[Yesterday I talked about a video made on the cheap](/posts/cheap-tricks- friends-of-p-by-rentals/) and suggested that in the modern day (typically thought to begin with JJ Abrams’s Star Trek reboot) you can make a music video for even less money. I thought it would be fun to take a look at an example.

Here’s the first video by Tune-Yards for her song “Real Live Flesh” which came out in 2010:

Now, I don’t even have a vague recollection of reading an article where an unnamed source said, “I heard from a friend of a friend that this video cost $321.52 to make.” So we’ll just go ahead and say that this video was made for the cost of a banana ($10).

Just like in The Rentals’ video, not a lot happens here. It’s mostly three people looking directly at the camera. Please ignore that bar at the top of the screenshots. I don’t feel like editing them out and they give that fun “poorly done blog” feel.

This video does take the time to create a narrative, though. You have the animal-natured beasts seen here:

Contrasted with the staid, stone-faced individuals that appear here:

They enjoy the music, bopping up and down, but they display restraint. You don’t see the wild abandon of the women with the painted faces. And, of course, they are the same women. Is one face the real one and another the face they show to the world? Or do both sets of faces represent the tiny kitten inside each of us, claws out, jumping onto valuable furniture?

The video also does fun stuff with lip syncing. At the beginning each of the three women sings a line.

First, this woman sings while the other two cavort in the background, possibly attempting to develop new jazz hands techniques.

Then you have the Native American woman. She eats her own hair in a ritual originally designed to gain the power of your enemies, but she believes that by eating her own hair she will double her strength.

Finally, there’s the other woman.

The fact that all three women sing a line that is, in fact, sung by the same person annoys me. It is possible that you could watch the video and not even know who the singer is! Your only real clue is that one of the women is usually in the middle or most prominent spot, like you see here.

Besides those first three lines, there is very little traditional lip syncing. Instead, you have hooting in the manner of their spirit animal, an owl:

Or their other spirit animal, a monkey:

Also, rather than mouthing the words they occasionally just open and close their mouths along to the rhythm of the words.

It’s mesmerizing and reminds me of this insane video that concerns itself with madness, torture, and the location of cereal.

The women seem to have some trouble getting their mouths 100% in sync with each other (in fact, I get the feeling the whole video was shot without the music playing in the background so they were just doing their best to be in time) but that’s no big deal. It adds to the general lo-fi feel of the video.

The final element is dancing. This is the first video I have written about that has synchronized dancing, which is strange because this is one of the standard elements of a good video.

Most of the dancing is done from the neck up, but “Synchronized dancing is synchronized dancing,” as Voltaire was so fond of saying in his later years.

Other dancing is more interpretive. Here the main woman does a twitchy, less demonic Ronnie James Dio:

The Dio definitely comes across.

There’s also an excellent moment where the woman on the right pops up just as there is a surging note in the music.

This could easily be overdone, but this type of thing is just used once or twice in the video and it is great.

The video follows the maxim, “Less is more”, which was, I believe, originally said by Ringo Starr (it was definitely one of The Beatles). Sometimes they just flip the image around.

Shot 1:

Shot 2:

Look at their eyes! I just love it!

Also, even though the whole thing is clearly shot in someone’s apartment (based on the YouTube notes the apartment seems to belong to Prince) they take the effort to change the background.

This background is primarily used for fun with hands.

And that’s pretty cool.

Join me tomorrow when we get deeper into just what a band can do with synchronized dancing.

As always, don’t forget to eat your wooden nickels.

-PTD

On Friday I was talking about a music video that was partially funded by a camera phone company. The fact that a major artist would need to turn her music video into an ad for an unrelated product just so she can afford to make a video makes it seem impossible for a smaller act to ever have a music video. Music videos must be outrageously expensive to make, right?

That is obviously not the case. Take a look at the video for “Friends of P” by The Rentals:

I remember reading somewhere that this video was made for $400. Since this is a blog and not a scholarly journal, I consider vague recollections to be substantial enough evidence to say that this video cost exactly $400 to make. This was a long time ago (when cell phones didn’t even have cameras) where they probably had to buy a video camera and editing equipment. Now virtually everyone who has upgraded beyond camera phone ownership to a smartphone has a more powerful camera and better video editing equipment than The Rentals could have possibly used. This means you could probably make a music video for your band in a day or two for almost no money.

Let’s say you wanted to make exactly this video. Let’s say you just recorded it and decided that it will be your first single. Great choice! It’s a catchy tune with an easy-to-remember chorus.

First, you’d need to purchase glasses and clothes for your band members.

Probably some of your band members would already own suitable clothing, but you might need to buy a few items. For the glasses, you probably would need to buy all of them. Although, if your band mates are hipsters they might already own soviet glasses.

Hipster:

Famed soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich:

Man, Rostropovich glasses are so in right now!

As far as the instruments, I’d assume since you just recorded the song you would already own the instruments or be able to borrow them from the same people you borrowed them from in the first place.

There’s no problem if your microphone has a big dent in it.

That just adds to the vibe of the video, just like filming it in black and white.

They don’t even use many different shots. Almost the whole video uses 4 basic shots. You have the three people side-by-side like above.

You have the singer’s face framed between the other singers’ faces.

You have just the singer.

And then you’ve got the full band shot.

Those 4 make up almost the whole video so you don’t have to spend a lot of time setting up new shots. Then you can spend the rest of the day shooting the fancy trick shots.

You have the partial band shots.

Man, you have to totally move the camera to do that!

Then you have the complicated side-by-side faces…

…into a violin solo…

…into face-to-face singing shot.

Finally, you have the shot where the aspect ratio or something got screwed up.

And that’s everything. Pretty easy.

The last thing you’d need is the ability to add text to your video.

Have I mentioned that I [love title cards](/posts/normal-people-with-lorde- royals/) in music videos? I guess I should address all that writing that I assume is in Russian. No, this video is not some sort of foreign version that someone uploaded to YouTube. It actually looks like Warner Brothers did, so this is the official YouTube release. I have done no research on this and don’t speak Russian put it looks like they added Russian subtitles to the video.

Why was this done? Besides the obvious fact that The Rentals believed that this song had a special appeal to Russian people due to their well-documented love of tone bent Moog synthesizer notes, it adds to the weird propaganda film vibe of the video. No one looks excited at all throughout the video. Everyone is doing their job, but they do not enjoy it. We associate this with the Russians. We imagine that the band members left the video shoot and went to wait in line to buy turnips.

Adding this concept to the video takes what would likely have been a pretty boring [live-without-an-audience video](/posts/excitement-mismatch-with-jet- and-vines/) and put everything into a special context. For very little money, they were able to spice it up! This video (to me, at least [double parenthetical note: if I do not specify that an opinion in this blog is only held by me, then the opinion is held by all humans]) is fun to watch all the way through. Even though nothing really happens, the lack of motion and expression lets the music and the little things stand out.

Little things like the fact that the guy on the right in the band never seems to play his instrument.

And, the best thing in the video, how insecure the blonde woman is.

Everyone else is looking straight ahead and she is trying to sneak a peak over at them.

Are they still there? Are they still singing? Is this whole video shoot an elaborate ruse to get me to dress like Rostropovich and move my mouth around? I’d better check real quick.

-PTD

I Will Survive. Respect. I Am Woman. He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss. Songs about female empowerment will always be with us. Whether it’s listening to these songs while cleaning a man’s clothes and dishes, humming along to them while driving the kids to a soccer game because her husband is golfing, or belting them out at a bachelorette party before getting rid of her shoes and becoming pregnant, women just love these types of songs.

Katy Perry has decided to join the list of enduring lady-classics with her song, “Roar”.

Ok, let’s just get this out of the way to start with: This isn’t really a music video, it’s a camera phone commercial. Remember camera phones? They were the things we used before everyone got smart phones but after everyone started using cell phones. So if a good music video is an ad for the band/song, what does that mean for this video? I’m not going to worry about it too much and just pretend this is a regular video.

The metaphor in this video is that female empowerment is like becoming a tiger. In the chorus she claims to have “the eye of the tiger” (Hey, isn’t that from another song? Wait, isn’t there another song about being a woman and roaring?) and that she will roar “louder than a lion”. Remember that I don’t like it when a music video [matches the lyrics](/posts/the-clean-cut-hospital- afternoons/) too literally? Well, this video is definitely too much for me.

Let’s take a look at the plot.

We start with a title card. As you know, [I love this](/posts/normal-people- with-lorde-royals/)! Now we know the name of the song! Strangely enough, I don’t think we can clearly see the name of the camera phone in the video.

The action starts with Perry and some duder having crashed a plane.

The duder decides to document the event using his camera phone.

He purses his lips in an exceptionally duderly fashion and Perry is very annoyed. He’s just pushing her around while posing for camera-phone-powered selfies! What a duder! To the max!

Luckily, he is promptly eaten by a tiger.

After the duder is eaten, the music stops. I don’t believe this happens in the non-music-video version of this song. Also, throughout the video there are added animal noises. I really don’t think it is necessary to do this. If your plot requires you to stop your song or change it, change the plot! The visuals are supposed to accompany the song, not the other way around. Just leave the audio of the song alone and construct a video to match that.

Perry, not yet fully self-actualized, is frightened out in the jungle, duderless.

In the light of day, though, she is no longer terrified by the animals who naturally inhabit the jungle and have every right to attack and eat any interlopers. She starts to befriend them. First she breaks apart her shoe to befriend a monkey.

Breaking the heel off your high heel is a standard trope in theses situations. I’m fairly certain that _Romancing the Stone _ has a scene where this happens and this zombie episode of a popular Canadian TV series is entirely about rejecting high heels. This is perfect for a song about female empowerment because high heels represent the yoke of patriarchy put upon women that prevents them from living independent lives. Perry uses her high heel to make a spear?!? I’m going to forget about that part.

She also brushes the teeth of an alligator.

Having thus befriended the animals, she coaxes an elephant into giving her a shower.

Although she is strategically standing behind a leaf, this gives the audience an opportunity to imagine her naked.

Having conquered nature, she needs to change her appearance. She is a powerful hunter who holds dominion over the beasts of the jungle and fears nothing. She emerges from a symbolic cave (the cave represents a cavern) like this:

Where did she get the leopard or cheetah skin? Did she kill one off screen? Did she find a rotting corpse inside the cave/cavern? Maybe that isn’t clothing and her body has changed and now she is a cheetah-boobed Eve covering her nakedness with a leaf.

Her transformation complete, she is now ready to face the tiger, because she is the tiger!

Since this blog is supposed to be about music videos I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the music by itself, but allow me to go off on a bit of a tangent. This scene depicts the tiger growling and Perry roaring right back so loud that the tiger is overcome. The way the music is done, though, her roar doesn’t really seem that loud. The problem is that so much of the song is already at the loudness limit that they can’t give this section any power. As a comparison, listen to this ancient recording. Seriously, take a couple minutes to listen to this. It’s not fair to any singer to compare them to Chaliapin since he is possibly the greatest singer of the 20th century, but when he holds out the one long note and it keeps getting louder and louder it has such power! The first time I heard it I felt like my head was going to explode. And how is he able to get so loud? By starting quietly! The production on this song leaves no room for the ROAR! and that is a bit of a disappointment.

Back on topic, the tiger is totally cowed and is given a punny name.

Perry celebrates by taking pictures with her camera phone.

See how integrated the camera phone ads are into the video? This is exactly what I’d do after defeating a tiger!

And look at that resolution!

But it was all a dream…

Fake out! It was totally real.

So what does this music video say about women and the power they can have? I think it says that women are like big cats. And I like my women like I like my cats: very hairy and weighing about 10 pounds.

-PTD