Letter to the Copyrighter

Claire took it upon herself to write a letter to the copyright owner of this song, getting permission would mean that we are definitely allowed to use this song for our video.

Subpop Records owns this song.

Dear Copyright Holder,

I am an A level student and I am writing to request your permission to use one track from the first album by Band of Horses entitled “Everything All The Time”

The track I wish to use is “The Funeral”, track 4 on the album.

With your permission, this track would be used in my current A-level Media Studies project which involves creating a music video for a popular music track, as well as producing an album and a magazine advert for the artist.

If I received your permission, this track would ONLY be used in an educational context and be viewed by my media class, my teacher and the OCR exam board moderator. It would NOT be released to a large audience or uploaded to any public video websites.

The artist and your company would of course be fully recognized throughout pre- production and the final video itself. A copyright notice, with wording supplied by you can be included in the records of the project. If this is required, please send full details.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Claire Martin

Basic Plot of Video

We begin with a dead girl. Potentially a long distance shot of her laying with a carnation or some sort of flower.

We then begin short sharp flashbacks of her with a boy, laughing and happy. Very loved up. Interrupted by really really short cuts of angry times, crying and fighting. The frequency increases as the pace of the music increases.

As the electric guitar kicks in we see a fight scene. Sheer anger. This is at 1.28.

She is sitting cross-legged, maybe on her bed staring at her phone whilst a tear rolls down. Close-up to tear. Cut to a shot of the phone, text saying something similar to 'I'm not sorry, I really do hate you.' Boy has gone off with a new girl.

She runs to a forest, barefooted in a dress. She needs to get away, to escape.

We see her write a suicide note and she takes her life (method undecided).

The final shot will be of the funeral. Small, close ceremony, everyone with flowers. Seperate, we see the boy that broke her heart, too ashamed to enter the graveyard. He knows he is resposible, without him she would still be alive.

Lyrical Analysis

Target Audience

Due to the 'alternative' nature of the song, I feel the audience in which this song would be best received would be both rock listeners and indie listeners.

This is a song that could be received on many levels, whether the audience absorb the lyrics or the music itself, there is definitely something to appreciate for everyone.

Rock fans, in an extremely stereotypical nutshell, wear leather, have facial hair (only for the men), go to gigs and concerts at every opportunity, ride a motorbike- the louder the more impressive.

Alternative names could be moshers, rockers, grungers or METALHEADS.

"The Metalheads tribe generally sees more people coming and going than other tribes – appeal wanes for many quite quickly. Metalheads feel no need to justify themselves to others, and are generally a friendly badge-wearing bunch but they do have a tendency to hate Chavs and Townies, as well as generally frowning upon the musical tastes of the Emos and Indie Scenesters.

This tribe is keen on mixing up newer and older varieties of metal, punk and rock – so older classic metal bands like Pantera, Metallica and Killswitch Engage have currency as well as more recent, and more experimental, bands such as Cobalt and Converge. "

You’ll mainly see them wearing black, though not exclusively. A black band t-shirt and blue pair of jeans would be the typical look of a Metalhead.

Amy Winehouse- Back to Black. Inspiration.

Now that we have decided on our sing, I have been looking at music videos on a similar topic to our final song choice- 'The Funeral'. Amy Winehouse's song 'Back to Black' refers to death very frequently as does our song.

The video is very gothic and dark, it emphasises all things morbid and melancholy. There are many shots of the singer casually singing the words, dressed in clothing suited to a sad event such as a funeral.

The singer's lack of eye contact with the camera really intrigued me as she is almost detaching herself from the audience, with an emotionless facial expression.

The entire video has a very serious tone, nothing is taken lightly and the repetitive image of the hurse travelling through the graveyard really does set the tone for the entire video.

This is my favourite extract from the video. There is a short pan of a few graves from the graveyard. This is definitely something I would like to include in our music video as it sets the scene whilst also showing the harmonious nature of the home of the resting. I feel it is important to pay respect to the graves that would be filmed as the topic will always be sensitive. Our video will be one of great seriousness and the entire plot will be taken seriously.

As a group we have been discussing using a symbol throughout our music video, and we thought about using a rose. Roses are an indication romance and love, and incorporating this idea into our video could only improve the strength of the storyline.

Coincidentally Amy throws a rose upon the grave in the video. I feel that our group can gain a lot of inspiration from this video as it holds almighty relevance.

Final Song Choice. The Funeral- Band of Horses

We have finally agreed on a song to use for our video and we are all really happy with our choice. It isn't a fast song like some of our other choices, yet we feel we can really work with both the lyrics and the beat of the song. All of us enjoy the song, not that that is an advantage, but we know how likeable this song can be.

We found this song thanks to a show on MTV called 'My Life As Liz'. I just remembered she sang this song during a talent show and remembered how interesting I found the song to be.

After discussing in depth the possibilities of our video we have been overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm to start filming. However, we know that realistically we have so much planning to do beforehand.

Due to the nature of our song we are inclined to focus upon the idea of death and all things related.

We feel there should be a lot of underlying metaphors throughout the video, one of which should be either a burning candle or cigarette that we do extremely fast cuts of at intervals throughout the video but at each one the object will be nearer and nearer to the end of its life.

I'm coming up only to hold you under
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
And to know you is hard and we wonder
To know you all wrong, we were

Really too late to call, so we wait for
Morning to wake you; it's all we got
To know me as hardly golden
Is to know me all wrong, they were

At every occasion I'll be ready for a funeral
At every occasion once more is called a funeral
Every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

I'm coming up only to show you down for
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
To the outside, the dead leaves, they all blow (alive is very poetic)
For'e (before) they died had trees to hang their hope

At every occasion I'll be ready for the funeral
At every occasion once more is called the funeral
At every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

Potential Song Choices

After communally listening to over 200 tracks by over 50 different artists and bands, we have narrowed it down to a few choices. These are the songs that we instantly found our imaginations trying to create a music video for in our heads. And strangely, naturally, all of our thoughts were similar.

Pink Squares- I Was a Cub Scout

Dirt Room- Blue October

My Best Theory- Jimmy Eat World

Self Machine- I Blame Coco

The Funeral- Band of Horses

From here, we are going to listen to these songs over and over and over as a group and discuss our thoughts and opinions on them.