Our music video was for the song Bacalao by The New Town Centres. This song is an example of the rockabilly genre, and carries many of the conventions of that genre; humorous lyrics, with an upbeat tempo and instrumental sections. We used and adapted certain conventions of a music video; we did this for many reasons. The niche audience of our genre meant that our style did not have to be one that would be easily acceptable for an institution like MTV, and allowed us to be more experimental in our ideas.
The mise-en-scene of our music video was decided on by looking at similar media products; this is shown through the screengrabs of our video compared to that of The Jim Jones Revue, a successful modern band in the same genre. Their video “Rock’n’Roll Psychosis” gave us many ideas for the mise-en-scene of the piece. As in the Jim Jones Revue video, our actors also wear smart attire; this adds to the perception of rockabilly as a societal representation, beginning with the rhythm and blues of southern America
As a convention of a music video, most of the cinematography of the band shots were centred around the instruments being played. This is a common convention of “Performance” music videos, in which the video shows the band playing the song. To this effect we used close-ups of separate instruments, to give the audience a sense of movement and rhythm, while also using long shots of the band to emphasize the themes of camaraderie and the band being a group. However our narrative shots had a different set of conventions; when planning our video we decided to use this opertunity to create an homage to the film Reservoir Dogs (Tarentino: 1992). This vertical intertextual reference would also create a cultural reference for our target audience, who we assumed would have seen the film. our narrative shots were a pastiche of the title sequence of Resevoir Dogs, involving the use of long shots, dolly shots and close ups of heads. We then slowed these down in editing to more accurately represent the opening sequence. This use of editing subverted the common conventions of a music video; instead of speeding the action up through fast-paced cutting and movement shots, we used the editing software to slow frames down.
When editing, we decided to make our video monochrome; we felt that this gave the video a nostalgic quality, and would make the sparse use of colour more complimentary to the overall theme; this is also a continuing theme we used in the entire digipack. This is a convention of modern music videos, and is common throughout many different genres; bands like Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters and Fleet Foxes have all used intertextual references to their album covers in their music videos.
