Shatter Me ft Lizzy Hale by Lindsey Stirling

I really like this music  video, especially the wide shot the violinist falling with broken glass as it is very powerful.Furthermore, I like how the images relate well to lyrics. Also the steampunk mise-en-scene gives the video an almost fantastical atmosphere

Genre: Indie Rock

Indie Rock originated from the UK in the 1990's and is a genre of alternative rock. It is very diverse with a variety of sub genres such as indie pop, jangle pop and lo-fi among many others. Indie Rcok was used to describe 'acts the retained an outsider and underground perspective' the term was also used interchangeably with alternative rock.

The term indie rock which comes from the word "independent" depicts the small, low budget lables on which it is release and the 'do-it-yourself' attitude of the bands or artist involved. Aesthetically speaking, indie rock is characterised as have a careful balance of pop accessibility with noise, experimentation with pop music formulae, sensitive lyrics masked by ironic porturing, and concern with 'authenticity' and the description of a simple guy or girl.

"Allmusic" states that indie rock is "varying musical approaches not compatible with mainstream tastes"

The indie rock movment encompasses variety of styles from hard-edged grunge bands through the do-it-yourself experimental bands. Indie rocj is also noted for having many female artists.

Indie Record Labels

An independent record label or indie record label operates without funding from other organisations. Many artists and bands start their musical careers with independent record labels. 

In the UK during the 1950s and 1960s, the major record companies EMI, Philips, and Decca  had so much power that independent labels struggled to become established. Several British producers launched independent labels as outlets for their work including Joe Meek (Triumph), Andrew Oldham (Immediate), and Larry Page. Chrysalis Records, launched by Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, was perhaps the most successful from that era, and continued to expand. Several major rock stars set up their own independent labels - The Beatles with Apple Records, The Rolling Stones with Rolling Stones Records, and Elton John with The Rocket Record Company, but they generally failed as commercial ventures or were swallowed up by the majors.

The punk rock era brought about a turning point for independent labels, the do-it-yourself ethos of the time seeing the emergence of a plethora of independent labels. In the US, independent labels such as Beserkley also found success with artists such as The Modern Lovers. Many of the UK labels ended up signing distribution deals with major labels to remain viable, but others retained their independence and the factor that came to define independent labels was distribution, which had to be independent of the majors for records to be included in the UK Indie Chart, which was first compiled in 1980. The term 'indie' and the chart itself was unrelated to a specific genre of music, and the chart featured a diverse range of music, from punk to reggae, to MOR and mainstream pop, including several hits from the likes of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan on the PWL label. The late 1970s had seen the establishment of independent distribution companies such as Pinnacle and Spartan, giving independent labels an effective means of distribution without involving the majors. The situation improved further with the establishment of 'The Cartel', an association of companies such as Rough Trade Records, Backs Records, and Red Rhino, who helped to take releases from small labels and get them into the shops nationwide.^[4] The 'Indie Chart' became a major source of exposure for artists on indie labels, with the top ten singles regularly aired on the national television show The Chart Show. By the late 1980s, the major labels had identified an opportunity to break new acts via the indie chart, and began setting up subsidiary labels that were financed by the majors but distributed via the independent network, thereby being eligible for the chart. With the major labels effectively pushing the genuine indie labels out of the market, the independent chart became less significant in the early 1990s, with 'alternative' increasingly being used to describe artists, and 'indie' often used to describe a broad range of guitar-based rock and pop. The Offspring's 1994 album Smash is the highest selling independent record of all time. The album was certified six times platinum in the U.S and sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Prelim Complete!

This is our finished preliminary task were we had to copy 30 seconds of a music video. Our group found that editing the lip sync the match with the song was difficult and required a lot of attention to detail to make match nicely. However we thought our end result came out rather well and that we learnt a lot in terms of film and editing such as camera movements and angles.

Prelim: Issues with editing

When uploading our footage onto the mac we found that I movie wouldn't recognise our footage. This has happened before when filming our film openings last year and we had to re-film the parts we couldn't upload. Unfortunately we had no time   to re-film our prelim task this time round and so it it got us a little panicked. We tried uploading the footage on a different mac but it still didn't work, plus a few other groups were having the same difficulties. However, we were then advised to upload the footage on the the desktop and import it all into imovie from there and finally we were able to edit and finished our prelim on time!

Prelim Task: filming

To make the our prelim more like the original music video we paid a lot of attention to the mise-en-scene. We filmed our prelim in a woodland/graveyard next to our school so it would look like we were in a forest like the original music video.

We also put leaves in Nicole's hair and yellow paint on her face so she would look more like the actress in the music video.

Below is a picture of  us and my little sister that acted as the artist after we finished filming. She also wore something similar to the artist in the video (plain white shirt and black jeans). My sister agreed to help us filming due to her availability, however when we talked about using other friends and people it was very difficult to find anyone that was free or would like to help us out, so it will be very unlikely that we will used other people in our own music video later on. 

Prelim Storyboards

This is the story board I drew for out prelim task. I drew more than what we would use for the video incase we wanted to use a different pat of the video than just the first 30 seconds so it would be easier for us.  I found drawing the storyboard quite enjoyable  although it got frustrating at times as I spent a long time pausing the music video only to pause it again only a few seconds later. Without the story board I feel like my group would have been very lost when it came to filming.

Preliminary task

Our preliminary task was to recreate 30 seconds of a music video already in existence. Our groups first choice was 'Playing God' by Paramore as it had a variety of shots and angles that we could pay around and experiment with. The reason why we didn't chose this as our video in the end due to the fact that we found in very difficult to find people available to act in our video. Also we wasn't sure we were able to recreate the mise-en-scene

 


The video we decided to copy in the end was 'Take Shelter' by Years & Years due to the variation of shots and we didn't need as many people to act it out for us as in our group there are only three of us.
We also liked the style and the beat of the song and gave us the opportunity practice editing the lip sync in the video.