Indie rock research and conventions

Indie rock is a genre of music that I am very fond of and that I would personally like to base my coursework brief on. Obviously this is not a certain choice as I must confer with Eboni and Beth over which genre to do as it will be a group decision that we will work on over a number of months.

Indie rock music has become very popular in recent years with many up and coming bands that fall into this genre. It has however, been around in the United Kingdom since the 1980's and can include various sub genres such as: Indie pop, Indie folk and indie dance. A conventional indie rock band would include instruments including: Guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and vocals. Indie rock comes from the word independent to describe the low budget record labels that indie rock bands are assigned to.

As for conventions, indie rock music videos tend to be set in easy access locations such as: cities, parks, open land or studios. There is a lot of variety from band to band however, they tend to keep it simple because these types of bands tend to focus more on the artist or performance. Mise en scene is used in this genre to portray the narrative better whilst the members of the band or characters in the video will dress with a retro edge to them to respect fashion and culture when the genre first came about. An example of an Indie Rock band who do this are The Arctic Monkeys.

Props used in this genre of music only tend to be the instruments that are used to create the sound of the music in the video. Some of the time, indie rock bands choose to set the video as a performance of the band playing a live show to avoid overcomplicating their message and to show the audience a taste of what they do best. In recent years however, it has been a popular choose to include a narrative between the shots of these performances.The Stereophonics are an example of a band who mix performance with narrative for the music video to show off the band playing as well as portraying a message. Other bands prefer to tell a common story or a journey as the narrative so the audience can relate more to the lyrics and the meaning of the song alone without a performance. An example of a band who make this different type of video is The Courteeners.

  

The most common camera shots for Indie rock videos 

are close ups and mid shots to show the audience the members of the band or characters in the narrative. The close ups highlight the talents of the singers and instrument players which can also portray the and emotion during performance. This is evident in the Kaiser Chiefs' video for their song Coming Home.Otherwise, if the video is narrative based as a story then various shots can be used including:establishing shots, wide shots and long shots.

                                           Music videos for this genre are edited differently as some may cut to different shots quickly in order to keep up with the pace of the music. For a forceful and emotion song with lots of instruments this may be the case however, some can be slower. Effects are commonly placed over the top of the original video to create a classical or old fashioned, sad feeling. This is clearly evident in Catfish and the Bottlemen's video for Pacifier.