G324 - Considering and Choosing Artist

The next big decision that we had to make before creating our music video was which artist we would like to make a music video for. This was a much easier decision for us to make as neither of us knew many folk artists and therefore our choice was limited. To help us decide which artist we would make a music video for, we looked at their music videos and album artworks to help us to determine which artist's style we must wanted to both adapt and encompass within our own work.

Tracy Chapman

Album Artwork:
Tracy Chapman's album artwork has always appeared very basic, despite their complex construction. The majority of her album covers include images of herself, whilst others focus on elements integral to the album, such as the close up of a sunflower for her "New Beginning" album. This would be easy to reflect within our own work. However, we feel like this could potentially limit  what we could do with the digipak and magazine advert as we feel that our work should reflect the artist's own style.

Music Videos:
Prior to becoming signed to Atlantic Records, Tracy Chapman did not produce music videos for her singles. Instead, she relied upon people uploading footage of her live performances to YouTube. However, upon becoming signed, Tracy Chapman also began to create music videos. Arguably, the record company had a big influence on the videos created due to Chapman's evident change in style.


Tracy Chapman's videos now revolve around a clearly structured narrative which attempts to reflect the meaning behind the song. However, the narrative still remains simple in order to retain Chapman's primary image of a down-to-earth, passionate folk artist. We feel that whilst this style suits Tracy Chapman's image and music, much like the album artwork, we feel like this could be extremely restrictive as we would not like to distance ourselves from the artist's own style.

Frank Turner


Album Artwork:
Frank Turner's album artwork style has changed and developed vastly over time. He initially used basic graphics to promote albums such as Poetry of the Deed and England Keep My Bones before starting to incorporate photographs of himself within the artwork. His album artworks now tend to combine the two and his most recent album, Positive Songs for Negative People, was more focussed on photography and personality than graphics. This would be interesting for us to adopt and adapt as it gives us a lot of freedom when creating our digipak. We would be able to combine photographs of the artist with digitally designed graphics without deviating from Turner's style.

Music Videos:
Frank Tuner's music videos are greatly varied. Some are entirely performance based, others are entirely narrative based, many of them combine the two whilst a few of his less popular songs have been given videos with neither which rather focus on Turner's touring life and the production of the song. This gives us a huge scope for our own video as there is no restriction on video content. Instead, the style of the videos is what makes them evident Turner's. We feel that this style would be easy to adopt which would allow us to successfully create a music video reflective of Frank Turner's own creations.



Mumford & Sons

Album Artwork:
Mumford and Sons' album artwork has always been extremely simplistic. Even their artwork for Babel, with it's busy background has a very basic notion behind it. This reflects their music style and helps to portray their personality. Despite easy to replicate or adapt slightly in our own work, we feel like this style is not interesting enough for us. Despite enjoying their music, we feel that it is important to choose an artist that would enable us to push ourselves in all aspects of the coursework. This includes the creation for our digipak and magazine advert. With such basic concepts in their artwork, we believe that we could not fully showcase our own skills if we were to choose to focus on Mumford & Sons.

Music Videos:
Mumford & Sons's music videos are either built around a strong narrative or entirely performance based. Some of their videos attempt to combine the two, such as the Hopeless Wanderer video below, however these always end up much less successful than their other videos. This would mean that if we were to construct a video reflective of their style, we would have to decide on whether we would rather create an entirely performance based video or a completely narrative based video. We feel that this would open up quite a few possibilities in terms of our music video but would prevent us from being able to intertwine performance with narrative whilst still remaining true to Mumford & Son's style.



Decision:
After completing this research into different artists, we have decided to create a music video for Frank Turner. This is because we feel we would easily be able to both adopt and adapt his style to great effect and feel that we have the most freedom in terms of our ancillary task.

Posted by Olivia Calver