Over the Christmas period me and Sharon have both struggled to get in contact with the cic cic centre which as I mentioned before is our ideal location for filming the main bulk of Sharon's music video. In the mean time I thought I would do some more research into lower budget singer songwriter music videos and also see if there are any videographers that do a lot of this sort of work.
The first thing I found when researching music video production is that even at a lower budget end of the scale most companies are a team of people rather than just one person. I did find a couple of people who make music videos on their own and I generally found them to be lower quality than companies that have a team of people. The first company whos work caught my eye was a south London based company called Epik music videos.
When I first clicked on their website I was straight away taken back by the colours and character of their websites home page. It looks professional while still showing the company's creativeness and I feel like a client looking at this site would straight away be getting an idea of what Epik music videos is about. I then wanted to quickly get into looking at the company's portfolio videos.
On going to the portfolio section of their website I found all their music videos split up into easy to switch between categories that clearly shows off the wide range of work the company has done, they also show the artists name and title of the video when you scroll over any one of the videos. For the purpose of this research though I focused on their Narrative music videos and in particular the first from in the above screenshot.
The Early Comebacks- "No Reason"
The first video on the narrative section the company's website is a video for the early comebacks song No Reason. The band are fit into the alternative genre of music and the song and video are about the joys of being a kid and having big dreams. The first thing I noticed in the video which I really liked was the old grain affect that had been used. At first I didn't know why it had been used I just liked the grungy feel it gave the video but later on in the video I realised that the whole video was made to look like it was on an old TV. The aspect ration had been set to 4:3 and the whole video is in black and white and I liked that this added to the feel that the video was showing the band as kids in the 80s and growing up and having big dreams. Other than the effects though I did find the video to be a bit boring it just features kids in different costumes and I feel they could have done more with the actors to give the audience more of a sense of story. The video does however work for the genre of music the band produce however I do think its quite an overdone music video within that genre.
Kay Melo- "For You"
The second video the company have on their narrative videos page is a video for a song called For You by Rhythmic R and B artist Kay Melo. Much like their first video the company haven't gone out of their way creatively to do anything different to what of a lot of other R n B videos do. The video is set mostly in a bedroom and is just about the beginning and ending of a relationship shown through flashbacks and flash forwards. The video is very stereotypical of the R n b genre which i'm sure in many ways works for the client but I would like to have seen a bit more creativity from the company to do something even slightly different to hats been done before as I feel that's what helps not only the company but also the artist to stand out in their genre.
Another thing I noticed later on about epik music videos is that they have bad reviews on google reviews. These reviewers however did not leave a comment but it still makes the company unattractive to a potential employer.
In conclusion the company Epik music videos have a really professional and easy to navigate website but are ultimately let down by their creativity. Their style seems to be to just do what they know works and to not anything different or try to push any boundaries of their art. This is the main thing I will take away from this bit of research because as a freelance videographer clients will be largely paying me for my creativity and being able to create a product that is unique to their company.
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