Auteur Theory

As significant as the performers and artists, are the directors who bring to life a concept the artist has imagined for their music video, often incorporating elements of their own that ultimately create some of their own artistic signatures. The amount of creative freedom awarded to a director is often up to the artist or company that hires them. While some artist leave the music video completely up to the directors, others often want a certain narrative to be portrayed. While directors pander to the artist's style, they retain their own creative vision as well.

The director whose work I've chosen to analyse is Emily Kai Bock, a Canadian film maker who is strongly inspired by legendary directors such as, Michael Gondry, Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer.

I will be analysing her style and stylistic signatures in the context of her music videos:

Impressionist

All her music videos predominantly aim to capture a certain mood and feeling. All of them seem dreamlike due to the way they're edited (include a lot of slow motion) and their colour grading. The consumer is enraptured in an almost trance like state watching these.

Type

Her music videos are mostly a standard mix of narrative and performances. The narratives are often abstract. The performances predominantly consist of lip-syncing to the lyrics and some un-choreographed dancing.

Colour Schemes and Gradient

Bock utilises a muted colour palette for her music video, often sticking to either mostly cool colours or mostly warm colours. Her colour gradient itself is muted, giving her music videos a subtle faded effect. 'Afterlife' is perhaps the only one which makes use of a mixture of both.

Camera Work

Her camera work is cinematic. She makes use of a lot of wide shots and camera pans, making the videos seem high end and almost movie like. She, however, also peppers in a few close ups.

Lighting

Bock also seems to favour low key lighting, preferring to cast shadows on the artists' face, accentuating features.

Editing

Bock makes use of continuity editing, shifting scenes and introducing slow motion effect in accordance with the tempo of the songs.

Comments

Second Cut (Final Music Video)

Once the first cut was done all the footage was laid out in the required order, the second cut was for adding all the effects and animations to make the video more visually pleasing. While shooting we relied on the sunlight as our main source of lighting and since the shoot took place over three shooting days with varying levels of light on certain scenes, this lead to some unpleasing discoloration to certain sections of the footage where the camera picked up odd muddy tones instead of the vibrant primary colours. In this first half of colour correction Mahnoor basically tried to match all the footage to a equal level of brightness and correct all the discoloration and try to match them on intensity and saturation of colour as well. In the image above you can see her correcting the dull greenish hues on the original video to a the required soft vibrant yellow. She wanted to match all the colours so when she would further apply filters there would be no miss match. After basi...

Creative Critical Reflection

Now that we've wrapped up our advanced portfolio its time to reflect on our project through the focus of certain questions. Q.1 How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do the represent social groups or issues? The genre me and my team picked for our final products was indie pop. Indie as a genre in general breaks tonnes of conventions and creates new ones mostly due to the freedom allotted to the artists. Rather than having set conventions the indie scene works in trends which emerge with time, which is what we've based certain aspects of our products off and what we've gone against to showcase some of our own artistic ability. In a country like Pakistan, which is mostly over run with remastered coke studio versions of old songs, releasing an indie pop album and music video is unconventional as it is. Similarly, due to the creative freedom the genre allows us, we were able to represent social issues which we may not have been able to if we were to be...

Website (Final)

Though we all gave her input and went over various options and versions together, Mahum was the one who actually constructed the website. She created it from scratch, starting off with a blank template. The team looked at existing websites of renowned artist, in order to find out the codes and conventions existing in websites (Website Analysis). Following this, Mahum looked at different templates on wix to get a better idea of the options available on the platform. Understanding the Website Editor was a little tricky for her but she managed to do it. For the menu page she did not want to add alot of things, inspired by the minimalist styles some indie websites are using.She wanted to keep it simple. She added a menu bar, customized it to her liking in accordance to the colour scheme that we had decided and above that added our Logo designed by Mahnoor. On the top right she added a sign in button customized with our decided colour scheme and on th...

Eman's Media Portfolio

Search This Blog