Goodbye to Russell Brand's The Trews

Say what you like about Russell Brand. He's probably already said it anyway. The Trews has frequently been a little too silly for my linking, but it's also been spot-on more often than not. I have wondered how long Brand would continue with it and sadly, today seems to be the last day for now.

I really hope he does come back stronger than ever. Trew be continued!

Fight Club Video Essay

The other day I posted an essay answer to the question of whether Fight Club is a film about power and control or liberation. As I haven't done any video editing in a long time, I thought I'd throw together this video version of the essay. It's just me speaking the essay with lovely pictures and gifs to look at while you watch.

I quite enjoyed making this little video though I am a bit worried about my utterly monotonous voice. I thought this was me sounding excited! I tried to include video clips but couldn't find a way to download video clips from YouTube anymore. People must rip clips from films to put in their videos on YouTube but unfortunately I have no idea how to do this either. As usual my lack of technical skills are completely limiting what I can do. This video could have been so much more exciting with frequent clips from the film to throw in.

While browsing around for images to put to my words, I found a huge range of pictures. There is so much cool Fight Club fan art out there and I love the gifs people have made. I hope they don't mind me using such things on my video!



I'm thinking I make some more of these though I might see if this one actually gets any views first as I guess there is not much point in making more if no one is going to see them. What I really need to find out is how to get clips from film to put in and then I could break up the monotony of my voice over with something far more exciting!

I'd be very interested to know what anyone who reads this or watches the video thinks. If anyone has some technical know how and could point me in the direction of a site that allows me to download YouTube videos to avi. files, I would also be incredibly grateful.

Purposes of music videos: Blink 182 and All the Small Things

After last week looking at why music videos exist, my students will next be looking at examples and explaining the purposes of music videos with references to examples. In order to help them I have written a short piece on Blink 182's music video for All the Small Things.

The music video for pop punk band Blink 182’s All the Small Things features the three piece group lip synching to the song, playing their instruments in front of adoring fans and engaging in a range of activities that parody the conventions of boy band music videos.

It is an excellent example of a music video that promotes an artist and their single for a number of reasons. Firstly and most blatantly, the video features the words Blink 182 and their logo in many places; on the side of a private jet, on many of the fans’ signs and even on a band member’s arm. This keeps the artists name in viewers’ heads as they watch. It is also an example of Blink 182 making themselves stand out from their competition. As they are a pop-punk band, they have to compete for single and album sales with other pop artists that include boy bands who were popular at the time such as Backstreet Boys and N-Sync. They do this by parodying conventions of boy band videos such as having water poured on themselves while posing for the camera, having a private jet in the background and performing choreographed dances in matching white suits.

The video would also help promotion by being positioned in the right place so that the target audience can find it. This means it could go on rock channels such as Kerrang and Scuzz but also on the pop channels like MTV to ensure it reaches a wider audience than just rock and punk fans.  The video would also be able to be viewed on various internet sites such as YouTube, thus extending the number of outlets the song can be heard in, and is also available on the Blink 182 DVD called The Urethra Chronicles. By selling this DVD, the record company and artist can all make more income from the music video. The adverts before the video on YouTube will also raise a small amount of income.

The music video is also a part of the record label and artist’s strategy for creating a popular and recognizable image for the band. Blink 182 are known to be a playful, silly and immature pop punk band that will appeal to teenage boys as they sing about troubles with girls, being immature and having fun. They will appeal to teenage girls as they are fresh faced, good looking guys who sing occasionally about love and relationships but usually in a silly, sweet and harmless manner. This video helps Blink 182 appear as funny and light-hearted and not afraid to mock their own image as well as that of their competition. While mocking other boy bands, it also establishes Blink 182 as a band with a major label behind them that has the money to invest in quite a high budget video that features lots of extras, different locations and even a private jet in it. It also ensures that the audience can see the band playing their instruments and looking like a typical rock band.

Their other videos including M&M’s, Dammit, The Rock Show and What’s My Age Again? The latter two feature the band running naked through the streets and literally throwing away the record company's music video budget. All confirm the band’s image as fun loving, silly and immature; everything the target audience of Blink 182 and pop punk would want them to be after hearing their songs. Watch the videos below:

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Why do music videos exist?

Here is another post for my BTEC Media students as I am starting a new unit with them on Tuesday called Music Video Production. The first assignment is to explain the purposes of music videos. Here's a post to help them get started:

Without music videos, what would we watch while listening to music? Arguably we don’t need to watch anything at all. Music is for our audio pleasure not visual pleasure. But music is also a performance and from the very beginnings of humans making music, there would have been something to watch as we listened. We can’t all go to gigs every day and experience live music with an artist performing in front of us and similarly artists can’t just depend on live gigs for income either so they record their music and hope to sell it in the form of CD’s, vinyl and increasingly digital MP3 downloads.

In order to sell their music, artists need to promote it. They can do this through touring and interviews and typical forms of advertising such as posters and adverts in magazines but they can also get their music to be heard through a huge range of outlets by the use of a music video. Traditionally music would have been heard live but then with the invention of the radio and vinyl, recorded music could be listened to by music fans almost whenever they wanted. 

 

With the introduction of television, there was another outlet for music to be heard. However not all artists could play live on television all the time so the music video was invented so that recorded music could still be played on television but the audience would also have something to watch. Shows like Top of the Pops popularised the use of the music video and nowadays there are hundreds of music channels across the world, some even exclusively playing music videos. Then video and DVD came along and artists started selling collections of their music videos alongside their albums.

Most recently the internet has become the most common outlet for music to be heard and music videos are therefore available on a huge range of websites, most notably YouTube. Artists and songwriters and the record labels that represent them can all even make some money out of advertising revenue when people stream these videos online. Read more about how YouTube views can make songwriters money here. The risk is that people can also illegally download these videos and songs and therefore the producers lose potential revenue from single sales.

So a music video is a promotional tool that allows the artist and record label to extend the number of outlets that the song can be bought and heard in. It gives the consumer the choice to see something while they hear the song and can also make the people behind the song some money. Music videos can be dirt cheap but also very costly so advertising revenue is not the only way that they can generate income. As mentioned previously, they can also be put onto videos and DVD’s and sold to make more money but increasingly artists can get sponsorship and product placement deals. Music videos can be filled with conspicuous products and this can make the artist and/or record label a fortune. If the artists use the product, for instance drives the car, makes a call on the phone, drinks the drink or wears the watch, then they are likely to be paid even more than if the product is simply featured somewhere in the background. Apparently, Britney Spears made half a million dollars from the product placement in her music video for Hold It Against Me.

 

Sometimes a music video is tied in to a film release. This can be mutually beneficial for both the artist, record label and the film and its production company. The song features somewhere in the film and parts of the film are featured in the music video. This means every time someone sees the film, they will think of the song (and may even purchase it) and every time someone sees the music video, they will think of the film (and hopefully go and see it or purchase it). This can make more money for everyone involved and is often used for synergy purposes. This is when a company such as Sony that produces both films and music uses the different parts of the business to promote each other. Men in Black for example is a Sony film and the soundtrack featuring Will Smith’s title song is also released by Sony.

 

All this boils down to promotion and increasing sales. While some music videos are far more arty and do not appear to actually promote the artist in traditional ways, most music videos are simpler marketing tools. Major labels put lots of money into producing music videos that will help create an image of the artist that will appeal to the target audience. Independent labels might be more likely to produce more experimental videos for their artists and some artists, often not even signed to a record label, will even self-produce their own music videos just to give themselves a bigger presence on the internet.

Promotion is vital to increase sales and there can be a number of different goals to it. The aim might be to introduce and establish a new product (in this case the artist and their single is the product), it might be to better position the product in the right marketplace to ensure the target audience will be alerted to it and it might also be to retaliate or make the product stand out from its competition.

In a future post I will explore a number of specific examples of music videos in more detail in order to explain further why they exist.

Links:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/13/youtube-songwriters-payment-copyrights

http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/the-rolling-stone-blog/britney-spears-made-500000-from-product-placement-in-hold-it-against-me-video.html

Batman Listens to Mortal Kombat

I hope that by now many of you will have seen this already but just in case anyone missed it, I felt it my duty to share the news with you that Batman listens to 90s techno when flying around Gotham City. The video below also reveals that Bane is obsessed with diet- hardly surprising considering the epic man boobs.

If you grow weary of Bane banging on about the dietary requirements of his henchman then skip forward to 2.25 through the video to see how Batman rolls when flying through the night sky. Even Bane can't believe it. It's also interesting to see that Bane is a big Mortal Kombat fan himself. Check out the fight scene where he declares Batman to be 'Toastie'!

I don't know who these Auralnauts are that made this parody video but I look forward to seeing what they come up with next!



Did this make you LOL? Or even ROTFL?

Life in a Day online for FREE! Get involved.

Life in a Day, the surprisingly brilliant documentary completely cut together from Youtube users' footage, has just been made available completely free to watch (legally) online.  Directed by Kevin Macdonald, who I recently heard talk at the London Film Festival (about the blurring boundaries of fact and fiction), it is a strangely moving piece of cinema history.  Please check out my full review here.  Depending on your view, this must have been an editor's dream job or nightmare.  Sorting through 4500 hours of footage to create something intelligent, coherent and unforgettable.  It is quite an achievement.  a day in the life of the planet Earth and it's wierd and wonderful residents.

But I'm not just here to encourage you to watch this great film for absolutely nothing.  I'm also here to encourage you to get involved with the (sort of) sequel, Britain in a Day.  Ewan McGregor, Ridley Scott and more are all here to encourage you to get involved.  Film your day, Saturday 12th November 2011, make it personal and upload it to Youtube to be a part of an amazing social experiment and hopefully a big part of British cinema history.  Go here for more information.  If you own a camera and ever wanted a shot at making or being in a movie, this is your goddamn chance!

For now, get inspired by watching Life in a Day below:

A Decade of Documentary Excellence

Writing my latest article for Media Magazine about the documentaries that have criticised America for so many reasons over the last decade got me thinking about how great these non-fiction films are. The likes of Michael Moore, Alex Gibney, Morgan Spurlock and Charles Ferguson are giving docs a reputable name with many cinema-goers.

Box-office records have been broken, awards have been won (including Cannes' Palme D'Or), critics have drooled and audiences have cued up like never before to see docs on the big screen.

And it's not just muckraking. Yes, many docs have laid into America's foreign policy, illegal and immoral war-mongering, inhumane treatment of prisoners, obesity problems, economic crisis and alleged covering up of the truth of what happened on 9/11, but there have been so many other docs that also deserve a mention for raising issues, confronting the powerful and sometimes just being bloody entertaining.

Michael Moore may have brought non-fiction film to the masses with Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11, but other filmmakers are working hard to catch some of that box office appeal. Morgan Spurlock with his gimmicky, silly docs for one.





But most interesting is the direction of Kevin Macdonald. With Touching the Void using vivid reconstructions of a mountain top disaster accompanied by interviews with the real-life stars of the story, a documentary became a gripping thriller in the hands of a skilled filmmaker. Following this with a couple of less interesting and significantly less thrilling fiction films (The Last King of Scotland and State of Play), he then returned with this year's brilliant doc Life in a Day. Taking thousands of hours of footage uploaded by ordinary people to You Tube and turning it into something beautiful, mesmerising, depressing, uplifting and life-affirming is one of the greatest achievements in cinema history. (See my review on this blog back in June 2011)





In the Media Magazine article I look at a range of documentaries that have attacked America from Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) to Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010) but a couple of other docs not mentioned due to their subject matter are Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009) and Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001).



Collapse is a terrifying must-see, particularly for anyone who enjoys conspiracy theories or just thinks that civilisation is always on the brink of collapsing. It might be just one guy sitting in a chair but by the end I was quaking in my boots and could not stop thinking about this doc for weeks after.



Waking Life is not generally considered a documentary but, and I quote, 'Waking Life is more a documentary than a work of fiction, because most of the speakers play themselves and talk about their real views' (http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/w/wakinglife4.htm). This amazing film's use of animation (or more specifically rotoscoping) and its ideas about 'identity, dreams, consciousness, and free will' are mind-boggling and great fun to watch.



So if you don't like documentaries or you think they're boring, next time you start mindlessly watching a piece of reality TV crapola, try finding a classic doc to watch instead. Here's my top 10 in chronological order:

1. Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970)
2. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001)
3. Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002)
4. Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald, 2003)
5. Farenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)
6. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (Robert Greenwald, 2004)
7. Glastonbury (Julien Temple, 2006)
   
8. Taxi to the Darkside (Alex Gibney, 2007)
9. Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009)
10. Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)

Seek them out, engage your brain, laugh, cry, be outraged and never forget! What have I missed? Is there any doc missing from this list that I need to see or include? If you read this, don't be scared to let me know....

Review of 'Life in a Day' (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)

Synopsis: A day in the life of the planet Earth and the human race; this is the 24^th of July, 2010 as recorded by anyone with a video camera.

Democracy. Power to the people. Digital technology. Video cameras, the internet, editing software and music. Life in a Day is a unique, ambitious experiment. And boy does it work! A call went out from director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) and executive producer Ridley Scott to the YouTube community. Capture your life in a day. Anyone with a video camera and access to the internet could enter and submit a video of what was happening in their life on the 24^th July 2010. Cameras were even sent out to far-flung places to allow people who do not have access to these filmmaking tools to contribute to the film. So is this a documentary, an experimental film or a social action media production? Well it’s all three and more. It’s also a narrativised piece of thrilling, enjoyable and inspirational cinema that will leave audiences crying, smiling and feeling blessed for their own lives and loved ones.

The narrative is not forced; the film begins in the early hours of the morning and takes the audience through the day to midnight. Characters occasionally reappear throughout the day and others come and go in the blink of an eye. The ordinary, everyday lives of the people of the planet are given an epic quality by the capturing of the full moon and many time lapse shots of changing landscapes and in one brief sequence the beauty of the northern lights. People rise early; people have stayed up all night drinking and one man howls and barks at the moon. The film then has many montages, people taking a morning leak, eating breakfast, taking their first steps out of bed in the morning. The soundtrack adds to the feel of the ordinary becoming extraordinary and the editing emphasizes the universal ways that people go about their days. It might sound boring but it’s not. The pace is swift with moments of humour, sadness and plentiful details that will strike a chord with many an audience member.

People play themselves and I say ‘play themselves’ because there are moments when the camera set ups draw attention to the constructedness of the scenarios. For example the montage of people waking up in the morning is rather let down by the people who have clearly set up the camera on the tripod and then pretended to wake up in front of it. Much more ‘real’ feeling are the moments of people filming their partners as they sleep and capturing true moments of awakening. There is also a notable emphasis on children which seems to tie in to a major theme of the film. Children are filmed by their parents (from sonograms to babies to a young man’s first shave) and in fact this is one of the first moments of the film when it settles on a character for more than a brief moment. The pride and love these parents feel shines through with the following of their children and cannot fail to put a smile on your face.

The task of editing 4500 hours down to just over 90 minutes must have been a monumental task and it’s a wonder that the film has been released in just under a year from the date that all the filming was done and uploaded. The editor, Joe Walker and the researchers must have sifted through countless hours of crap and should be applauded for their selections and for managing to also keep the film to a concise 90 minutes. I imagine there are also numerous moments that were fought over and eventually ended up unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor.

Life in a Day is thought-provoking and life-affirming. Though no message is forced down the audiences throat, there are many ideas presented here that should be thought about and discussed for hours after watching. The global origins of the footage, the various languages spoken, the colours, sounds and sights of people of varying cultures brought together in one film emphasizes the similarities between the people of the planet. The footage of rituals, customs, and celebrations from around the world show that love and loss are universal, that family is universally important to all cultures. Juxtaposing an Afghan photographer with an American soldier’s partner or a grinning Lamborghini owner with a shoe shining child suggests a political agenda but again, no message is forced. The viewer decides what to make of what they are seeing. There are some horrific moments; the tragic outcome of the German Love Parade, the killing of a cow, but these are contextualized in a positive film that does not dwell on the sadness of life but focuses more on the joy.

At just over 90 minutes the film does not outstay its welcome and I dare to suggest that a sequel would be worthwhile in a few years time. Life in a Day is a time capsule and a treasure trove of the ordinary. Through skilful editing, beautiful and emotive music and the desire for the people of this planet to share themselves honestly and openly with others, Life in a Day becomes more than a film, more than a documentary and more than an experiment. The ordinary becomes extraordinary and the film becomes a gift, a statement and a powerful dedication to love, family and unity. Watch it and embrace it.