Codes and Conventions of Dubstep/Drum & Bass

Drum & Bass is a type of electronic dance music which originated in London in the 1990s. The genre originally began as an off-shoot of the early 90s rave scene but over the years has gained more fans and morphed into a genre in its own right. Typical characteristics of drum & bass include heavy bass & sub-bass lines which can be physically felt through large and powerful sound systems because of the low range of frequencies. The backbeats form a canvas on which producers can layer tracks to appeal to virtually any taste, making drum & bass very popular in today's music scene. The genre is widely promoted through use of the internet (Youtube, blogs) and radio but gains less exposure on TV. Saying this, TV exposure is growing and drum n bass continues to gain popularity in mainstream music. Pendulum's 2005 album 'Hold Your Colour' is the biggest-selling drum and bass album of all time.
Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music which originated in London in the late 1990s. The differences between Dubstep and Drum & Bass are that unlike the fast breakbeats of Drum & Bass, Dubstep has a 2step rythm and puts more emphasis on 'dark' basslines as well as wobble bass and popular bass drops. Dubstep is a lot slower then Drum & Bass.

Codes and Conventions of a Music Video

Lyrics

Nero's - Promises Lyrics

You got my so wild,

How can I ever deny,

you got me so high,

so high I can not feel the fire,

And you keep tellin' me,

Telling me that you'll be sweet,

And you'll never want to leave my side,

As long as I don't break the...

Promises, and they still feel o' so wasted on myself (4x)

You got me so wild,

Why should I be so suprised?

You got me so high,

Don't you see it in my eyes?

And you keep tellin' me,

Telling me that you'll be sweet,

And you'll never want to leave my side,

As long as I don't break these...

Promises, and they still feel o' so wasted on myself (4x)

They are so wasted on myself (12x)

Promises, and they still feel o' so wasted on myself (4x)

Analysis of Nero - Promises

Inspirations/ Influences

Devlin - London City

This video of 'London City' by Devlin has become a influence to us on deciding where to locate our music video.

For us, a lot of the shots of London in this music video are easy to access and therefore could play a part in inspiring our own shots. For example, a shot that we really like is just a simple shot of a street lamp next to the river thames with the river flowing in the background.

We thought that this shot was really effective to the video as it displayed a sense of time throughout the video as the video is about partying through the night. This shot would work effectivly in our music video as our initial ideas include a couple running through London trying to get to eachother so portraying  a sense of time would work really well.




Another shot that we really liked was the establishing shot of Big Ben from a low angle under the street lamps. This shot is inspirational because is establishes where the video is based and sets of the theme. In our initial ideas we discussed having Big Ben as our establishing shot so after watching this video it has set off our decision as we know it works really well.


As a group we also had the initial idea of speeding and slowing down some of our shots of London. This video displays a good amount of sped up shots of cars, rivers and people. Therefore this video has had a big influence on our music video when it comes to camera shots, location and editing.


Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends

This video has influenced us due to the first bit mainly. For our video we want a conversation before the music. Our idea was to have a white screen with the boy and girl split on two different screens. However, we may not have the equipment to do the split screen so we may have to have a scene like this at the beginging but more serious.

Work Schedule

Mood Board

The mood board displayed above expresses the location, scenery, emotion and style that will be included in our music video. As you can tell the red bus, London eye, bridge and Piccadilly circus show that we plan to film in London. The indie clothing is something we would like to include in our music video and the homeless man represents someone we'd like to use to hold up the lyrics. The Black Swan make-up is something we would like to use for the miming. We liked the idea of black and white to make the girl seam more abstract. The heart represents the theme of love running through the music video as the boy and girl will try and find each other.

What Is A Music Video?

For our A2 coursework we have chosen to make a music video. A music video is literally a filmed version of a song. A typical video will include images of the artist performing the song and/or clips interpreting the lyrics. Videos are mostly used on music channels (MTV, Kerrang, Q, etc.) when they are seen on the television. This gives the audience something to look at when listening to the song, in turn making the tune more memorable and promoting the artist and their music thus improving their chances of selling more records.

There are different music video characteristics for different genres, for instance there are more likely to be clips of live stage performances in a video for a Rock song than for a Dubstep one.
In these instances, there are expectations from the record company for the director to include a lot of close up shots of the lead singers/artists as this is what the audience wants and expects.

There are sometimes intertextual references in music videos, where there are references to other videos/films or TV texts. This is clearly recognisable in all of Plan B's videos for his singles from his album 'The Defamation of Strickland Banks'. The album follows the fictional story of Plan B's alter-ego Strickland Banks as he finds fame as a soul singer (Love Goes Down, Writings On The Wall, Stay Too Long) but then loses everything when he's accused of and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit (She Said, Welcome To Hell, Prayin', etc.). The story is played out naturalistically in the music videos from the album, and so they all link in with eachother. The mise en scene is kept the same in all the videos as well as the lighting, which gives the viewer a sense of continuity even though the videos were all filmed at different times. The same actresses are also used to play Strickland's girlfriend (Vicky McClure) and his obsessive one night stand (Kaya Scodelario) which makes the album seem more like a story than just a collection of songs.

Intertextual links are also often present when songs are used as soundtracks to films. Bryan Adams' song 'Everything I Do (I Do It For You)' features on the soundtrack of 'Robin Hood Prince of Thieves' (1991) and the link is very obvious in the video. There are clips of Adams and his band playing live music in the woods, which symbolises Sherwood Forest, and there are also many clips from the Film played in the Music Video as well. Other examples of this are 'End Credits' by Chase and Status which features in Harry Brown (2009) and 'New Divide' by Linkin Park in Transformers (2007).

Permission e-mail

It is very important that we ask for permission to use a song because ourselves and the school could get sued for copyright infringement and that is illegal. Also it is polite to write an email or a letter to the Record Label and shows respect for the song and also for the Artist and the Label.

Evaluation of AS Blog

This image is from http://www.wordle.net/. This website allows you to copy your URL from your blog and it highlights the words that you used frequently in a thematic word cloud.

This 'wordle' is copied from our year 12 blog. Obviously the words that have been highlighted do not show a great deal of technical media language. This therefore is one of our weaknesses from year 12. For example, 'Likes' isn't a word that you would associate with media along with 'Shop'. However, words such as 'Thrill', 'Thrillers' and 'Thriller' are defiantly words that were good as at the time we were producing a thriller. This therefore was a strength. Words that we wish were highlighted more in 'wordle' are 'audience', 'mise en scene', 'editing', 'camera shots' etc.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

For our year 12 blog we felt that the following things went right...

• Organisation
• Worked really hard
• Good balance between writing and pictures
• Good use of PowerPoint
• Creative
• All done an equal amount of work
• Good use of pictures and images
• Use of videos
• Added our own posts

Print screens of things we were proud of according to the OCR requirement.

WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN IMPROVED

• Language
• Terminology
• Could have been more visual
• Pictures needed more explanation
• Could have made the essay writing more simple

Print screens of stuff that we could have improved on.

We had numerous amount of opportunities that helped us with our thriller. These consist of social networking sites such as 'Facebook', 'Twitter' and 'MySpace'. However we only used Facebook to promote our thriller as we discovered that the majority of people at the time were using Facebook. By doing this we got numerous amount of likes on the link and a lot of views on the You Tube video which brings us to our other opportunity, You Tube. This helped a great deal with promoting our thriller and watching clips of other thrillers to help with our influences.

There were also a numerous amount of threats that we had to be aware of when it came to our thriller. These things consisted of the weather. It was winter at the time so it was raining a lot which made it difficult to film as Amy, the protagonist found it quite hard to act in the conditions. However, as it was a thriller we wanted the weather to be quite dull and actually we found one shot where the raindrop landed on screen which was really effective as it gave a 'thrilling' effect and also as we used a river the rain drops looked really good on the river so we actually just had a shot of the river and the rain drops.

Threats we have to look out for in Year 13...

• The weather: it's winter, do we want sun?
• Location: will it be too busy?
• Lighting: will the night light be too dark?
• Timing: will we get our blog posts and editing all done in time?
• Cast: will all the cast be committed on the day?
• Team work: will we work well as a team?

Opportunities we will have in Year 13...

• Social networking: Twitter, Facebook
• Websites: You Tube, My Prezzi.com, Google 
• Public transport
• School's cameras
• School's editing suite