Music Video - Song Candidates

Before choosing song candidates to create our music video to, we first made up some guidelines on the style and type of songs that we wanted. To do this a number of things had to be decided:

• Performance or narrative based
• Genres
• Artists
• Song choices

At first our group had wanted to create a narrative-based video. However, after looking into different existing narrative and performance based videos we decided that it would be a better idea to make a performance video. Reasons for this include:

1. Performers were easier to obtain than good actors
2. Most songs lend themselves more to performance based videos
3. Easier to avoid cliche and bad end products
4. Less locations would be necessary to obtain

Once we chose this we moved on to music genres. The consensus in our group was that we should choose a genre from which a performance video would lend itself most to. Most rock style music videos that exist at the moment are semi or solely performance based, clearly showing in each video the band's energy and drive with their music. This genre clearly was a good choice to look into further, and as we did so we started to look at different sub-genres. Alternative rock was an area that sparked our interest as it still lent itself very well to performance style videos, but also had varied sounds and instruments within that weren't typical of normal rock music. We considered this as a good thing because we'd be able to create a unique video that stood out among others. This also, however, will create challenges later on when finding musicians that can play these instruments, but I will talk about these in a later post.

We looked at several artists within the alternative rock genre (and the rock genre for good measure) including Red Hot Chile Peppers, Gorillaz, One Republic, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Jovi, The Verve, Nirvana and the Oasis. Three songs stood out in particular for us from these artists:

1. The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
2. One Republic - Secrets
3. Bon Jovi - It's My Life

All three of these songs fit a performance style video and have their own unique sound using various techniques and instruments that would make for an interesting video.