For our music video, we decided in the end to create a straightforward illustration video as we felt that this would be the best way for us to make our video look professional and realistic. When we were researching for our music, we spent a night browsing through numerous music videos, both old and new, taking bits of inspiration from certain scenes from many videos.
One thing we looked at in detail was the Brit-pop era, with bands such as Blur, Oasis and The Stone Roses influencing our decisions on the styling of our band in the video. In the band, we decided to give the lead singer freedom in what he wanted to wear, as his own personal style is heavily influenced by people such as Damon Albarn, of Blur, Liam Fray, of The Courteneers and Faris Badwin, lead singer of The Horrors. This style also reflected on the band. We decided to change the band halfway through due to the time they could offer us and the fact that we wanted to have people that could play guitar, as we tried to learn from the mistakes of others.
When I looked at inspiration from other music videos for our music video, The Drums - “Let’s Go Surfing” came to mind. We were always keen on filming the video outside, as we feel it fit in with the alternative genre we were looking at and was a bit different than the typical performance video. This then inspired us to shoot the video in night-time which then made us look at other videos both night & day, based in rural landscape. Videos such as Coldplay’s “The Scientist”, Foals “Spanish Sahara” both have outdoor countryside settings but we felt that the shots in these video were too slow for a song like us, due to it being fast paced.
This then led us to look at videos by bands such as The Vaccines and The Maccabees, especially songs off “Colour It In”, as this is more of a faster paced album. We took inspiration from The Horror’s infamous video “Sheena Is A Parasite” as although the mise en scene and storyline is not at all similar to our music video, the fast paced shots work due to the short and snappy length of the song.
We also tried to emulate some dancing shots on a handheld camera, like those seen in The Drums “Lets Go Surfing”, where the band are dancing, with charismatic frontman Jonathon Pierce hogging the limelight, this being replicated by our frontman in our video.
For my digipak, I wanted to create something quite simple and abstract, without it looking bare. When researching and planning my digipak, I looked at a different genre of music to inspire me. One person who had a huge effect on my digipak was Jamie xx and I looked at his releases, “Far Nearer” and “I’m New Here”, with Gil Scott-Heron. I tried to take his idea by using a bold colour, with a slight gradient and a small rectangle. In an ideal world, on the front cover on my digipak I had it alligned so that the rectangle would have been visible on the 3rd panel, with the hole on the front, this replicating Jamie xx. I also looked and took inspiration from other electronic artists such as Totally Enourmous Extinct Dinosaurs and Neon Indian.
The back panel with the song titles and record label information are inspired by SBTRKT’s eponymous album artwork, made by Go De Jong. I found that the simpicity of it helped to fit in with the layout of my digipak.
I tried to abstractly link the music video and digipak together by using colour to represent the video. The green in my digipak front heps to replicate the background of the trees and grass in the video and the splash of bright orange replicated the band, standing out from the darker shade. this was something I thought about during the creative process as I did not want to reference the video heavily, as I was creating a digipak for an album, not a single for the song I did.
For the poster, I again looked at how Jamie xx and the xx had advertised their albums and I tried to emulate something similar. I decided to create a panel which fit with the poster, like jamie, by repeating the bands twitter name, which would again help to market the product as it shows continuity. I feel that both my digipak and poster challenge the stereotypical image of a a midshot of the band and I feel this adds a bit more of an edge to the band.
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