Journal 12/09/13 - Conventions of indie music videos

1) Live performance
For indie artists/bands a live performance is often present in their music videos normally because it's about the passion of sharing and performing music rather than the fame and success. This is also a simple way to share their talent and portray that they belong in the music industry as it's what they love doing. Live performances is also normally used as a promotional tool for indie artists to make them look 'natural' and give the impression that their voice is the same live as it in the song.

2) Mise-en-scene
The mise-en-scene of a music video plays a huge role in making the video look unique. Indie artists tend to give their videos their own personal appearance and make them look a certain way to reflect their style of music. For most artists they tend to go for a retro look which is normally created through settings or costumes such as clothes from the 60's.

3) Narrative
a narrative is normally present within indie videos to tell a story throughout the video by linking the visuals normally with the lyrics. This is common for indie bands as it makes the video memorable and allows the artist's creativity to by shown especially with the development of new technology allowing more technical videos.







4) Editing
With most indie artists their videos tend to display an old fashioned effect and in order to create this the video relies on the use of editing to add certain effects to change the appearance and mood of the video. Sometimes indie artists will use green screen in their videos to create a completely new set with a smaller budget.






5) Sound
Sound is a key feature in indie videos as artists tend to alter the sound to make the music more interesting and unique. Sometimes indie artists will add forms of diegetic sound at various parts of the song to add to the narrative of the video such as speech. Or they will use an effect on the sound to make it slightly distorted for example during a live performance clip in the video to give it a realistic effect that they are actually singing live.

6) Camera
It is a common convention of music videos to feature close up shots of the artist to create a relationship with the audience and the sell the image of the artist to them. This can also be used to highlight their talented singing or portray their emotions if they are using a narrative style music video. Sometimes indie artists will you more long shots in their video so they have less association with the video as their aim could be to sell the artistic side of their music video and withdraw the focus from them to their music and the video.

now we are aware of the conventions of the indie genre we plan to use them to our advantage to ensure our music video is easily recognizable to our target audience. The main convention my group is going to focus on is having a narrative as our whole video is going to be the story of plasticine models, representing the band, going through a typical day in life performing actions the same as the lyrics. Since we plan on making our music video a stop motion editing is key to our sequence as in order for it to be pieced together perfectly we will need to edit it together flawlessly.