Indie // Weird things happen...
//Indie-- Weird Things Happen...//
After exploring potential song choices, and deciding on our target genre ( indie /rock), we felt that we should firstly explore our genre and the popular and well known bands/songs within our genre, to start to obtain an idea of the conventions their videos follow.
We started by creating a mind map, branching out all of the most well known bands for our genre:
After looking at the results of our mind map, we started looking at existing videos for the artists, and started to look for common elements in the videos.
A large element we came across, was the idea of using a narrative that is either complex, or very obscure and confusing/weird, but at the same time with deeper meaning hinted at, and often pop culture references that not everyone will get. This is a large element of the indie genre ; the idea of being able to understand something normal fans can't, makes the audience part of a more exclusive group, almost similar to the "hipster" phenomenon, which revolved around "i liked it before it was famous", making them part of an exclusive group.
An example of a video that conforms to this, is Bastilles Laura Palmer :
the video is so confusing you find yourself having to watch it a couple of times, and even then the true meaning doesn't always come. It also is based on a popular series and film from the 90s "insert title here", which not many audience members will get the reference of , again making these fans part of a exclusive "club" that get the reference.
Screenshot from the "Laura Palmer" music video
we then moved onto looking at other indie bands, and noticed another general theme, was that in the videos, very weird things would be happening, either to the artists, or just in the narrative in general, laura palmer again is a good example, as well as "bad blood". The consensus is that the events are normally very odd and many times unlikely but not always unrealistic. We also looked at "kids" by MGMT which at first glance is a very odd video but again has further meaning behind it and refers to the imagination of kids. We decided to further look into micro elements of these videos, and the other popular artists to further get a better idea of the conventions used inside the micro elements, as separate posts and go further in depth with the analysis.
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