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Tame Impala have produced songs that don’t have any music videos to tie in with them such as ‘Elephant’ and ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’. We could have produced a music video to any of these songs. This would make the video interesting as there is no original to compare it to. However, ‘The Less I Know The Better’ is a song that Emily and I know the best. Knowing the lyrics made it easier for us to create a narrative for the story.

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When I listen to music, I tend to use apps such as Spotify which doesn’t play the music video. As soon as we decided to create a music video for that particular song, I watched the video to gain a better understanding of the key themes used in Tame Impala’s videos. I didn’t enjoy the video as there is quite a long intro and the scenes depicted in that intro are of a sexual nature. I felt quite uncomfortable to watch it and was confused why that scene would be featured in the first place. What symbolism does it have or what does it represent?

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As I carried on watching the video, I started to understand the narrative a bit more but I thought it was portrayed in an odd way. Again, there were sexual scenes such as the female character straddling a man dressed in a monkey suit which I found quite disturbing. There was also a scene where the monkey grabbed the woman’s bottom when she was only wearing underwear. After seeing this video, Emily and I decided we wanted to create a video that wasn’t sexually orientated and wasn’t age restricted on YouTube.

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Tame Impala are an Indie Rock band. Knowing this, I decided to look at the codes and conventions of music videos centered on this genre. A key feature of Indie Rock is that the music videos have a narrative. This is an important part of our music video as the lyrics wouldn’t make sense without having the story in the background. The song lyrics portray a story of a guy who likes a girl but the girl likes someone else. That is also shown in the original video. In our video, we have two best friends who fall out because one of them gets a boyfriend. It isn’t exactly the same story line which makes it unique to the original video.

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Another feature of this genre is that the artists don’t usually show their face or they have someone else sing the lyrics for them. For example, in Artic Monkey’s ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ the group used a computer to generate images that timed well to the music. In Tame Impala’s video, the band isn’t shown at all and the narrative is portrayed by a male and a female. We decided to subvert this trend and include ourselves in the video. If the lip sync wasn’t added into our video, the audience might not have known that it was us; however, the audience can see that the people singing in the video are also the ones featured in the narrative.

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Goodwin’s convention theory is apparent in our video. One of the conventions he focuses on is that music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. This is mentioned above. Another is that the audience can establish a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. When we are shown singing the line ‘So goodbye’, it transitions to the next scene of the hair dying phase. This represents the next section of the story: ruining of the friendship.

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Goodwin also talks about a relationship between the music and the visuals. In Tame Impala’s video, the beat at the beginning of the song is coupled with short scenes of the different characters in the story. In our video, we decided to use pictures featuring Emily and I to connote friendship. The images appear on the beat of the intro to the song which uses the convention.

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In the version produced by Tame Impala, the scenes are quite voyeuristic meaning that the video offers the opportunity for the audience to look at quite sexual scene e.g. the close up of the female’s bottom. This doesn’t appear in our video as we wanted it to be clean and available for all viewers to enjoy. Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory argues that the media is shown through the perspective of a heterosexual male and we deliberately avoided this objectification to empower females in this video. A feminist critic may argue that the high angle used on the neglected friend sat on the sofa portrays her as vulnerable and weak. Contrastingly, during the lip sync, both females are being shown at the same height signifying equality. Additionally, the proxemics between the two females in the friendship scenes is closer than the female and male suggesting their relationship is stronger. This challenges hegemonic ideologies. Several music videos of this genre feature these conventions. They don’t feature all of them but a few which is what ours does too. This means that our video reinforces the use of Goodwin’s theory.

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The music video we have created does feel like it could be a music video produced by well-known record companies in several ways. For example, we have a mixture between performance (lip syncing) and narrative (all other scenes). Several professional music videos use this same structure (having the singer tell the story through lip sync and inserting clips to represent the thing they are singing about). Another way that it could be a professional is how we edited the video in time for the beat. This is used most effective at the beginning of the video when the pictures of Emily and I (representing our friendship) change in time to the opening beat. The next scene is of a firework that we filmed when we first started the music video. We used an editing technique called reverse so it would fit in time to the beat. It is important as it emphasises a strong friendship at the beginning. A firework scene is shown at the end of the video to represent this good friendship again. Both firework scenes match the audio directly which is clever and I believe it makes it more believable.

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Matching to the music is also used in the middle of the song when the fall out starts (the lyrics ‘So goodbye’ signifies this change). When zooming into the hair dye, the song slows down slightly and the transition of the slow zoom fits perfectly with this part of the song. Having basic or little transitions and edits would (in my opinion) make a music video feel amateur. This is why we felt it was a necessity to add in a range of transitions and edits. In quite a few parts of the video, we use transitions that make the video more effective. For example, using the slow zoom in the hair dye and hanging photo scene really helped to provide a smooth shift from one scene to the next. I think that there are no edits or transitions that appear to look out of place or just stuck onto the video; therefore, this makes the video feel more professional.

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On the other hand, there a reasons for why our music video does not meet the criteria of an expertly made video. Other than the fact that the cameras we used weren’t expensive and the highest quality equipment, the music video provides a feel of a sort of home-made product. We made the video like this so it represents how normal a friendship like ours is and makes it more applicable to viewers (this uses Blumler and Katz’s theory, specifically interaction and escapism). Not many professional music videos take this approach which is why it feels different to them. Many audiences expect music stars to be wealthy and have them portray this in their video like Nicki Minaj and Cardi B in the song ‘Motorsport’ showing off the fast cars behind them. When making our video, we didn’t have access to expensive props such as cars, fancy mansions, etc. This emphasises the reality of people our age, further expressing Blumler and Katz’s theory of realism.

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I believe that our music video is based around the concept of aesthetics. This means that our video is all about looking good. It isn't meant to look like a professional music video, we wanted the audience to get the impression that this is a home-made style video focusing on the friendship of two people. I hope people appreciate that this video is one for the eyes.