised
• 1 (3.8%)person did not know

5 (Imagine Dragons):

• 14(58.3%) people knew the band
• 4 (16.7%)people recognise
• 6 (25%)people did not know

6 (The Jesus and Mary Chain):

• 4 (21%) people knew the band
• 15 (79%)people did not know

Question 2 (The genre):

• 17 (65.4%) people said Indie/ Alt rock
• 9 (34.6%)people said Rock/ Pop/ Brit-pop

Question 3 (other bands):

• Mix of many bands but most mentioned are Buzzcocks, Pixies, Stone Roses and Wombats

Question 4 (what will be featured):

• Most people all agreed that there would be a band featured (performance)

A few people went into more details with some having hit exactly what we have gathered from our research:

Question 5 (name specific band):

• 4 (15.4%)  people said Welshly Arms 
• 2 (7.7%) people said they recognise the band
• 20 (76.9%) people did not recognise the band

Question 6 (specific to music video):

• People suggested the same things as the previous more general answer
• There where many more who suggested a love/ relationship narrative to be featured

Question 7 (Name background music):

• 8 people said Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love
• 6 people said they recognise the song 
• 12 people didn't recognise the song

What can we gather from this audience research?

Indie/ Alt Rock is commonly known as a genre and people of all ages mostly recognise the genre for what it is. People defiantly knew the more mainstream bands compared to the less mainstream bands. One person even recognised every single band showed and gave feedback like we expected to have in our music video. This was an 18 year old female. People also picked up on the love/ relationship aspect of the lyrics for the song Locked by Welshly Arms which we are creating a music video/ digipak for.   

Production Schedule Updates

Shoots:
Re-shoot Performance: 20th January
JC - Photos for album cover: 20th January
Add to narrative: 21st - 27th

Conventions (genre): 8th February  

• SS - 6,7,8,9 (UGC, Alt-Vids, distribution/ social, Promo package)
• CS - 2,5, 10 (cinematography, editing, genre specifics, possible influences)
• JC - 1,3,4 (lyrics/visual, intertextuality, representation)

Industry research: 1st February 

• JC - what is indie, how does it work?
• CS - History of digitisation and the impact then clear summary
• SS - Monetisation + record label

Audience research: 1st February 

• CS - questionnaire summary
• JC - Media appearances
• SS - Audience feedback sample scene
• SS - Mood-board male
• CS - Mood-board female

Editing:

• Performance rough cut: 28th January 
• Narrative:
• Final Cut: 

Digipak: 

• SS - Merch: 29th January
• CS - Website: 29th January 
• JC - CD cover: 29th January

Other:

• SS - Storyboard: 18th January

EVAL Questions:

• Q1 Conventions/representations
• Planning - 12th February
• Finished - 25th February 

• Q2 Promo package branding
• Planning - 12th February
• Finished - 25th February 

• Q3 Audience engagement/distribution
• Planning - 12th February
• Finished - 25th February 

• Q4 Technologies
• Planning - 12th February
• Finished - 25th February 

This weekend;

Narrative filming - sunday 

Performance rough cut

Digipak rough
Merch
Website rough

MOODBOARD: Female Audience

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Moodboard Female Audience from ChristianStricks

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Above is a mood board created to visualise the female target audience of the Indie genre.

PODCAST 7: Improvements to Music Video

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Things we discussed in this podcast
Film larger range of takes on performance re shoot

• 30-40 shots per person
• 2 shots, close ups, dutch angles , low angle, etc.

Put variety on where the band is located

• Put singer up against pillar
• Have shots with band spread out around area
• Abstract framing

Make 5 piece

• Put a new cast member on guitar
• Maybe change the cast on drums
• Guitar player will move around 
• Bass player will also walk around to rhythm
• Singer and guitarist interact at times 

DIRECTING: Green Screen Singer

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Above is a video clip showing the progression of directing and how it is reflected in the performance of the singer.

PODCAST 6: Reflecting on Shoots

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What we did and what to improve:

• We did house an Christmas market scene
• Filmed the couple in past and present time
• Need more shot variety to work with
• The acting needs to be more naturalistic 
• We need to have a less linear idea

Idea update due to Audience feedback

• Have a funeral of some sorts
• Brings in more dark and sinister tone to fit music
• Have less linear scenes 
• More use of narrative enigma 
• Have band come into scene or busking