Great News!

Yesterday I recieved a reply from Bently Jones saying that I may use his songs as part of my media project so I can now begin my project straight away during the summer holidays before most other people so thats great.

A second thing that is from the message BJ says it should be okay as its for education purposes, also thank you Bentley for your if you do decide to watch my blog and thank you for taking time out of your day to read and reply to my message.

information regarding music videos

In general music videos carry a lot of the same conventions between them. One example of this is that most music videos show the band singing or playing instruments to the song as though they were performing it right at that point. a second convention that would be used is that the music video would either match (run parallel) with the music or going against (be contrapuntal) with the music/ lyrics of a song. The videos may be used as a way to get across messages that an artist intended to get across through his/her song and felt that a visual medium was also needed. A convention of music videos may also be that dancers may be in the video and specially choreographed dance moves may be used to keep the attention of the viewers.

One general use of the music video is to promote awareness of a certain group/artist and to sell their material and usually whether or not a music video is a success or not is based on whether the CD that the song(s) are played sell well. i.e. if a song sells well because of the music being shown to the public then the video is as a success but if a CD sells badly then many blame the music video as its advertisement was not very affective in getting the public to buy it and so is seen as a failure.

Research

The research that I shall be doing as large and as varied as possible. First of all that I would like to note is that on the Playstation 3 system now there is a service called Vidzone where a large variety of music videos can be streamed onto the system to be viewed and the list is very varied as it contains many different genres of music as well as music and videos from different countries i.e. France, Spain as well as Bollywood videos. It will make good research to compare and contrast how different regions of the world make videos within the same genres. Last thing to add is that a number of asian music videos will also be added as I already have experience with this to a certain degree.

The above is from a Japanese band called Nightmare (ナイトメア) an the song is called The world. The band Nightmare is a 'visual kei' band. Visual kei is a reference to the the style of the band in terms of their looks. A visual kei band is usually some what eccentric in what they wear. This could be seen as a mix between things such as emo, goth, rock etc.

X Japan is a popular band from the days where this style originated as they are regarded as one of the pioneers of the style and are seen as quite big faces in the Japanese music industry as they have sold over 20 million albums. One might say when looking at them that they are comparable to a band such as guns and roses (well that's how I see it anyway).

New project

The new project for media that I will have to do is that of a music video. I haven't been given a specific piece of music yet but I have opted to try and get permission from the artist Bentley Jones for any of the songs on his CD Trans//lation as it is the only CD of his that I own at the moment. In this project things such as the conventions of music videos will be spoken of and videos of how I made the music video will hopefully be up. Fingers crossed that I can get permission from Bentley to use a piece of his music.