Original Video + Lyrics

This is the original video of "Dance to the beat of my drum" By Nicola Roberts which I have decided to promote with my own version. I have decided to post this on my blog, to help with my audience feedback on my polls.

Lyrics

Once upon a time I pressed rewind

Two left feet, I had no beat

Baby in the corner learning quick

Keep up, keep up, keep up

Graduation take a bow

See how strong you've made me now

Two steppin' all over me, then cha cha cha cha

I'm in!
Oohh don't it make your heart go wow

Oohh how I've turned this whole thing round

[Chorus]
L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

Leader of the pack get on that track

Swing your back and don't look back

Captain attending, too much to handle

Too hot, the pan goes pop

Blow your trumpet like you do
I put on my marchin' boots

I know we can work it out

Let's step into the groove
Oohh don't it make your heart go wow

Oohh how I've turned this whole thing round

[Chorus]
L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

[Chorus]
L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

L.O.V.E

Dance to the beat of my drum

Dance to the beat of my drum

Critical Analysis

At the beginning of my first year I had no skills in Photoshop or a vast knowledge with computers and I found it very difficult to adapt to new technologies (such as Photoshop, blogger, YouTube, Wikipedia etc..) and new terminologies (such as connote, denote, mise-en-scene etc..) . Also I found it hard to keep up as I was very disorganised and as my organisation has improved I have found that I have picked up a lot of new skills, that have slowly been discovered and improved with a lot of effort and hard work over the past year. I have found that I am now a lot more confident with using these new technologies, and that my work looks a lot more professional than when I had first started, and I will carry on succeeding with more knowledge of this subject.
Our preliminary tasks were to make a perfume advert and the front cover, contents page and draft of a double page spread of a college magazine. Whilst working on my college magazine I had never used Photoshop, an SLR camera or Blogger. I started to use an SLR camera and I had to adapt to the new settings of the camera, when I was able to use the basic settings of the camera, and keep the models in focus, I learnt that it took better and clearer images. I found Photoshop very difficult to adapt to but now my skills have improved drastically and I am now able to add different layers, resize images, blur the edges of photos, add different textures and fonts on top of images, these new found skills helped me with my final product of a new music magazine.
The difference between my college magazine front cover and contents page, and my final product of a music magazine front cover, contents page, and double spread, was that in the college magazine I had only used basic fonts, whereas in my music magazine, I had used fonts from “dafont.com”, and photoshoped them in, using the crop, layer and blur tools. In the college magazine I had tried to stick to the original conventions of a basic college magazine, by using a masthead, a barcode, a medium close up shot of a student, subtitles, a date and a price, placed in the bottom corner of the page. My main objective, was to try to keep to Wyke's colour scheme, using purples and greens, which I did stick to throughout the front cover and contents page, because I hadn’t acquired the skills of using “dafont.com” or being able to use Photoshop that well, I used a plain font, but tried to make it stand out with bright colours and a black border around the font. I chose to use a black border so that the colour of the font would stand out and wouldn’t get lost within the background. I didn’t stick to the continuity of this, and didn’t apply this effect to the sub-headings in the bottom left-hand corner, therefore you can hardly see what they say, whereas in my music magazine I have a dark background and I have tried to use either red or white writing throughout to stick to the continuity and make my magazine look more professional. In both magazines I have tried to use interesting sub-headings, to grab the audience’s attention, but I think that I didn’t achieve this objective with the first magazine, as much as I did with the music magazine. With both magazines, I tried to find an appropriate image to agree with the conventions of each magazine, but I found that I achieved this more with my preliminary task of my college magazine, as the main image was of the brand new building "Oak" at the front of the college, which is also the main entrance into the college with a midshot of two students smiling, a smile connotes happiness and therefore makes the audience feel that this college is very inviting and friendly. The reason I chose to take the picture here, was because it has the logo of the college on the side of the building.  The image of the two students I took, was not originally in front of the building, it was in the green room, and I have flipped and photoshoped it onto the main image, with a lot of practise, this gave me confidence to try more things on Photoshop. You can tell that this is a college magazine, because of the main image and the masthead, whereas on my music magazine if it wasn’t for the subheadings and images of festivals, you would not be able to tell that it was a music magazine, because I have not related any of my images towards music.
Over all I think that my past experience in my preliminary task helped me feel more confident with making my music magazine, I just feel that I needed a lot more research on music magazines, i.e. - using LIIAR analysis on other music magazines, and reading through more magazines, to get used to the conventions of a typical music magazine, using Google and Wikipedia more to research these conventions, and also use YouTube to watch professional artists music videos, to see their style of clothing and how they deliver themselves across, therefore helping myself in delivering better images.

History of Music Videos essay

History of music videos

The first type of music videos started in the 1940’s, as there were few TVs in the 1920-30’s, therefore no promotion. Music videos were a lot different than they are today; they were called promotional films. They were short films starring the artist, artists never sang live- they used to lip sync all videos, examples of these artists were Elvis Presley (Jail House Rock), The Beatles, Bill Haley (Rock around the clock), Bob Dylan and others.

In 1967, Bob Dylan’s documentary included his version of a music video, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. Since then Music videos have changed, as the video was in black and white, it has a very slow zoom, and then the camera is hand held as it is very shaky and there is no tripod to keep it steady. Dylan is stood holding card with words from the lyrics of his song, but because of the change in technology since then, as he could have been listening to a cassette tape whilst turning the cards but because a cassette tape doesn’t play back at the exact speed as the original track that has been placed on the top of his video as he is very out of time when turning the cards, there is no lip syncing it is just music placed on top of the video.

When the music industry started in the 1960’s, artists never wrote their own songs, they were controlled by their managers.  On the 1^st of January 1964 the BBC broadcasted Top of the Pops (TOTP) and it was broadcast weekly from 1 January 1964 to 30 July 2006. Each weekly programme consisted of performances from some of that week's best-selling popular music artists, with a rundown of that week's singles chart.  In the late 1970’s Top of the Pops began playing music videos, and were able to have the band in the studio, i.e.- more promotion. Initially acts performing on the show mimed to their previously released record, but in July 1966, after a lot of discussions with the Musicians' Union, miming/lip syncing had been banned. A few weeks after this rule had been put in place, after singing live, a lot of the acts seemed to have been lacking their original energy from what had been previously recorded, and as artists didn’t seem to have the talent as what had been previously thought, a compromise was reached whereby artists where allowed to have a specially designed backing track as long as all the artists on the track were present in the studio.

The first proper music video was in 1974 this was, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, this video took £4500 to make, and took under four hours to film. Some artists had made video clips to accompany their songs, including Queen themselves; for example, "Keep Yourself Alive", "Seven Seas Of Rhye", "Killer Queen" and "Liar". It was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" the single that it became regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases, especially as they became so popular and well known, as queens single “Bohemian Rhapsody” was number one in the chart for nine weeks. These videos could then be shown on television shows, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, therefore the artists would not have to appear in person. The Top of the Pops Orchestra, led by Johnny Pearson improved the tracks when necessary. This set-up continued until 1980, when a prolonged Musicians' Union strike resulted in the dropping of the live orchestra altogether and the use of pre-recorded tracks only. This accounts for a number of acts who never appeared on the show due to their unwillingness to perform like this.

MTV (Music Television) started in 1981 in America which started a worldwide phenomenon, the first video that aired on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles.  MTV was aired for 24 hours a day, and as there were very few music videos made, therefore videos were needed to be quickly produced. Consequently, music videos became very important for artists, as they were being judged not just on their vocal abilities, but also on their performance and appearance. MTV has been highly debated, as a lot of people saw this as the beginning of a new era in music whereas others considered it to mark the end of music as a talent, as artists are more focused and appreciated on their appearance instead of their vocal abilities. Now on channels like MTV, it’s almost like a rarity to see music videos as a lot of these channels are now full with reality shows.

Now in modern day music videos have changed radically since they were first created because of the change in technology. Throughout the majority of the 1980’s most music videos stuck to the “original” conventions of old-style performance but, occasionally branching out into different types of special effects to help promote their videos more than others, as special effects were very new, even if they are a lot different as they are today.  The 90s brought out more videos with a specific narrative for example "Smells like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. In this video, we are given the impression of torment and chaos and this is being demonstrated, with dark lighting, fire, a lot of people, which also makes people feel intimidated. This was made possible by new music video effects and styles which have been altered over time to make videos connote the artist’s appearance and impressions. Because a lot of videos such as “Smells like Teen Spirit”, other artists felt that they were able to put a political spin on their image. Entering the 21^st century the music industry and music videos are still changing even up until today. There are still a few videos that are trying to cling on to the old style of music videos, but the majority use a whole lot of different techniques and special effects, I feel that if and older generation audience were to view artists’ music videos such as Katy Perry or Lady GaGa, and try to compare them with original old style artists such as Elvis Presley or Bill Haley, they would feel that it has probably changed, as a lot of these new videos are a lot more provocative.