Synaesthesia:

Synaesthesia is the term used to describe the mental images and thoughts that are provoked after hearing certain genres of music. We each have our own perception of how certain genres of music should sound. We also some typical visual conventions for separate genres. For this task, we were assigned with finding certain songs and analysing aspects of the songs, such as:

• Subject Matter
• Vocals (pitch/grain of voice)
• Cultural References
• Narrative

My group and I also had to think and plan certain important aspects of our song. What will the narrative and the performance be like? Who will perform the video? How long is the song? For instance, I believe that the original song was too long (4:30) so if we use my video idea I will trim the song by about 50 seconds, to 3:40 which is a more reasonable length for our video.

The song I have selected is ‘Down to Earth’ by Flight Facilities. Click play on the tab below to listen to the original song.

I have selected this song because it has a very positive feeling to it and there is no particular theme in the song (which is conventional to the electronic genre). I feel that the lack of a specific theme is beneficial to myself as it allows me to produce a more unique and disjunctive narrative rather than be restricted to certain conventions and narratives.

In order to create a product which will match the predetermined ideas related to a music video from the electronic genre, we will need to make our video very energetic and have a positive feeling. We will do this by implementing a fast editing technique. Colour is also heavily used in the electronic genre, so we will incorporate a variety of bright and light colours in our media texts.

My Initial Ideas:

Narrative:

My idea for a music video is to have a boy who is playing football with his friends. The opening sequence is the subject with his team playing a match. At first he performs poorly and looses the respect of his teammates, this will be shown through shots of him failing to score or giving away the ball. But he works hard and trains, then eventually he has a chance to redeem himself with another game. In the middle of the video he will be doing exercises to improve himself. During the closing sequence of the video, he has improved enough to play well with his team, and is praised by his team after he has finished performing well. This will be shown with shots of the subject scoring goals and using skill to get past players. The overall aim is to create a feel-good and positive video.

Performance:

A young man with an electronic keyboard, laptop and speakers. The idea being that he is creating the song as he’s performing it. For instance, shots of him typing on his laptop and playing the keyboard. As the chorus approaches he begins dancing and enjoying himself. This will be rapidly inter-cut with the narrative to create a fast paced feeling to the video and produce an energetic feeling.

Mood-board:

One of the first steps in planning our music videos was to think of our own individual video ideas. As a way of presenting our ideas, we created a mood-board displaying images that would represent our music video and the narrative. We then had to present our mood-board and explain our idea to each other. The presentation of our mood-boards was helpful as we could see other people’s ideas and identify potential partners who had similar video ideas.

My Mood-board for Down to Earth:

Click the image below to view my mood-board.

 What I have learnt:

I feel as if the synaesthesia and mood-board have been very beneficial to furthering my knowledge of music video production and have also inspired several ideas for my video.