Research Paper

With the research paper due next week I've taken all the materials I've accumulated and begun to organize them into the different categories of technical, artistic and cultural influences.

Cultural
The music video research I've conducted falls into the cultural along with ideas I've gotten from books including The Missing Piece

Le Petit Prince

and the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch


Technical
The construction of the video should truly relate to the song itself, so using reference from one of the best video directors out there, Michal Gondry, I have worked on honing my narrative so that it reflects the musical structure of the song. His video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers constructs a landscape that responds to the beat and complexity of the music.

Even more rooted in the structure of the music and the repetitive nature of choruses interlaced with verses is his video for Come into My World by Kylie Minogue in which she begins the video by exiting a dry cleaner’s and walks a full circle to the same dry cleaner’s during the course of the first verse. When she returns to the spot she began the same Kylie that exited the cleaners initially exits behind the one the camera is following, so she is doubled. Everything around her is doubled too—all the people on the streets and the items with which they are interacting.


Artistic
This section should contain styles I have studied that are influencing the aesthetic of the piece. I've studied a bunch of animated videos from the classic 2d look found in videos like Pearl Jam's Do the Evolution

to more stylized and caricatured looks like in the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine

to even more cartoony animation like Tenacious D's F**k her Gently

as well as a more simplified look, like an independent video by Laith Bahrani, creator of Monkeehub. The video is to Radiohead's acoustic version of Creep and has a pretty cool look to it.

The few that I really like in terms of style are Drive by Incubus in which footage of the band is intercut with the lead singer drawing himself and the other band members. I really like the hand-drawn look and the quality of the line, though its not as caricatured as I want, the look is very realistic--the drawings match the footage exactly as is obvious in the crossfades.

The video that really has the look I want is the Gorillaz Feel Good Inc. which moves from their 2d look in previous videos to a 3d toon shader look. It might be a little complex for the time I have, but its an awesome looking video.


This is a good bit of research to start with and I think serves as a good outline to springboard into the full-fledged paper.