Lyrical analysis

Lyrics

I don't want to wake up in the morning
But I've got to face the day
That's what all the friends I do not like as much as you say

I don't want to do things independently
But I can't make you stay
That's what all the friends I do not like as much as you say

But if you wanna come back it's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back
Do you wanna come back? It's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back to me

I don't want to see you with another guy
But the fact is that I may
That's what all the friends I do not like as much as you say

Give it just another couple months or so
Then you'll be ok
That's what all the friends I do not like as much as you say

Alone, all alone
I am on my own
Alone, all alone
I am on my own

But if you wanna come back it's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back
Do you wanna come back? It's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back to me

If you wanna come back it's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back
Do you wanna come back? It's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back to me
Do you wanna come back? It's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back to me
Do you wanna come back? It's alright, it's alright
It's alright if you wanna come back to me

The lyrics denote a sense of a man's self distraction as he attempts to block away his loneliness "Alone,all alone". The song describes his desperation and lack of self assurance "If you wanna come back it's alright, it's alright" - repeated to empathise his longing and addiction to the 'fix' he has lost "I don't want to do things independently". Throughout, a sense of paranoia and angst is expressed, "do you wanna come?" as if he is constantly questioning the return of her feelings & feels as if his love is not mutual and as if he must earn or seek her approval or commitment. He attempts to detract from her presence by relying upon social compforts "That's what all the friends I do not like as much as you say" - but the repatition throughout shows that "months" "friends" "morning" will not change his state of mind -stressing her significant importance above others in his life. Our video designed to this lyrical track will help to physicalise his partners unwillingness to leave him as well as her determination to move forward with her life, we aim to show a mutual relationship between the two characters by having her as the key visual narrative performer & him as the key vocal performer in order to collaborate their importance in not only the video but their relationship. Rather than focusing on his depressed existance with out her - slumping out, bingning, lazy, upset etc, we want to focus on her journey forward yet twist this concept by making her travel back to reiterate the fact she does still love him but is almost fooling herself "just give another couple of months or so" - it will take her far longer for her to get over him so its as if she is being pushed back centuries to exaggerate just how much she unknowingly loves him . We hope to examine the way the opposite sex's minds work in conjunction to one another to explore the uncertainties of relationships as well as delve into the world of the past and the constants that never change (love). The lyrical message throughout "If Ya Wanna" sets it up to be a very versatile which leaves us with so much scope. The ambiguity enables us to develop upon the original meanings as well as further developing and exploring different interpretations of what we can make them mean in order to correspond & amplify our visuals. Furthermore the continual repetitive rhetoric questioning fits perfectly with the notion that our female protagonist is trying to search for something - the answer to her future & her identity (with or without him), as though she is constantly going over & over, round & round (literally as she is traveling for era to era) her options in her head with no conclusion apparent. Also the structure of the lyrics makes them appear as though they are a continence ,(or her continence) the voice of her true emotions (or his voice) in the back of her head (or the back of the scene as we intend to edit him into the shots using special effects in order to make him appear ghostly & translucent). 

Editing idea influenced by other music video

Whilst looking through various music videos we found different editing techniques used that we would also like to try and recreate when making our music video. One of these editing techniques we found in Angel's Time after Time music video. Just after 50 seconds into the music video a technique is used where figures slowly appear whilst moving and then disappear. As we want the male in our video to seem kind of ghost like and not humanly present as she travels through the era's looking for love, we figured that if we could also use the technique used in Angel's' music video it would work really well and show exactly what we want.

Inspiration from other media texts & videos #3

One video that inspired us with our initial idea was Black Eyed Peas - Where is the Love? Although this video isn't similar to our video idea at all, the concept of the song relates to idea we want to come accross in our music video. The song and video is about looking for love and the fact that it feels like there is no love which is similar to our idea of the girl unsure whether she is in love or not. Our character moves through time to find love whereas in the Black Eyed Peas' video the group moves around the city sticking posters everywhere to ask everyone 'where is the love?'. The idea of looking for love is something that many people of any age or sex can relate too which is possibly why the Black Eyed Peas video is so successful therefore we thought that by bringing that element into our music video - many people will be able to relate to it and therefore find it enjoyable to watch.

Audience Questionnaire

Audience Questionnaire's on Prezi

Inspiration from other media texts & videos #2

One music video that has majorly influenced the idea for ours is this: Stupid by Sarah McLachlan. Although the story is slightly different, she uses the same concept of different time periods to highlight the message in her song. In her video, she is seen with the same guy in three different time periods: 1800s, 1900s and 2000s, making the same mistake over and over. This amplifies the lyrics 'how stupid could I be", and is very effective. We liked the idea of using the different eras in our own video, and also liked the idea that the man was there in each era, as if she couldn't escape him. We thought this would also be appropriate for our video, with the girl trying to run away but failing miserably.

One thing we could possibly consider changing after seeing this video is the size of the set: Sarah McLachlan has tried to recreate the different eras on a private scale, whereas our initial idea was to do a full hall full of people. This would be extremely difficult to do, so perhaps we should try doing it on a smaller scale just as McLachlan did. 

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Another video that has influenced us is The Only Exception by Paramore. Although they do not go through significantly different time periods in this video, the lead singer does visit a variety of locations in order to figure out how she feels about a particular guy, and discovers towards the end that he was there for her all along and she decides to stay with him. This story is fairly similar to ours, except where the lead singer was running through locations ours will be running through time. It was from here we got the idea of using different doors as the gateway to different eras. Obviously we do not have the same kind of budget as Paramore did, so instead of building an entire set with different rooms we plan on using continuity editing to make the girl run out of one door and back in it again, with her seemingly in a different room when in reality we've just dressed up the same hall. We like our idea of the girl running through time as it fits well with the concept of her trying to move forward but actually moving backward. 

Inspiration from other media texts & videos #1

Even though it isn't a music video in developing our idea for our own production we drew many elements from some pieces of advertising as well as of course other artists music videos.  I personally really liked the concept of the John Lewis advert "Never knowingly undersold". Throughout the ad a couple from two different eras (one modern day, one from 1925 - the year the store was opened) go on a journey / have a relationship with one another, through the use of split screen; ultimately they end up together (or it is proposed) at the end of the clip.  In particular what I really liked about this style was the interesting mis en scene that made each era distinctive & visually pleasing & understandable - the costume choice, the building design, the posters, the cinema architecture, the transport, the street feature, the interior design of the bedrooms, the technology, the bicycles,  and so on (similar to the intertextuality within music video that adds an extra sense of pleasure for the viewer). This is something I really want to embody in our piece, this attention to detail - the little features that the viewer spots and can identify to a particular time period. In addition the love story idea - the exaggeration of space & romantic distance through playing around with chronology & history - something which I feel will make our video  have a much greater sense of depth. 

Another advertisement we drew inspiration from was 'John Lewis''s 2010 campaign - 'She's Always A Women'. We liked the idea that this one girl is growing & developing throughout the piece with a familiarity from a continual thread. A concept in particular which we want to borrow is the repetition of using the 'door' (or another object) in order to flip the linear structure; we want to use this idea in our video in order to connect our different eras & show a clear flip from each time period. We liked their concept of playing with time in order to create a personal & literal journey - something which we wish to convey to illustrate our unique vision (& transformable style) of the lyrics from 'If You Wanna' by 'The Vaccines'. The use of the symbolic 'red' top to connect the sequence is also something we will want to incorporate - keeping one element the same in each different era we jump to in order to develop a sense of continuity & a story line - embedded with performance sequence & shots which are more abstract and harder to follow as a viewer (in order to uphold the conventions of music video & create a piece which differs from that of a structured film which endeavours to keep the audience fully aware of the happenings and leaves less room for interpretation) 

Mood Board for our Music video

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We created a mood board in order to creatively denote the variety of ideas we had had for our music video. This exercise enabled us to have a visual preview of our previous discussions and also look into the music & popular genres of different type periods (something which compliments the themes and mis en scene we wanted to incorporate into our video).  The window is representative of a 'window through time' and 'a window into the multitude of decisions' which the female star has to make during the course of the video. Each box presents album covers for different by gone era's - 1970's, 1920's and 1950's, and once the flaps are opened they reveal a collage of typical costumes from those era's. The girls make-up is split between  a 70's glam rock and  twiggy like 60's style - something which we wish to achieve in our video by constantly changing the female stars facial make-up & clothing as she travels through the past in search of her future and who she is.  

Our initial pitch

The idea for our pitch is a mainly narrative video with a deep storyline involving many different eras. The narrative would be centered around a boy and a girl and their relationship. In our story, the two are a couple in modern day, but they break up as the girl wants to search and take some time to 'find herself'. She runs from the boy, and from the relationship, but while trying to move forwards she finds herself moving backwards, through different decades in the 20th century.

To do this, we plan to use one location (e.g; a hall), and dress it up in different ways in order to make the time jump obvious. We could use running through doors as a transition, by using continuity editing to make her run out of the hall, and just enter back into it again, as if the next era was on the other side of the doors. This would help to convey how stuck she is as well  as every time she tries to escape she finds herself even further back in the past.

The various scenes in this hall could include things such as dances, and using the iconic dances of the time - the Lindy Hop, the Macarena etc. This would also enable us to have a band on the stage: therefore including the performance piece of the task. However, we feared this may not be enough so we were considering a green screen to make up the rest. We were going to film the main boy (who is both the character in the relationship and the lead singer of our band) singing in front of a green screen and walking around. We would then put a black and white filter on it before layering it on top of the party image, making him appear ghostly and letting him be omnipresent during all the party scenes, with the change in colour also hinting at how disjointed he is from the main girl.

Obviously, to make this idea work we would need a lot of planning as the props, costumes and other general mise-en-scene is extremely important in order to avoid an amateurish look to our video. We have already begun thinking about costumes, and drew up some sketches of some typical costumes from different eras that we can try and resemble.

We do have one source for our costumes so far: authentic outfits from grandparents etc., but if we want to make this look professional we would probably need many costumes for extras. This would be extremely difficult to do and potentially very expensive, so to remedy this we will ask around all our friends and friends of the family to see if they or their parents have anything we could use.

"Indie Rock"

"Indie rock" genre of music

Indie rock (or alternative rock) is a genre of alternative rock which originally started in the UK & US in the 80’s . It’s style is very diverse, and comes in many varieties and sub-genres, for example indie pop (Indie pop was inspired by punk's DIY ethic and generated a thriving fanzine (fan magazine), label, and club and gig circuit. Indie pop differs from indie rock to the extent that it is more melodic, less abrasive – grindy & metalic, and relatively angst-free), jangle pop (Mid-1980s jangle pop was a non-mainstream "pop-based format" with "some folk-rock overtones", with psychedelic influences & uses raw and immediate sounding melodic guitar-bands) , C86 (a guitar-based musical genre characterized by jangling guitars and melodic power pop song structures) and lo-fi (a sound recording which contains technical flaws such as distortion, hum, or background noise, or limited frequency response). 

When grunge (a subgenre of alternative rock which started in the US in the 80’s, it was inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal, and indie rock, and is commonly characterised by heavily distorted electric guitars, contrasting song dynamics, and apathetic (showing of feeling no interest) or angst-filled lyrics) and punk revival ( more mainstream 90’s punk) bands in the US & Britpop bands in the UK (The movement developed as a reaction against various musical & cultural trends in the late 80’s & early 90’s. Britpop groups brought British alternative rock into the mainstream and formed the backbone of a larger British cultural movement called Cool Britannia & Britpop groups were defined by being focused on bands rather than solo artists; having drums/bass/guitar/vocals) ,broke into the mainstream music industry  (in the 90’s it was used to identify those acts that still retained an “outsider” & “underground” (less testosterone-driven) perspective.

 In the 2000s, as a result of changes in the music industry and the growing importance of the Internet and sights such as youtube which allowed them to freely market and brand their groups on a much larger scale that ever before (and more people find out about their style & beliefs) a number of indie rock acts began to emerge more publicly and enjoy their share of commercial success. Indie rock came from the term "independent" & is basically a musical wave which is made up of a relatively small and quite low-budget group of labels, who’s artists & bands have a generally have a do-it-yourself attitude. 

Even though most of their distribution deals are often made with major companies these labels and the bands they manage still try and attempt to maintain some of their autonomy, self government & individuality. Meaning they are usually left to freely explore sounds, emotions & subjects  which are probably of limited appeal to a large the mass market audience.   Indie rock is influenced by styles such as extremely diverse, including punk, psychedelia (influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs.), rock (a popular music genre which centres around the electric guitar, usually ‘rock’ artists are in groups and include the instrumental use of bass guitar & drums as well as of course vocals) and country (It takes its roots from southeastern American folk music, Western cowboy, and often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjoes, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles, and harmonicas.) Indie rock has been identified as a reaction against the "macho" culture & came into it’s own after the major success of Nirvana. 

It has been described as "too sensitive and melancholy; too soft and delicate; too dreamy and hypnotic; too personal and intimately revealing in its lyrics; too low-fidelity and low-budget in its production; too angular in its melodies and riffs; too raw, skronky and abrasive, wrapped in too many sheets of Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr./Pixies/Jesus & Mary Chain-style guitar noise; too oblique and fractured in its song structures; too influenced by experimental or otherwise unpopular musical styles." (by all music an online music guide website) 

Our Group

Our names are Amy, Grace, Ellen and Rhianna. We worked together well in our AS year and have decided to keep our group, and our production company 'GEARproductions' going into our A2 year for the production of our music video.