Royalty Free Track

The Royalty free track I found  Owl Time -Kellee Maize has the same kind of tempo as the song I want to use by The Piratones - Let It Out

I also found a YouTube user who posts some of The Piratones music through their account.

Jonas Akerlund

Jonas Akerlund's work tends to feature a strong narrative, he also tends to make very controversial material, firstly coming in to the public eye with The Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" which showed drug use, violence and nudity, this was consequently banned from the majority of music channels however massive demand from the public forced MTV to show the music video only after midnight with a news warning. This then led him on to work with other artists such as Madonna, Maroon 5, Rihanna and Lady GaGa.
Many of his videos form something like a short film, he has a strong individual style, and uses a lot of taboo subjects: lesbianism, drug use, murder, and sexual explicitness.
Mostly Akerlunds work seems to be mainstream pop, he uses a lot of fast cuts which gives the video a fast pace making it more interesting for the audience, i like his work because of the indepth narrative and the way he can make awful things look beautiful, i've included some examples of screen shots for two different videos below.

Lady gaga telephone video by Jonas Akerlund

Here Akerlund makes prison seem glamorous and fun, when it is as we know quite the opposite.


Lady GaGa Paparazzi video by Jonas Akerlund

 Here GaGa makes even disability look glamorous this is a very typical warped image of reality from both GaGa and Akerlund to make something so awful look beautiful.

And again with the prison scene, you wouldn't pose for the camera as GaGa does, but she tries to make everything she does aesthetically pleasing, no matter how disturbing the image.

Analysing music videos

The first video I have chosen is Nicki Minaj -Starships, I strongly dislike this video, simply because it really has nothing to do with the actual song, although the dancing and cuts go well with the song and it's not been badly edited i'm left baffled as to why there's a futuristic dance party on the set of Lost. One part of the editing  I do enjoy is the kaleidoscope effect of Nicki dancing at 2:04, this effect is one of the only parts which are at all alien like or could have anything to do with a Starship.
When Nicki moves to a hill top I think the fog/mist which is added to the background is a good effect in making the place look eerie but then again this really doesn't fit with the upbeat tempo of the song, nor the outfit which she is wearing. Around 2:50 there is a flicker of sky lights where there is good use of colouring to imitate some form of sunset, but i'm not really keen on the inverted colouring which follows, there's lots of neon paint and extra layers of dancers are added, giving you the effect of seeing double. The fake lava which spurts from behind Nicki Minaj is poorly edited and just adds to the tackiness of the whole video.



M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

My second video is M.I.A -Born Free, it depicts a genocide against red haired people. The videos portrayal of military force violence met a positive reception but caused controversy worldwide, it received a ban from Youtube in the US and UK With some critics praising the representation of oppression and others criticising the explicit material. I personally really enjoy the narrative of this video, because even though we are "born free" it's questionable how much freedom we have to be ourselves, I think this video is a good representation of a lot of the things which are taking place in the world which are being overlooked. Although this video is rather gruesome I find the whole idea of it rather fascinating. I also really enjoy Romain Gavras' work on M.I.A's song 'Bad Girls' a lot of M.I.A's music has a very political unheard voice to it.



My third video by Bombay Bicycle Club is quite different, when I first watched this I wondered if my computer was failing, but it's just the impression that the video gives off, in a way i'd say this video blurs the line between what's reality and what's not, but I think it's just because it makes you feel slightly uneasy. I have to say this is the only video without a narrative that i've ever been actually interested in watching, i'd say it's because there's quite a lot going on on the screen at the same time. And it's very dissimilar to normal music videos. I like that it's all continually lit the same, and the way they have short clips of random places people don't go often, looking fairly abandoned.