Research, Influences & Themes

Research:


As a group we discussed and established the importance of researching into the chosen artist and genre of ‘indie’ music. We acknowledged that this would assist us in ensuring that our video sequence was appropriate and fundamental to the song. The research is as follows:



Jamie Alexander Treays, known by his stage name Jamie T, is a 23-year-old English singer/songwriter from Wimbledon, South London. He is currently signed to Virgin Records, but released his Betty and the Selfish Sons EP on his own Pacemaker Records label. His backing band is called The Pacemakers and he has lately been touring, advertising and releasing material as "Jamie T and The Pacemakers”.





















In popular music, independent music, often generally abbreviated as "indie", is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, Do-It-Yourself approach to recording and publishing. Independent labels have been known to strive for minimal influence on the artist they represent, avoiding the artist-cultivating behaviour of many major labels. Artists represented by Independent labels have been known to be focused more on producing music than becoming wealthy and/or well known. These artists use more off beat styles to create music since they are not hindered by the record label.

Influences and Themes:

The music video which we produced was greatly influenced by the original version created by the artist; however we adapted it greatly to input our own ideas and enforce particular moralistic views. We saw this as an opportunity to be creative and to actively produce and deliver something which we were proud of. We were also greatly influenced by abstract qualities and graffiti art, which features regularly throughout the video. We thought this to be appropriate as not only has graffiti existed since ancient times, but it is a form of abstract art exercised to communicate both social and political messages.

Graffiti has since evolved into a pop culture existence, creating a lifestyle that remains hidden from the general public. The controversies that surround graffiti continue to create disagreement amongst city officials/ law enforcement and graffitists looking to display their work in public locations. There are many different types and styles of graffiti and it is a rapidly developing art form whose value is highly contested, being reviled by many authorities while also subject to protection, sometimes within the same jurisdiction.

Another influence of ours was devised from the work of Danny Boyle, from the film he directed, ‘Trainspotting’. His use of pausing action to still images to develop on a characters attributes and personality, whilst telling the story was more recently used by Quentin Tarantino in ‘Inglorious Bastards’. We used this technique on occasion employing a similar effect.