In our music video, we purposefully placed the band behind the dancers to make the scene seem like a proper bar, where you would have a band and dancers working together to entertain an audience. A simple concept, really, but little did we know that this was a popular form of setting a scene to connect both musicians and dancers, on a stage, infront of an "imaginary" audience. I knew that it was very common to include the band and the artist together, however this surprised me.
This screenshot from John Newman's "Love Me Again", is very similar to what we had created. Dancers in the foreground, musicians in the background; as if they were dancing for an audience. For a music video of our kind, it seems as if we, and both of these examples, are speaking out to the audience and attempts to fully emmerse them within the performance element. This kind of helps to understand the underlying theme and make the music video more interesting, rather than something where they are sung at but don't really understand what is going on.
However, one convention which we do challenge in our music video is the fact that the artists we have is neither the mad scientist which lip-syncs, nor the dancers, but the musicians. Keith Negus argues that the music video aids an artist in promoting their star image. However, the musicians never get put in the spotlight alone unless they are shown in close-ups, which makes it difficult for the audience to identify who the main focus should be on during the video. In almost every music video, the artist is put into primary focus as the audience can then see who is making the music. In will.i.am's music video "Bang Bang" this is clearly illustrated, as the focus is shifted from the band to the artist and back, however the primal focus always being on the singer(s) rather than the people in the background. In our video, it is quite difficult to see the band at times, and therefore they fade into the background. It is evident that they are the ones making the music, however this is only due to the fact that our song is primarily instrumental and doesn't have a lot of vocals. In a sense, they seem important due to the way the track goes. Most of the audience probably think that the artist shown within the video is the mad scientist (Mike), however this is not the case. We have made our music video in a sense that the audience becomes easily decieveable and therefore challenge the convention of the need of having the artist in the foreground constantly. Is it necessary for the artist or a band to show their face within a music video? Not really. There are a lot of music videos on the market, such as that by Calexico ("Falling from the Sky"), which do not feature the artist in the video, however portray some sort of storyline. I feel that this is what we are attempting to do as well.
One convention, which I think that we challenged by creating our music video, is that the artist typically lip syncs in their own music video. In our music video, Mike is an actor which stands in to fill the role and make the narrative understandable, and pushes him to the front, even though he is technically not part of the band at all.
In music videos such as "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons, the artist is shown lip syncing his own track. The only kind of videos where the artist doesn't sing their own track is in cover videos, usually created by Prosumers. We have challenged this convention by letting someone else do the lip-syncing in the original video, as we felt that it wasn't relevant as to whether he was in the band or not. Our entire band campaign is focused on the organic nature of them anyway, meaning that the band chooses to stay out of the spotlight, and focuses on their music more rather than being recognised by the audience. For our music video it was only relevant to have the connection, and in order to build up the narrative we needed an actor who was capable of embodying the "mad scientist" role who would be transforming the 1920's set to one in the future.
One of the conventions which I am unsure as to whether we challenged or not is that many of the videos with an underlying 1920's (or similar) theme is usually colourgraded into black & white or made into a cartoon to aid with the vintage aesthetic of the video. Alongside will.i.am's "Bang Bang", music videos such as "Hit that Jive" by Gramatik, or "Libella Swing" by Parov Stelar, which are all examples of music videos revolving around the past, are put into a black and white or sepia tone, alongside a slight grain to add to the effect of an old video. Essentially, this is something that we were going to do as well, however when colourgrading we found that our video lost a lot of it's essence and we enjoyed the red hues, which we then heightened instead. In the end we disregarded the black and white entirely, and made the video more colourful overall. The set and the costumes as well as the instruments themselves allow for the audience to be transported into the past instead of creating another black and white video. Therefore we challenge a common concept of the need of black and white to be utilised to create a nostalgic theme successfully.Another thing which I found quite conventional for music videos which attempt to portray the past is that they are represented in a cartoon-y style.
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Overall, our music video generally tends to adhere to stereotypes when thinking about the technical aspects, however when it comes to the stylistic elements it becomes heavily unconventional, being like almost none of the other music videos which attempt to represent the past. Despite this, I feel that it is still very successful and doesn't have to be like all the others to appeal to a certain audience or be a successful video of it's genre.
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