Trip to Richmix- Pete Fraser's Presentation

On Tuesday we went on a trip to Richmix in Bethnal Green. We were given lots of advice and information about music videos from Pete Fraser. I found this very useful to my media studies. We were shown a wide variety of music videos starting with Len Lye: A Colour Box. This was made by painting on film and then animating it. I thought this was strange because it was just loads of patterns and I had not really seen a music video like this before.

The next video shown was Nat King Cole: Frim Fram Sauce which involved intertextualtiy where he is watching himself on a television screen. There is a point of view shot in the video of the artist looking at a woman's legs and it is quite a slow paced shot. This kind of thing was seen as inappropriate at the time it was made whereas nowadays there are more explicit videos shown such as 50 Cent: Candy Shop which we also looked at. This video objectifies women for a male purpose but it is more acceptable these days because there are lots of music videos similar to it.

We were also shown the Beatles: Can't buy me love which was in black and white. There are a variety of different shots in this video which keeps the audience interested. For example there is a high angle shot filmed from a helicopter looking down at the band who are dancing around. There are also hand held shots. The Beatles started the trend to make a music video into a short film. This video would then be shown on Top of the Pops if the band were unavailable. This video showed record companies that you need visuals to go with a song.

We were then told that MTV was dominated by Britain when it first started, this is because British record companies were ahead of the game, they always made music videos quickly. This is because, as mentioned before, they knew that visuals were needed to go with a song. Madonna was the first USA artist to have a video on MTV. Michael Jackson made a video for Billie Jean which created a big uproar as in that time period they did not allow black artists to show their videos on TV. However there was an exception because his video was quite good. He then went on to make one of the most popular music videos- Thriller. This video cost loads to make but it was very successful with people making their own versions of the video and copying the dance. This is an example of user generated context, where people make their own videos and publish them on YouTube.

Another great video that we were shown was Jay-Z: 99 Problems. There are lots of cuts in this video and the drama is emphasised because it is in black and white. The camera is moving a lot which makes the video more interesting to watch because the audience is less likely to get bored because there is a lot happening.