D.B: Responding to our Track

Bondax - Gold (Snakehips remix)

What is the genre of the track?

• The genre of this track is Electronic Dance, determined by the set of percussive electronic music used throughout the track. This genre of music is primarily used in nightclubs and other occasions involving dancing. It is generally used and created by DJs who often, like the track we have chosen, add these electronic effects to already existing tracks. Gold – Bondax was remixed by Snakehips and contains looping, added sound effects and is arranged in a rhythmic pattern that is unique to his style, this is how I determined that Electronic Dance was the genre of this track.

Snakehips' Oliver and James

Do you think this track represents a High or Lo Fi video?

• Snakehips are dance DJ’s called Oliver Lee and James Carter. They are a pair of London producers in their mid-20s, who release their music on their own label, Hoffman West, taken from a fictional character one of them invented to get into clubs for free. Due to the fact that they are not signed to any major conglomerate record label and have only been around since 2012 a Lo Fi video would be most appropriate.

What videos would be comparable?

• These videos are comparable in terms of the budget that i predict they were given:

• With Glass Animals - Hazey there are many dancers inside an abandoned house with little special effects.

The dancers in this music video are incredible and we understand that we do not ave professional dancers that can do moves like these but we can use suggestive cutting and close up shots like the one above to make sure they still look beautiful on shit in stead of awkward.

This shot is incredibly urban and would be perfect for our video if we could emulate it. It looks serene and would be easy for us to find a back drop that would be similar. It would be perfect to show the main character contemplating whilst maintaining the urban theme,

• Bombay Bicycle club has animations drawn onto stills which would be a simple effect that we could imitate

We want to use animations in our video and we understand that this would be incredibly time consuming through both learning how to do it on AfterEffects as well as actually creating it. Instead i have taken inspiration form this video and the individual shots that we should draw on to create a great effect without being too difficult. For example, above there are squiggles coming out from the drummer creating synaesthesia between music and visuals. The shot is fairly long and the animation does not change. We could draw on one of the shots and then make it fairly long so we would not have to create a moving animation.

• We really like the idea of using a green screen because it would mean that we could put any design onto the background and it would be cheap and easy for us to do. Wolf Alice - Bros particularly inspired me with this idea.

The background changes colour as the band members dance in front of the green screen. This is almost exactly how we envisioned the green screen work we would create. It would be simple and it looks really effective and perfect for a dance track. We could have colours that create synaesthesia, preferably a multitude of colours - mostly bright- in order to simulate to happy mood of the song. 

We could also use the technique of white-out. The person standing in front of a coloured screen would wear a top that was a similar colour to it and then we could remove the colour during editing to create an ominous and stylistic effect.

Give an outline for a treatment:

• I think that the video should be about someone who is in a relationship with another person who is deeply depressed. The main character would then feel like they are the problem because they can't seem to make their partner happier. This would make the lyric 'She's the diamond, I'm the rough' because he begins to feel like he is the person who is making his partner unhappy rather than her just simply being depressed. This narrative would be portrayed in a subtle and stylistic way that would include interpretive dance, symbolism and motifs.
• Performance? Narrative? Conceptual?

The video would be a slight mix of all 3. It would mainly be a narrative video but when using the gold paint and glitter it would become conceptual and there would be a slight performance aspect to it when he mimed the lyrics.

• The relationship between the lyrics and visuals would be illustrative apart from when the lyrics sing 'Gold is not enough' because there will be gold visuals such as paint and glitter. This will be in order to create a storyline and meaning to the video that will encourage repeatability because it will need to be continuously consumed to work out the meaning. 
• The relationship between the music and visuals would be amplified because most of the cuts will be in time to the beat of the music but it may disrupt the narrative if it cut on every single beat because our track is very fast.

Identify suitable locations for filming particular sequences of the video.

• Inside a house because this is the most common setting for a relationship however he would be trying to make her happy so would take her to lots of different locations.
• A roof - him trying to show her the beauty and spectacles of the world.
• Sunsets in picturesque fields.
• Graffitied tunnels

Consider grain of voice. What characters will you use?

• The singer of our track is a young male and therefore we were thinking of using a guy as the main character because at some points during the video we want him to mime the lyrics and it would make a lot more sense. We wouldn't have any other main characters and the only other people we plan to have in the video would be female backing dancers.

What pro-filmic and post-production special effects would be suitable?

• We want to use elaborate and beautiful make-up for the backing dancers. For example a bold gold line across their eyes used as a way of concealing their identity slightly and make them seem less like individuals. This will be used as a technique so that they don't retract the audiences' attention from the main characters.

  

  The make-up was inspired by this still from SBTRKT - Pharaohs

• Because the song is called gold we want to include a few gold aspects in the video. For example gold face paint or gold glitter. It will add fun to the video seeing as the narrative is fairly dark and the track is dance so it will need to feel slightly up-beat.
• In post-production I have already talked about how we want to use animations created on AfterEffects and a green screen.
• We would also like to increase the saturation of the shots at the beginning and gradually the saturation would decrease throughout the video as the main character becomes more and more depressed.