Experimenting With Photoshop

As we have decided on using 'Something Good Can Work' for the song of our music video. I decided to play around with Adobe Photoshop in today's lesson to try and gain some knowledge of the programme which would hopefully help us later on in our project. After an hour of experimenting, this is what I produced for a rough album cover...

Two Door Cinema Club - Something Good Can Work

 

Two Door Cinema Club are an upcoming band in the Indie genre. One of their music videos to their most well known song 'Something Good Can Work' illustrates the band perfectly for the start of their music career. The video completes the look of the indie genre by it being basic and setting the bands image. Some indie videos use narrative layers, however this is not needed in this video due to the effect they are looking for. Its a simple yet effective video by the band all being in the same room saturated in black and white leaving a plain coloured square behind them. The square changes colour regularly with cuts in time to the music to help produce pace to the music video along with the beat of the song. The video is fully based around performance as the indie genre is always trying to promote the artist as much as possible. This is done by lots of shots of them either in the narrative, or of them performing the song synced with the video to show themselves.

There are many close up shots of the lead singer at the front of the band, along with frequent mid shots of both the bass and guitar players. As the song is called 'Something Good Can Work' the relationship between both the video and the song could be saying that even though they are a young band who are plain and simple, if their fans like their music they are able to be successful, therefore they haven't gone too over the top with their video. There isn't so much a relationship between the music and the visuals, other than the common fast pace cuts along with the beats of the song with the jump cuts of the band moving around the room. The video is all synced up correctly showing all three band members playing their instruments in time with the music. As the pace of the song changes, the music influences the speed of the cutting by them speeding up with the chorus and slowing down in each verse. As the lead singer is often right up close to the camera, this could be sexually implied due to him trying to show himself off with the rest of the band members behind him, however, I don't think this is intentional due to it being quite subtle. The record company are looking to to sell the track by promoting the band through the use of performance and looks due the whole video being focused on them instead of using a concept. The video links in with many of their other ones such as 'I Can Talk' and the other video to the same song 'Something Good Can Work' all of the videos follow the same pattern being mainly based around performance with other layers of the band themselves acting in certain circumstances. There are no intertextual references within the video as there isn't a narrative layer to the piece. The song I think is about a relationship with a girl that is going wrong, and they are trying to make it work to show anything is possible. The video doesn't represent this due to it being 100% performance based.

In conclusion to the overall video, the band have achieved what they set out to do with the song. The video creates style to the band and sets a great image for them in the indie genre. The main points such as the performance and black and white saturation all links in with other bands such as ‘The Kooks’ and ‘Arctic Monkeys’. The video could be improved by including some more layers to it such as a narrative and concept to make it a bit more interesting, however I think due to the band being new and upcoming, it illustrates what they have set out to do perfectly to start their music career.

Initial Research

Luke and myself want to find an artist/band which will be good to use for the music video we are going to be producing. We don't want the band to be too well known as they will already have many music videos promoting themselves. Last week we got set an essay for our first piece of research which helped us a lot into who we are planning on choosing. I researched 'Something Good Can Work' by Two Door Cinema Club, as this video is basic but effective. After thoroughly going through the video, I found many different techniques which we could use when producing our video to make it as good as possible. The black and white saturate with a plain colour background we both thought worked really well with the band and the song, therefore this might be an idea which could be included within our video. 

We now know that Two Door Cinema Club are the band we are going to use for our video.

Who I am..

Hi I'm Jamie, I am in year 13 continuing the second year of my A-levels in Media Studies, Product Design and AGCE ICT. Throughout my blog I will be uploading posts commenting on the production process working towards a final piece of complete coursework on a music video, which will be submitted at the end of the year. I enjoyed Media a great deal at A/S working with Flicka Films to produce 'Black Out', and I'm aiming for a high grade in my A2 to hopefully achieve an A at the end of the year in both my coursework and exam. 


For my coursework I have decided to work with Luke Longman. We are currently deciding on a name for the record label and undertaking research which will help us decide on a band which will be suitable to use for this years project.