Editing to music

For a music video to be successful it has to be relevant to the video in some way, maybe not in a literal way, so the video does not have to follow the lyrics word for word.
A good way of making a video relevant to the song is to have to video edited to the song, so when you play the video to another song it does not match. the editing has to be timed to the video, reflect the mood and style. This is the most important thing i have to remember when making my finished product.
This video is by a DJ called Venetian Snares. The genre of his music is known as 'Glitchcore' which basically means the music is is heavy and a lot of the sounds are glitched for effect. So when a music video was made for the song the editing had to reflect the song. The video has a lot of quick editing with a fast paced style. Because the video works so well with the song and reflects the style of the song, if you were to put the video to another song it wouldn't work at all.



This next video is by brian allen carroll. The video is made for the song "danse macabre" by saint-saens. The video contains shapes and objects that appear and move to the instruments played, its another good and more simple example of editing to music. The video shows how simply and effective editing can be, using simple shapes that move in time and reflect the instrument being played.
This video is good research for me as i will have simple characters and animation, so with my characters they will move with the melody, and as the video has lots of weird noises i want to have shapes that will move to elements of the song, for example maybe have smoke from the volcano that moves with the sound of the flutes. Hopefully if i can pull this off my video will have created a style that connects with the song and look really effective.

Animated Music Videos

Searching through Youtube i found a play list containing some of the best animated music videos ever. Looking through this I'm starting to understand how music videos work, an animated video has to stand alone, so if you watch the video without the music you can understand what the video is trying to say. From my research i found that each video has some kind of narrative, although the video is not a literal representation of the song i.e the animation does not follow the lyrics word for word, but portrays a story in a way people can understand. The good example i found is a video for a band called Los Campesinos, the video is called "You! Me! Dance!", the video is about the evolution of a civilization, and in the video the civilization grow to a point that they start to destroy each other then eventually they move to another planet and then the process begins again where they start to destroy each other again. The video has a strong message but the actual song is about dancing, the only relation is that in the video the characters appear to be dancing in the video, also which i think is the most important for a music video is that the events of the video match the song, so a lot of moments are in sync, which makes the video much more visually interesting.





So for my project i want to create a scene that relates to the video in the way that the style of the song matches he animation. so i'm going to have a narrative but its my own story which relates to the Journey to the west but doesn't match the song word for word, so it will be a narrative story but its a non-literal video.

The Avalanches Frontier Psychiatrist

The Avalanches are an elctro-indie band that make songs using beats, samples and loops. so for this music video Frontier Psychiatrist the entire song is comprised of samples and loops, There album is said to use around 3,500 samples. So for this video which contains a lot of samples the music makers have looked at what each sample sounds like and created a literal video for it, for example when the record scratches the shot shows a record with the needle slipping off. i think this video is so successful is how surreal the scenes are, so the music video has a literal elements, but has no narrative which makes it an interesting watch.