Music Video Director Case Study

Jonas Akerlund Basic Bio:
• Born in 1965 -56 years old
• He has a son called Elvis and a daughter called Mini.
• Between 1983-1984 he was a drummer in a Swedish band called Bathory.
• He is a director known for his pornographic music videos such as Telephone – Lady Gaga featuring Beyonce and Hold it against me by Britney Spears as well as other controversy themes such as drug use and violence.


Music Video Work
• He has directed a lot of Madonna’s work. Ray of Light won a Grammy award for best music video short form. Other videos he directed were American Life and Celebration.
• This attracted some of his more recent work like Britney Spears- Hold it against me. This video shows her with little clothing, it’s very fast paced and includes loads of different effects. The video is set in space and very surreal. The video provides us with lots of colour.
• Lady Gaga featuring Beyonce “Telephone” also uses lots of colour and the women are dressed in almost nothing.
• David Guetta featuring Rihanna –includes scenes of space at the beginning and includes lots of colour.
• Christina Aguilera-Beautiful is a big contrast to the music videos above. This video includes very dull colour and disturbing scenes such as a anorexic girl and a girl getting beaten up.


Other work
• His short film ‘Spun’ made it into the Guinness book of records for having over 5000 different edits.
• “Try” another short film about a couple of drug addicts who are homeless received a review saying “It was a brilliant film but incredibly depressing to watch.”
• Commercials include – Dior “the iconic lipstick” and other designers such as D&G featuring attractive well known women like Kate Moss.


Accounts of their style
He likes to use a lot of colour in his videos which make the video really fun and interesting to watch. It is also noticed that he uses split screen and uses writing to introduce his video.
He also enjoys using lots of effects which also contributes to making his music videos fun and wacky. None of the videos I watched other than the Christina Aguilera video, Beautiful were normal.

Iconic music video from the pre 1990s...

This song is by Bros, and its called When will i be famous which was show in 1988. I thought this music video was interesting by the way they have used an narrative style into there video in which being the band walking about the streets not really sure what they are doing though. Yet this is often intercutting with the performance of the video, with the camera shots and angle mostly shown on the equipment being used such as the drums and guitar to especially show off the skills that they have. Also, close ups of the main singer which supports the idea of Goodwins theory, which suggests that the band arent only there to advertise and promote there song, but to promote there whole image as a band aswell...and also helps if they are good looking, so if there music isnt too good, most girls will be distracted with their good looks!

Another point to support Goodwins theory is the contraditory of the lyrics and visuals, as the lyrics are mostly about a girl/person asking when they will be famous, yet they think she shouldnt keep mentioning that. But in the video it doesnt really involve anyone that seems to want to be famous...

I think some of effects that they have used in this video we could include in our potential music video with the different colouring, and the style that the video is in with the narrative yet the perfomance going on aswell.

Our Media Evaluation

I hope you enjoy our evaluation. Due to our time limit, I decided to take the evaluation with me and finish it off at home. -hence more of me speaking!
Our final piece will be up on the blog soon!

ps...

A couple of pictures to show you who we are!

DONE

Our final media product has finally been completed. Overall I'm satisfied with our final piece and am pleased at how it finally came together. Our evaluation is also complete now ready to be marked. The evaluation and our final media piece will be posted on our blog soon. I hope you enjoy looking at them.

Approaching Deadline...

SO.
As our deadline approaches for our evaluation we are suprisingly on track and I am certain that by 15:50 tomorrow we will have both our film and our evaluation on the digi stick ready to be marked!!

We have tried to use as many different ideas, angles and shots as possible to keep our evaluation from looking completely run of the mill. At the moment we have used alot of cardboard signs and sped up white board writing :)

Lets hope for AMAZING marks as we are very proud of our final cut of the thriller opening and we have put super lots of work into filming and editing.

:)

Evaluation...

So far in the evaluation process, we have managed to get doen question 1, 3, 4, 5. By doing this we have done audience feedback, and we wrote the conventions on cardboard to hold up by us and other people. In the technology question, we said that we struggled with Continuity, Final cut Express, Editing and music, and so far me and hannah have spoken about them and how we have learnt from it.

Next lesson we are hoping to have got the question about our preliminary task and had emilys and daves input towards the technology question. We hope to have done all the questions in time for our deadline.

bye x