Idea 3 Webpage

I have made a PowerPoint presentation full of images which I find suitable or inspiring for the creation of a website relating to my third idea.

Idea 3 webpage de elenae81

Idea 2 Webpage

For the webpage of the artist behind the song "Chameleon", I've been looking through the sites of other neo-psychedelic artists in the industry with similar values to the ones I picture I'd give to my invented artist: the struggle for innovation, the love for his own music, the interest in art and graphic design, among others. 

It would be amazingly interesting to come up with something similar to this idea of webpage I've got here, with music playing and different sounds getting activated as we navigate the menu. There would be synergy between the webpage and the digipack, also highly graphic as I pictured it.

Take a look at the website of Animal Collective:

Idea 1 Webpage

I've created what would be a rough idea of the webpagefor my first idea. Obviously, I still haven't discussed many details about our made-up artist or changed the name of the original singer, Calcutta. Everything is in a basic stage but pointing towards the right direction. 

I have used images similar to those from the video and digipack as to mantain synergy among the products. Incluiding pictures of Italy struck me as a good idea taking into account how much the artist loves his country. However, when we have the face of our singer, I would add it to the page and modernise it a bit because I am thinking of doing a younger, more tuned version of Calcutta, who does not have any social media or web page to begin with.

So far, I have only created a sample, which means it has just three blocks: presentation, bio and track download.

Here's a video capturing the webpage:

Idea 3 Digipack

This digipack is slightly different as a concept because, even though the band is organic, they take advantage in their condition of young, attractive females to attract a wider audience. Scanners will give more importance to the usage of pictures of themselves to make an impact.

For instance, the cover of the digipack would be a black and white close-up of the face of the main singer, who I picture to be a skinny brunette young woman with an unusual face. Here are some examples of this classic formula of CDs with the face of the singer in the cover:

Adding to how attractive these singers may be, this would be Scanners first release, which means that they want to be easily recognisable among new fans and give them a face to praise. This is the sort of looks that I would associate with the lead singer of the band, though in the cover she would be styled and edited with strong chiroscuro contrasts similar to those of the covers seen above.

In the other two sections of the outside of the CD, I'd stretch a black and shite picture of the singer ijn front and the rest of the band (another four girls as I've said in my other post) behind her, sitting in tombstones. They would all be dressed in suits as in the video, with serious expressions in their faces rather than suggestive. This is a run-of-the-mill, simpler version of my idea:

Inside, I would play more with the stills of objects and locations of the video by themselves. For instance, these empty cinema seats seem convincing to me as they are both comforming to the aesthetic of the band and interesting to take a look at:

Idea 2 Digipack

For the second idea, I feel like something graphic for the cover would be the best choice. The artist is independent and alternative, born in the Netherlands and far from the maintream of the American scene. The colours must be striking and varied, to match up with the psychedelic style of the music. However, I picture him as quite minimal in taste and would simplify the drawings to a naïve representation of reality. These would include, clearly, a chameleon, but also the masks of the video and the outlines and some locations perhaps.

Jacco Gardner is a highly experimental artist, constantly evolving. That's why I'd like these drawings to be quick and without much thought to them, linking them back to the subconcious which seems to be an underlying theme in his music. Automated, continuous lines, with colour pencils or such, could work. Eventually, a Photoshopped version could be developed very successfully. 

I'd then include a black and white photoshoot of the artist and the band and dancers in their masks, with just the whiteness visible, creating an other-worldly perspective. They would create shapes around the singer, giving a threatening impression on the onlookers. The last picture, where the disk is placed, would be in colour of the whole troupe without masks in a natural way, a behind-the-scenes kind of pic.

Everything in the album as to be decisive and categorical, giving a strong impact and conveying that the artist is very sure of what he is doing, with an impeccable and professional resonance in all the pictures and drawings, which are clearly naïve on purpose rather than by mistake.

Idea 1 Digipack

Thinking of how the digipack for my first idea would look like, I've figured out I would like it to be very visual like the video, with stills nature or shadows reflected upon a sunbathed wall. It has to transmit the influence of the Mediterranean on the artist.

                    

                      

As he is an organic musician, I would not give his personal appearance too much importance. I'd include a photograph of him in a small square in the back next to the tracks. However, both the cover and the interior of the digipack would be filled with faded colours, recurrent images which suggest warmth and melancholy. As I am saying, I think it would be beautiful to play with light and shadow, and I found a collage of an artist who wraps blank bodies with hands. I believe something similar would be very effective inside, as the song keeps going on about a girl he apparently cannot reach.

Another artist paints lightly above nature, and I think that, as I'd expect the singer to be a proud Italian who undeniably loves his country, I would alter in a simolar way a picture of the coast or the province of Lazio, where he is originally from. 

The loneliness he expresses in the song could be translated too by including a picture similar to this, an aerial view full of people who stand by themselves, with massive shadows projecting in the empty pavement around them.

Of course, I have to narrow all these ideas down, but I think the aesthetic is similar throughout my examples and could work very well with the image of Calcutta. I took a picture of my own which sums up all my choices and seems very suggestive to me, perhaps it could work:

Music Video: Idea 3

My third potential idea is to make a video for the song "In My Dreams" by Scanners, a rock band from London formed in 2004 from which little is known of. I see potential because the tune is catchy and the female voice special. I can also see a narrative unveiling with the lyrics as a starting point.

               

The song is abouth dreams, an alternative to the reality we are living in and love in the form of a lost lover who is presumably dead. The point of view is quite pessimistic, though the beat is empowering and the song is very special overall, it has a very wrapping sound.

I'd picture a brunette singer, very pale, straight hair, tall. With her, an all-female band dressed in suits. 

The narrative would evolve around the singer, who is reminiscing her lover. I would begin with a sequence of quick cuts in which we see her in different spots of the city (cafés, an apartment, a park, a garage, a tunnel, etc), first accompanied by the boyfriend and then by herself. This has to be very subtle, not falling in any romantic clichés at any moment. The more realistic and gruesome the sequence is, with both positive and negative moments rather than idealising the relationship, the better.

A key image in the music video would be that of an audience in the cinema watching themselves in the screen, an initial idea which could eventually evolve into the image of the girl with lover watching a movie in which she is alone in the cinema.

Another key moment I've thought about which really fits with the aesthetic of the music is using a cementery as a location, in which the dead become dancers and join the band. As a transition, I'd add a white room in which doors appear and disappear, changing place.

Finally, towards the end of the video I would drop another representative moment which would be a close-up of the singer/girlfriend cooking biscuits with the shape of the lover, proceeding to a shot of her teeth dissecting the biscuits while lip syncing.

Lip Sync Exercise

Last week of school, we carried out a simple exercise to prepare us for the challenge of the music videos 2017. It served the purpose to become familiar with the technique of lip syncing and also have a bit of fun with friends. There were three sets (a fireplace with a Beatles poster, a light wall with a dolly set in front, and a sofa with a green screen. They were useful for a better time management between the groups of performers, who were helped by a floor manager and a play back organiser in charge of the timing.

After the filming, we were arranged into smaller groups to edit the footage. I worked with my old partners from the opening sequence exercise, Ellis and Emma, and we were taught two main ways of editing a lip syc:

• Sync up the shots with the snare which played before the song began so that the music and video are in time, arranging the footage easily by just cutting out the bits that are not selected.
• Match up the timing from the playback person by using the zoomed in shot of it before the actual filming and the sound track with the same numbers.

 In our group, we found it easier and quicker to use the snare sounds to guide us, as it is a more intuitive way than having to search for the numbers. We chose a variety of videos which we found creative enough from a number of performers and each one of us took turns to edit it as we all want to get experience for the future. We refused to cut each shot in the beat of the song because we believed it would get too boring and repetitive, so we explored various other ways of cutting for a while and the result turned out pretty well:

Music Video: Idea 2

My second idea for a music video is based on the song "Chamaleon" by Jacco Gardner. Gardner is a Dutch neo-Psychedelic musician who sings and plays various instruments. This song from the album "Cabinet of Curiosities" (2013), is all about transformation and loss of identity. The original video is in black and white and features a mysterious man consistently wearing a white hat as the protagonist. A succession of images from city life, forest, and a girl in the beach overlap and fade together.

The chorus consists of a key line which matches the name of the song: "I'm a chameleon I'm changing every day". I feel drawn towards this song because of the connotations of the lyrics but mainly I am atrracted by the overall vibe, the style and instruments used.

I'm thinking of playing with surfaces and over-lapping in my own video as well, but focusing the fading on the main character, who is a melancholic-looking man preferrably pale to match the coldness of the video and of the reptile to which the song refers. I would also add textures and give more importance to natural landscapes and patterns than city scenes, though I wouldn't discard some shots of empty locations to increase the sense of solitude that the song transmits. In the music video for "Chamaleon", I would give much more importance to the performer than to the musicians, who would appear occasionally in exotic backgrounds, or freed from their instruments merging with other actors.

I imagine a dancing sequence based on contortionism, where dancers would be dressed in black and freed from their identity with the choice of white masks. The main actor would also be wearing masks occasionally, but his would be more ornamented and varied as the video progresses. 

I am considering androgenous masks or mixing male and female, and soem sort of mascarade party or carnival could be included at some point. I would encourage at least the traces of it. For instance, the remains of a festival near a park, with messed up costumes haging in the branch of a tree, comes to mind.

Having a genuine chamaleon crawling in the ground would be an extra, especially because I have the intention of including a formal dinner in the end in which the protagonist sits along with all the rest of the performers, them wearing white masks and him with his bare face, and the chamaleon would make an appearance in the table causing chaos among the guests but not the host. They would eventually remove their masks and storm out of the room, while the main actor would stay sitting in semi-total darkness staring at a passing fly as the final image.

My version has a tint of lunacy that I want to transmit with bright colours and a trippy style throughout. Ideally, I would have a competently edited video in which the sky in some filmed sequences turns into a sheer psychedelic fantasy, and the post-production would play the most important role consequently.

Music Video: Idea 1

My first idea is for an indie song called Gaetano, by alternative Italian singer Calcutta- give it a listen. As the song is not mainstream at all, a fact that he holds with pride, there is no such thing as a music video for it and it took me a while to find my favourite version of the song, the one included in the demo version of the album "Maintream Più". In the song, we hear a depressed man talking about his lost love and his life so far, remembering details of his teenage years and expressing his desire of something new to happen (he even fantasises with drawing a swastika in the centre of Bologna just in order to cause a quarrel).

The artist was born in Latina, inside the Lazio province. He is fairly known in Italy but few know him outside. He is a private person who does not usually give interviews. His major success was with this album, Mainstream, which enabled him to successfully go on tour around his country. As his main inspirations, he cites other Italian songwriters and Brazilian music, especially the musical-cultural movement known as "tropicalismo", which was born in the early 60s to innovate with a blend of bossa-nova, rock, psychedelia and Portuguese fado. 

These are the lyrics of the Gaetano translated to English:

Gaetano told me that we live in the ghetto but in the meantime I'm thinking that
If I'd lie sleeping on your side of the bed, maybe I would be you
I wanted to have children
Nor many nor less
Nor late nor tomorrow
With winter coming you want to start a compani that makes hand-crafted courtains
And I drew a swastika in the center of Bologna
But it was jus to quarrel
I didn't want to party and I needed a reason
To let you go
An accordion is playing and
Your mother used to say it "do't you go on youporn"
To let you go
To let you go
And I drew a swastika in the center of Bologna
But it was just to quarrel
I didn't want to party and I needed a reason
But I would actually accompany you
Take again another walk with you
But it's difficult if you go fast
Keeping up with you
How do we do?
An accordion is palying
Flames in the rom camp
Your mother used to say it "do't you go on youporn"
An accordion is playing and
Flames in the rom camp
Your mother used to say it "do't you go on youporn"
To let you go
To let you go
And how many times have I thought that the smile in the end is a parenthesis if you see it
I got bored at parties and I got bored at dinners
And how many times have I thought that the smile in the end is a paresis if you see it
I got bored at parties and I got bored at dinners

My idea for the prospective music video is very narrative-based, though we would include shots of our singer as well. I would like to include a variety of images related to the lyrics as I believe they are important and interesting enough both visually and methaforically. Playing with light and shadow would clearly fit with the style of music, so if I included dancers I would dress them in classic ballerina costumes and get them to cast shadows against a wall of, ideally, natural sunlight. 

Looking at some images by photographer Dane Shitagi, I am considering doing the whole video in black and white as one of the options, as part as the obvious halo of nostalgia Gaetano possesses and to link it back to the Italian film directors of the generation of "La Dolce Vita", whom I admire. 

The singer would be a young, Mediterranean looking boy with a tired face and visible eyebags, maybe without having shaven properly. Of course, it would help if he was Italian because of ther difficulty of the lip sync, though with effort everything could be possible no matter what the mother tongue of the actor is. 

In my point of view, some scenes in a swimming pool would be effective. I have pictured them when the singer says "But I would actually accompany you

Take again another walk with you

But it's difficult if you go fast

     Keeping up with you

     How do we do?"

The boy would be swimming in a fairly large swimming pool trying to reach the girl about whom he talks about all along, but just when he is about to catch her, we would cut to an image of the swimming pool completely emptied with a cat strolling on the side. In the most intense scenes of him going after the girl, I would play with lighting and add some floating flowers, possibly switching from nightime to brode daylight when the fantasy is over.

Also to add to the theme of desperation and eventual abandonment, swinging clothes could be considered as a recurrent image.

The lyrics of rebellion can also be reflected with wholes in wire fences or broken glass (riot). I think that the emptiness, the breaking of pattern, also conveys solitude.

I believe that a very clever idea to introduce the concept of drawing a swastika just to cause trouble —as I said, the author's idealogy is completely opposite—, could be having a sequence in which the singer draws a normal swastika to later in the video transform it in a comedic way, maybe similar to this visual approach:

The main idea is to make the video very visually appealing and focus the imagery more on inanimate objects than in the performance side.