‘Twas a fitting start to the course by seeing the film ‘Control’ by the director, Anton Corbijn, whose eponymous music video ‘Egg Hunter’ is also the name of this course. 

Like his Egg Hunter video, Corbijn keeps the frames of his shots for ‘Control’ stark and in black and white. There’s a bleakness to them all while at the same time communicating relationships between the characters. For example, there’s a scene where Ian Curtis is sitting on a couch while his love interest Anika is standing on the other side of the frame in a doorway. The band is in the middle communicating subtextually that they or Ian’s ambition, is in the way of their relationship, that right now they are emotionally far apart. A lot of the shots are quite static. There are no handheld or many of tracking shots. There are no camera flares, no great camera tear aways, just simply gritty scenes that the band is in sweaty, stinking pubs. We get the sense of Curtis’s state of mind, the maladies that plague him, his isolation, his state of perpetual conflict.
For our project, it occurred to me that we could use a studio scene with Willy Dynamo, headphones on while he narrates the song. This could be our return point, our core narrative. Also, I liked the door opening and closing in Joy Division’s ‘Love will tear us apart.’ Simplyeelements that repeat could be useful.

‘Music is a narrative that narratives nothing.’
(Theodor Adorno on Gustav Mahler’s music)

Aerosmith ‘Crazy’

This idea of music videos do not contain, as Varnallis puts it, ‘complete narratives or convey finely wrought stories for numerous reasons, some obvious or less so’ seems self-evident at first. But when Varnallis uses the example of Aerosmith’s music video ‘Crazy’ the conventions become more apparent, though I will stress not in a rigid ’cause and effect’ linear narrative. The scenes are episodic and each one ups the ante of what the girls are going to do from driving in the underwear to finally doing a homoerotic striptease.  While the narrative drive is ‘blunt[ed]’ by the appearance of the band, the band itself is part of the narrative, mirroring at times the gestures of the girls, one of which is Liv Tyler, the daughter of the lead singer, Steven Tyler. What I find troubling is that the video is not only very much set in the male gaze (the flash of underwear as Alicia Silverstone escapes the school) but incest undertones. Liv Tyler is fetishised here in a strippers outfit while her father sings ‘I need your love’ . In any case, this narrative video presents a sense of closure as the girls drive off in the sunset, having been set free, as the drive off with a naked man sitting on their laps.
What was interesting and a term that I hadn’t heard of before was the ‘narrative plank’.  Varnallis’s asserts that music videos lack the essential ingredients of a film (place names, meeting times etc) so the ‘narrative plank’ becomes a short hand to set the scene or indeed the narrative. For example, in Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’, Marvin walks into the doctor’s office and begins to talk of ‘his problems’.  We know as the viewer that there is an expectation that a solution or a remedy will be given to the patient so already we have already begun the narrative journey in the present and into the future, the director therefore ‘intuited’ our expectations and thus provided a ‘hook’.  Music videos simply by their form, Varnallis asserts, ‘encourage us to seek out a narrative.’ When that does not transpire, the experience can be unsatisfying.

It is hoped by doing the Egg Hunting course, I’ll be able to explore the myriad possibilities conceptualising a music video, learning and sharing ideas with fellow students, overcoming obstacles or difficulties positively,  brushing up on my video camera skills, and most importantly, experimenting with the form. Overall, push my curiosity out a bit further than usual. I’m not really familiar at all with making a music video, though I’ve seen a fair few over the years. I guess the challenge will be working no budget and achieving our aims.

Anyway, as I was away on Monday (Melbourne Cup weekend), I had to play ‘catch up’. Groups had already been sorted themselves out for the music video project, thus I was allocated to ‘Cool Ridge’, comprising of Sean,  Luka and Melody. They’d already decided what artist they’d do the video of which turned out to be Sean’s friend, Willy Dynamo, a local Hip Hop artist in Melbourne. Willy likes to reference a ‘pimp persona’ reflected aptly here below:

With this in mind, Sean and Luka wish to pursue the ‘pimp’ theme, though I think we maybe constraining ourselves in what we can thematically and conceptually if we stick with this.
Another issue which may rise to some conflict is that Luka and Sean wish to do three short music clips as our final. The issue here of course is that we have to come up with three different concepts and somehow link them. This appears to be more work than I am prepared to do and hope to convince them otherwise.

Willy Dynamo with his song Irony:

We sat together working out concepts in Rohan’s brainstorming sessions which were quite helpful in terms of freeing us from judging too much and then sharing these ideas with the rest of the class. We’ve come up with one idea of filming inside a dojo where Willy gets to fight ‘himself’.
After going through Willy’s catalogue,  we were able to narrow it down to  ‘Who’s World’ something that Willy wants us to make a video of.