Hello and welcome to the official Radiohead – Nude podcast, I’m Becca Penfold, the creative director and this podcast is to allow you guys to get an inside look on the creation, concepts and behind the scenes of Nude – the album, the video, the overall promo – so I hope you enjoy!
I was really pleased with this project as a media product. I feel it not only conforms to your typical music video but it also challenges a lot of what you may expect to see from your average alternative music video. Before I made any decisions about any aspect of the video I looked at three of my favourite alternative videos that covered quite a wide spectrum of alternative music, this is because I wanted to see different interpretations of music videos of this genre – the stripped back (Johnny Cash Hurt), the theatrical (Pulp This is Hardcore) and the weird and cooky (the cure lullaby). I noticed that all videos had a darkness to them and particularly had thought about the look of the video colour-wise and concept-wise with both colour and concept linking to create a specific mood for example, Johnny Cash Hurt, the song is very emotive and talks about dark subject matters such as ‘hurting himself today’ the lighting featured a lot of shadows to reflect this gives an intense emotive mood. I used this in mine by featuring the sexy mix of black and red to touch on the, what could be seen as sexual, title ‘nude’ as well as in post production adjusting the saturation, brightness/darkness and contrast to make the visuals darker – connecting to the dark sound and content of the song, as essentially the lyrics tell you to not be too hopeful about life ‘it’s not gonna happen’.
I did however make sure to follow basic conventions of music videos that to me are vital to follow such as creating a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. I particularly used illustrative – for example ‘now that you’ve found it’ you see an image of the girl he loves then the lyric, ‘it’s gone’ showing where she was before but is now a mess, much like the rest of his life without her. I also made sure to show a relationship between the music and the visuals because to me it’s the most important, the visuals and music must flow together. There are some illustrative examples such as I used shots of the drums quite often as the drums really stand out to me in the song and add highlights of emotion. I used the music to determine the cuts, using the rhythm, the drum beat, the odd emotive vocal to decide the timings of takes. This is most obvious in the climax of the song with the flash of memories, they fit the beat of the drum and are used to amplify the feeling. I didn’t use any contradicting visuals just because I did not want to take anything away from the artist, the song and the relationship between the song and video – I wanted them to have a very clear and pure feeling.
There are many close ups of the lead singer, Ben, as I found with the real media artefacts, the videos I had looked at before that most videos predominantly used shots of the lead singer. I did this also to promote Ben as the lead, he’s the biggest personality of the group and likes to be up front, where as members of the band such as Liam, Bass and Dom like to focus on the music more, rather than the promotion and attention. However, every member of the band does get at least one close up to show off their skill and their connection and seriousness to their music. This promotes the band to be quite sophisticated.
The notion of looking is also quite clearly present in this video through the use of the video camera – usually this notion of looking would be used voyeuristically to look at the female body but I decided to challenge what some may expect and have the notion of looking through focus on the male and his vulnerability, rather than a woman’s sexually.
There was also an intertexual reference within the video – the image of Bettie Page – this was to make a reference to her as an erotic icon which links not only to the possible sexual title of the song, the sexy yet haunting sound of the song and also links to a part of the narrative that suggests that the character is a bit of a sexual deviant – though this was meant to be subtle as it’s subtle in the song and with the digipack. The erotic theme is carried through to the advert and digipack also because the album cover – it’s a close up of Ben’s mouth and most people would agree that the mouth/lips whatever are particularly sexy feature. Also, the album cover features, pretty much, complete flesh, nudey skin tones which again add the sexy feel.
I challenged the basic ‘alternative’ video conventions as I feel most music videos do not feature narratives similar to this one, I haven’t seen many sort of psychological music videos, I’ve tried to not only make this a promotion piece for the song but what I like to see as an artistic short film with a repeatability factor.
With my digipack I did abide to many of the conventions of other digipack’s and adverts I had seen for the alternative genre. I used black and white because it is associate with the genre as alternative music is seen to be well crafted and sophisticated in comparison to other genres like pop. Black and white is classic, simple, to the point and that is what Radiohead’s music is about and the image we want to create for the band. We carried through a lot of the aspects that are in the video promo for nude, in a way I think this is challenging the conventions of music digipack’s as although often the artists video promos relate to the digipack from the albums I have looked at (such as Gorillaz) I have not seen such an obvious link than with my digipack. The images of the camera used for the back cover and the bed through the image of the camera link completely to the video as they are featured heavily in the video. This was done because as an album the themes seen in nude (transparency, invasiveness, vulnerability, erotica) also can be seen throughout the other tracks, the album, advert and video promo for nude all have links to reflect the entirety of the concept of this album that we are trying to sell – Radiohead psychologically stripped back – nude.
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I think this makes the product of both the main video and promo and the ancillary tasks very effective, as it is clear to see a link and a flow between all three video, digipack and advert. The ‘Nude’ themes mentioned before can clearly be seen in all. For example invasiveness is represented by the use of the camera throughout the music promo and digipack, it also can be seen in the advert as the album cover features a very invasive close up of Ben, the lead singer. Literal transparency can be seen on the album cover, the video shows it by looking through – the idea of being able to see right through him into his thoughts and memories (shown through the flash backs). Vulnerability is also shown through the extreme close ups on the album cover, advert and the video shows a lot of vulnerability through close ups and the narrative itself. I think the idea of the takes being slowed down also adds to seeing Ben’s vulnerability as they allow you to absorb and notice little flickers of emotion that normal speed takes couldn’t do. There is a subtle erotic theme running throughout our media artefacts as mentioned before, which I’ve touched on only slightly through all media pieces, you can see more evidence of this with the tracks ‘closer’ and ‘tempted’. In the video this can be seen though the use of the primary colours being black, red and the lighting is quite dark sexy as well as what I’ve mentioned before.
One of my favourite visual themes is the close up of Ben’s lower face which can be seen in every single media piece with the album art, the advert and also within the video during the section ‘you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking’ a screen shot of this can be seen on the radiohead nude blog.
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The feedback I’ve had from the video has been really promising and helpful throughout the creation of the promo. A lot of it has confirmed my judgement but other audience feedback has tweaked and perfected what I wanted to achieve for this. For example, my audience feedback confirmed that the video needed to change the colours and lighting to give it a much more intense visual feel. They especially helped me with the creation of my digipack as they helped me with the images in numerous ways. First they helped me decide to use two black and white photos and two coloured but desaturated images to create a dark, edgy but sophisticated balance. The colours used can also be seen in the video and the album artwork being in colour also helped with the ‘nude’ idea, allowing the fleshy nude tones to be translated throughout all media pieces.
Someone else suggested that I should change the band image because it was too dark and the framing of all the members was unfair on Dom, the drummer as he was very hard to see. They also suggested to adjust the framing on the album art as Ben’s neck was very uneven in the original image. I retook the image of the band so that Ben was still the in front, but only slightly and the rest of the band were all equal to each other. This again shows that Ben is the front man, the personality but the fact that they are all standing together shows that they are a band and equal in creating their music. Instead of re-taking the shot of Ben I used photoshop to perfect the framing by copying the wider looking side of his neck, flipping it and then fitting it where the thinner side of Ben’s neck was. I’m really glad this was recommended by my audience as it allowed me to create an image that featured complete nude tones – perfect for an album and video promo for ‘nude’.
Without one of my focus group suggesting I used special effects to heighten the mood of parts of my video I don’t think the video would carry across the feeling it does now with them. This turned my video around as it gave the video an edge that worked well with the themes already in it – such as the vulnerability and instability of the character as the distortions of the flickers of ‘bad tv’ and ‘bad film’ create a breakdown in the visuals which represent the breakdown within the character.
One of the parts I enjoyed most about producing the video promo, digipack and advert was the use of technology. To edit and put together these pieces photoshop and final cut pro have been my holy grail. I’ve used photoshop a lot in the past so using it to create the advert and digipack was pretty simple. I also just love it for altering the colours and curves, playing with the different types of layers and changing them to ‘soft light’ and such. Also, despite finding it hard to take a perfect picture of the boys I did enjoy the challenge of editing two images together to create a great band image for the digipack. You can see screenshots of the photoshop editing on the ‘Nude’ blog.
I’d never used final cut pro before so I was a bit anxious about using it, thankfully I picked up how to use it pretty much instantly. I had used it previously on my ancillary task before when in a group be re-made the classic Britney Spears video – hit me baby one more time, but I didn’t use a lot of the features, I used it very basically by just cutting clips in and putting them together – no colour alterations, framing, slowing down, special effects but I thought it was vital to make the best of final cut and explore and experiment with the features to see if I could heighten the look and feel of the video to what I had pictured in my mind. I altered the framing to crop out and zoom in on certain shots to either focus in on the artist and also to make the shots look cleaner, simpler, more professional. I also changed the colours by desaturating the clips to give the colours a less vibrant and darker feel, this used with changing the darkness and contrast allowed the colours and lighting to have a darker, more sinister and sexy feel. Slowing down the clips not only complimented the slow pace of the music but it also was used to allow the audience to observe a more detailed view of the character and his emotions. Adding special effects such as ‘bad TV’ and ‘bad film’ really added the final touch to the music video promo. I used them mainly to highlight particular points in the music, the lyrics or the narrative. At the songs climax they are particularly used with the beat of the drum during the flash of memories – I think this worked nicely as it allows the audience to really pick up on the rhythm of the music and it links to the narrative with his memories being distorted and upsetting.
Though final cut pro and photoshop are the most obvious technology aspects of this project online mediums such as youtube, blogger and facebook have been extremely helpful in streaming the video, its progress and gaining feedback. For instance, I uploaded a near final draft of my music video to facebook see if anyone had anything to make it perfect – as it turned out people loved it. Blogger has been great to develop ideas, collect and store feedback and research, especially as you can label posts to create specific tags of areas of the project. I found this made it easier to look back on things such as my real media artefacts to build on ideas, concepts and conventions that I wanted to expand, change on or include in my video. It again helped with collecting feedback as anyone could comment on what I’ve done and make suggestions, as well as allowing me to store all my audience feedback in one tag. Youtube has also helped in terms of my research, as things like VEVO allowed me to look at official music videos of artists and analyse it deeply as being able to pause and rewind of my own accord allowed me to look at great detail and pick out the best ideas of each video, as well as allowing me to get a feel for the genre of music video.
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