Star Image - Miley Cyrus

Music Video Director - Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze is an American director, producer, screenwriter and actor. His work ranges from TV advertisement to film and television to music videos. He was born in 1969 (his birth name is Adam Spiegel). He has done a vast amount of collaborative work such as being a co-founder and editor of  Dirt magazine as well as an editor for Grand Royal Magazine and senior photographer for Transworld Skateboarding. He is also a producer and co-creator of MTV's hugely successful prank and stunt series Jackass.







Jonze has been directing music videos for over 20 years now and has worked with an eclectic range of artists including; The Beastie Boys, Weezer, R.E.M, Bjork, Sonic Youth, Daft Punk, Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls, Fatboy Slim and Kanye West.

A personal favourite of mine, and one I have always remembered from a young age is Fatboy Slim's Praise You music video (directed by Spike Jonze). Jonze actually starred in the video himself as one for his alter-egos named Richard Koufey accompanied by his factious dance crew. This video is an excellent example of 'stealing shots' as it was filmed using guerrilla style filmmaking. This is when you film at a location without any permission from the owners of the property. The music video is very simple, it has no narrative or abstract artistic edge, it is just Jonze and his dance crew dancing to Praise You outside a cinema in California as passers by observe with curious expressions and the cinema employees get aggravated by their public disturbance. In my opinion the fact this music video has no motive or goal, it has no high-concept drama or special effects is what gives the video its charm and entertainment. The video only cost $800, which was used to purchase the boombox used and food for the dancers. This goes to show that a successful video can be made on an extremely low budget, as long as the idea is simple and straightforward to achieve and has some originality and charm behind it. Despite it's low budget, the video was hugely successful and won 3 awards at the MTV Music Video Awards in 1999 including; Breakthrough Video, Best Direction and Best Choreography.

Another example of Spike Jonze's work is Daft Punk's Da Funk music video. This video's narrative focuses on a dog/man named Charles who is wondering around New York City at night blasting the song from a boombox which he carries on his shoulders. The video follows his journey through the night as he is laughed at, rejected and ridiculed by member of the public. He then bumps into an old friend and is supposed to go to her house but when he sees the sign on the bus saying 'No Radios' he panics and does not get on the bus. Although the video has many potential interpretations and possible representations such as alienation, city life, isolation, the band have  stated that there is no message behind the story. 
Da Funk is a dance track and because it has no lyrics it may be hard for the audience to create an image of the music and therefore cannot connect with it, however Jonze has created meaning for the audience through the use of dialogue and narrative in the music video. The video is very unique as we rarely see a human dog used as the protagonist of any media text and because of this the audience is likely to remember the band/song. Therefore Jonze has successfully done his job of promoting the band. 

Jonze also uses a lot of intertextuality in his work, for example Buddy Holly by Weezer and Sabotage by Beastie Boys. Although narrative is a major element of his work, he sometimes challenges conventions of genre through postmodernism and parody. For example in Flashing Lights by Kanye West although there is the use of voyeurism with the half naked women, she is not objectified and she holds the real power and dominance in this video as she opens the boot of a car to reveal Kanye tied up who she then kills. Similarly in Drop by The Parcyde, the video appears to be going forward when actually is it going backwards. This rejection of meta-narrative and rejection to follow a normal pattern shows Spike Jonze's videos are postmodern and have conventions of their own. 

Jonze's work is inspirational to me as it is creative and daring, and often the main premises of his videos are very simple but made/performed with unique style and individuality. He also displays that a massive budget and a conventional narrative is not necessarily required to make an interesting piece that promotes and sells the artist.

Mood Board

Lip Sync Activity

In order to understand how lip syncing works we had to film ourselves singing a minutes worth of a song, then take out the audio and put in the music track. I did mine using iMovie on my home mac. Getting the timing as exact as I could took a while and made me realise just how hard but necessary perfect lip syncing is.

Here is me lip syncing to Buddy Holly's song 'Everyday'

Lolly - Artist Profile

Our chosen song is 'Hey Mickey' performed by Lolly. The reason we chose this version of the song rather than the original by Toni Basil is because we thought this would give us the creative freedom to build up Lolly's image, rather than take on Toni Basil's already established one. Lolly, born Anna Kumble in 1978 had a very short-lived music career and during this time released 5 singles and 2 albums. Her most successful records was her cover of 'Hey Mickey' and her cover of 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' by Cyndi Lauper.  She has since gone on to become a TV presenter and perform in a number of pantomimes. She has a very happy and bright image, a very 'pop' look and we plan to play on this as we build up her public persona.

Preliminary Audience Research

In today's lesson we explored the demographics of our population and learnt that audiences are tremendously more complex than simply gender or age. When studying audience and deciding exactly who our target audience is and how to appeal to them, we must consider social-class, race, employment status, background, location, lifestyle and obviously age and gender. The reason demographics are vital in analysing audiences is because what may seem as 2 very similar social groups may actually have complete opposite tastes. For example 2 women who are both in their 40's but one may be a housewife whereas the other could be a successful businesswoman, and due to their different lifestyles, their taste in music is likely differ greatly.

Conducting audience research is key to finding out what appeals to their individual tastes and what they personally think looks and sounds good. In our lesson we each asked each other a series of questions of find out about their music tastes and music consumption habits. My questionnaire looked like this:

Audience Questionnaire
Our project is to make a music video and in order to do so successfully it is vital to understand how different audiences perceive different types of music and music videos. Please take a few moments to complete the questionnaire so we can interpret your opinions to make a good music video!

1) What is your gender?
     Male       Female
2) What is your age range?
     14-16     17-19    20-25    25+
3)What is your occupation?
     Student    Employed    Unemployed
4)Which is your favourite genre of music out of the following:
     Pop   Indie   Rock   Hip-Hop   RnB
5)How often do you watch music television?
     Everyday    1xWeek   Fortnightly   Other (please state)..................
6)If you do watch music channels regularly, which ones do you prefer?
     Smash Hits    Kiss    MTV Rocks    Kerrang   Other (please state).....................
7)In you opinion do you think a music video necessarily needs narrative to make it interesting?
     Yes     No
8)If you have stated no please explain why ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
9)Name some of your favourite music videos
......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Because we only had the opportunity to ask fellow classmates these questions, their opinions were fairly similar, although not everyone likes the same genres of music. In order to broaden the depth of audience research as a group we will have to ask a much wider range of people from different demographics. This can be achieved by asking our parents/teachers, siblings and students in lower years. Doing this will provide my group with qualitative and quantitative data that we can use to guide us when planning the details of our music video.

Album Artwork Analysis

Placebo - 'This Picture' - Goodwin Analysis

'This Picture' by Placebo was released in 2003 and its music video director was Howard Greenhalgh. Howard Greenhalgh has directed numerous videos from a variety of artists and genres, such as Iron Maiden, The Pet Shop Boys, The Sugababes, Puff Daddy and the Spice Girls, as well as Placebo. Placebo's genre is alternative rock/pop punk, their music is not particularly happy or upbeat and consequently their music videos tend to be quite dark and gloomy. Placebo have the image of being fiesty and provocative, especially the lead vocalist and guitarist Brain Molko who is known for his androgynous appearance.

The lyrics of the song is about a relationship involving sadomasochism but it is the female who is abusive and dominant. The "Ashtray Girl" is used to refer to a woman who uses men as "emotional ashtrays". The visuals amplify the lyrics as the audiences sees there is a story about the girl in the picture however it is not explicitly exactly what the narrative is.

The video is in timing with the beat of the music. For example this clip from the beginning of the video shows how the editing cuts on every beat of the drum cymbal:

The videos pace is relatively smooth throughout and doesn't fluctuate a lot throughout the video, however in the middle of the song the timing gets faster which means that the editing gets faster. This clip shows that the camera movement gets fast in the performance part to match the fast pace of the music:

Close ups of the artist creates intimacy between the video and the audience. It also verifies recognition of the star image. The audience is clearly shown Brian Molko's style when we see close ups of his eye makeup and this is recognisable to Placebo's fans as they are already aware of his bisexuality and interest in cross-dressing, and for those who do not know Placebo already, this will grab their attention as it is something different to what they might expect and they then on have this image of the band in their memories.

The camerawork and editing focuses a lot on the band itself, ensuring many close ups of them playing their instruments and performing as this presents them as a talented band. This clips displays this: 

Voyeurism is used to an extent in this video as we see the girl being portrayed as a sexualised object due to her almost being naked and connotations of bondage.

However this has a more sinister impact rather than 'sexy'. Placebo's music videos tend to be quite disturbing and dark and again this motif if shown in this video. Voyeurism is used in a more artistic and symbolic way rather than trying to establish a 'sexy' music video. Additionally, we only see short shots of the girl which doesn't allow the audience enough time to see the woman in full. This teases the audience in a sense and engages them with the video as they want to get another look at this mysterious character. We only eventually see a close up of her face at the very end of the video.

This video is a combination of performance and narrative based. The narrative is fragmented and there is no clear storyline however the audience does realise that the song is about this unhappy woman in the video. The use of performance promotes the band as talented musicians as we see they all can play their instruments.

Brainstorming/Planning

Now everyone's groups are sorted out, and I am very pleased with who I am working with, we have begun to think of as many ideas we can for our piece. Firstly, deciding on a song was surprisingly easy, we all agreed that we absolutely wanted to do a fun and upbeat song, most of this decision came from seeing what was successful the previous year, those who had done faster song's videos tended to be more interesting whereas slow love songs were very tedious. We have selected Lolly's version of Toni Basil's cult classic 'Hey Mickey'.

We have begun to discuss what the overall narrative of the video will be, but also how we can break it up and edit it so that it is a fast paced music video, not a film. Our main idea is for the overall concept to be the star of the video (Lolly) to be a fun, charismatic and silly girl, who is getting ready for a school disco. Throughout this we cut to shots of her going on various dates in different settings such as a park, a diner, a boat trip etc... with different boys, however to her, they are all Mickey. We thought that the obvious story for the video would be to have one Mickey and show his relationship with the star. We thought this would be predictable and a bit unimaginative, therefore we decided that rather than have her heartbroken and cheated on by Mickey, we would have her as the 'player' and have her be playing all these different boy, who to her are all the same (all Mickey). This would all build up to a dance scene at the disco where she would be seen dancing with all the Mickeys and then have to choose who she wanted to be with, and then pick none of them and walk off leaving them all behind.

Throughout this, we would have shots of her performing this song and her band members would be played by all the Mickeys.

We want the video to ultimately be fun and enjoyable for the audience.

-So far our planning is going well and everyone in the group seems to be on the same wavelength which is a positive start!