Our music video tends to use forms and conventions of real
folk music videos rather than challenging them as we believed that this would
help to establish the genre of the video in a much simpler way. This is because
there are not very many conventions of folk music videos and therefore it would
have been difficult to portray the genre suitably if we were to challenge too
many of the conventions. Not only this, but we felt that due to Frank Turner’s
honest reflection of the folk genre within his own music videos, we should employ
this same approach in order to reflect his style.
One of the key conventions of folk music videos that we have
employed is the use of casual clothing for the artist. This is done to place an
emphasis on the lyrics of the song and the narrative of the video and prevents
the artist from being presented as some kind of star. This relates to the
down-to-earth nature of folk musicians. We found that this technique was used
by Frank Turner in many of his videos including “The Way I Tend to Be” and his
own video for "Polaroid Picture". This technique is also used by other folk
artists such as George Ezra in his “Blame It on Me” video and Mumford &
Sons in their “Babel” video.
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| Frank Turner - The Way I Tend To Be |
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| Mumford & Sons - Babel |
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| Frank Turner - Polaroid Picture |
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| George Ezra - Blame It On Me |
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| Our music video |
We also followed the convention of including isolated locations,
such as the abandoned castle ruins, to reflect the loneliness that the artist
feels now that his friend is gone. Much like with the costume ideas, this is a
technique that we have mirrored from Frank Turner’s “The Way I Tend to Be”
video. We decided to do this in order to help convey the genre but also because it was a location that we felt worked well with the idea of a ruined friendship.
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| Frank Turner - The Way I Tend To Be |
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| Our music video |
Acoustic guitars are another common convention of folk music videos as indicated by Frank Turner, Tracey Chapman and Laura Mullins. We picked up on the frequency of this convention and therefore ensured that we contained the acoustic guitar in all three of our products. This also allowed us to create a strong connection between the three products with the recurring image of the guitar.
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| Frank Turner - Recovery |
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| Laura Mullins - Devorah's Song |
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| Tracy Chapman - Performance of Fast Car |
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| Our music video |
We incorporated the use of simple shots within our music video, including many mid shots and close ups. One of the close-up shots that we used was directly taken from Frank Turner's original video for "Polaroid Picture". We did this as we believed that it would create a strong connection between our video and the real artist and would indicate the way in which we were attempting to reflect his style. Not only this but we also thought that the shot was well constructed and worked well with the narrative.
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| Frank Turner - Polaroid Picture |
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| Our music video |
We developed the folk convention of constructing a narrative that reflects the lyrics of the music video in order to create a powerful video that emanated the emotion behind the song. We believe that this allowed us to present Frank Turner as a down-to-earth musician which is extremely important in terms of folk music as it allows the audience to relate to the artist.
Due to the ways in which we have used and developed conventions of folk music videos, I believe that the video we created is highly effective in reflecting the genre and creating a star image of our artist as being down-to-earth and relatable.
