Step 7 and Step 8

The duration of the unsigned song that we have chosen called, 'Zombie by Miser', I found out that it lasts for three minutes and eighteen seconds. Every time the chorus plays, it lasts for 22 seconds. Since it is only 22 seconds and the chorus is four lines long, this is another reason why the chorus is fast-paced. I did some research on Google about the duration of music videos and I came across a website called WISTIA. On a page on WISTIA, it talks about "Does length matter? It does in video!" 
I then came across two sentences on the page, that I believe is very true. The sentences are "We've always touted the message "shorter videos are better". They tend to get straight to the point and hold attention better than a drawn-out message". Basically saying if the video takes a great amount of time until it's finished, then I would drag on the main point of the story or just the story itself. That way it will not engage the viewer or viewers viewing the video. When the duration is shorter in a music video, the audience will be engaged a lot more, because it gets straight point and not as much dragging.

At the very start of the song "Another head hangs lowly..." till the start of the chorus, "...In your head, in your head, they are crying" the song plays at a short pace and it will have shorter takes to go with that pace, to make it flow with the speed of the song. I know this because for example the first paragraph of the song, "Another heads hangs lowly...Who are we mistaken", it feels to me that this paragraph would not flow nicely if the song was playing with faster takes and when you would read through those lyrics and imagine that it has shorter takes, then it would flow nicely. The songs pace will then move faster every time when the chorus plays. Most of the words that are in the chorus is the word, "zombie" and the singer says zombie three times in a row twice in the chorus. So if you would to imagine the pace of the chorus in the song would be slow, then it would sound quite boring and will effect the whole song, but then if you would imagine the chorus to be at a faster pace with the singer singing the word "zombie", then it would sound really exciting for the audience. Also it would play with faster takes, because it is playing at a faster pace.

In a book that I have found on Google Books called 'Communications & Multimedia Technology', I have found this quote, 'As with music, different moods will require different paces'. This quote that I have found made me think, have I talked about this in Step 8? Which is about what is the pace of the song that we have chosen? It also made me fully aware that we need to think about the speed of our cuts in our music video when we are at a part of the song with a certain mood. So for example if the whole song had a sad mood to it, we need to make sure that the video we make for this song, is at a slow pace and that we don't use quick cuts for that certain mood.

Step 6: Narrative

In the unsigned song, 'Zombie by Miser', we as a group have discussed the Narrative in this song. We first discussed, what narrative could the song be? So I thought that this song was set in a city or a town and there are zombies trying to take over that city or town. But then in the songs lyrics it says, "With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs and their guns." This most probably out of anything suggests that the army is in this narrative and they are annihilating the infected. We also thought that this could be a war, we got this idea from the bit in the lyrics, "It's the same old theme since nineteen-sixteen". In 1916 it was only two years away from the first world war, but maybe in 1916 it was getting to that point where the war was being decided. And also we know that this could be set in a war because of the lyrics again, "With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs and their guns". So this song can be set in a zombie apocalypse, or a war.

In this song it does not follow Todorov's narrative theory where it starts at a Equilibrium, which is where in the story it is peaceful and then there is a Disequilibrium which destroys that peace. Which then after that, it ends with a New Equilibrium which is most probably a better Equilibrium than the other Equilibrium was at the start of the narrative. In this unsigned song it starts straight away as a Disequilibrium and nothing more. It then ends in the same Disequilibrium and there is no Equilibrium in the story of the song at all.

We have decided as a group, does this song follow a Linear narrative, or a Non-Linear narrative? All of us suggested that this song was a Non-Linear narrative, because it starts talking about a child is slowly taken and then a tiny bit further in, it talks about families, most probably flash-backing to the family. So the songs story does not follow in a straight line and that is also what a Linear narrative is, where everything in the story keeps going forward. However in this song it feels to us that it keeps flash-backing to bits, for example the army with their tanks and bombs, a child is slowly taken and about someones family.

Step 2: Why did we choose this song?

When I first heard this song, I thought that this song would be good to use for a music video that we can produce. As a group we all agreed that we didn't want an unsigned song that had a long opening. So we first decided what genre we should choose, we chose this by saying what are our favorite genres in music. We all had Rock as one of our favorite genres in music, so we decided Rock. After we decided what genre we were going to pick, we went on the website, 'http://www.unsigned.com/' and browsed through the Rock songs, To find the song that we all liked and that will be good for a music video that we can produce. When we were choosing a Rock song we made sure that the people singing in the song were clear to hear,we were doing this because some songs that we came across weren't as clear, for example the actual music was far more noisier than the singers singing, making us obliviously losing interest in the song. After looking through some unsigned Rock songs, we came across a song called, 'Zombie by Miser'. The opening in this song really gave an interest to us and as we were listening more, we all thought that this unsigned song was perfect to use for our music video.

Copyright issues: The song that we have chosen that was from a website was an unsigned song from an unsigned band. Therefore this song is copyright free and just to be courteous we have emailed the band just to see if we have full permission to use their song and make a music video out of it.

Practically speaking, we felt we could deliver a song such as this as we have four people in the group and they are a band made up of five people. Although we were one man down we still felt we could replicate a video for this size. So when we found out that their were five people in the band, we came to the conclusion that we would need another person for our music video. This would be if we wanted the band to be in the music video itself. This is still undecided.

Technically, there were decisions to be made in regards to choosing the rock genre. For example, typically the rock genre uses low key lighting which is readily available to us in this country- particularly at the time in which we will be filming.

Step 4: Summary of Our Song

This entire song is about an army fighting against zombies. The line, "And the violence caused such silence", in the lyrics most probably refers to zombies killing civilians and making the surroundings filled with only zombies and with no noise. The setting in this bit of the song, can be a village, or a city with zombies limping around in silent. Later into the song they sing about tanks, bombs and guns; out of anything they are singing about the army and the army eliminating the zombies.

Step 5: Mood Board

Mood Board