Hollow's new music video 'The Look' has been under speculation from many critics suggesting that the failure to create a unique video will have a detrimental effect on how much viewers will enjoy the piece. With recent news of this, the bands director Tarun Solanki and his producers have quickly come the the bands rescue with a quick fire, defensive response to protect the bands integrity from the disappointing reviews. The following statement has been received via email in the last few days.
Having read the many reviews that the video has received this recent week for it's failure to challenge pre-existing forms and conventions I felt I had to reply with my own thoughts. Firstly, the success of a piece of work such as a music video is not dependant the originality of it. Secondly I feel it is clear that our video challenges the conventions of a modern video as the song itself is upbeat and quirky whereas we have stripped the video right down so it is focused on the actual music itself. Also the deadpan facial expressions again allows no attention to be lost from the song. Our extensive research proves that we have used and developed forms of real media products. We have re-developed all of our favourite ideas in a different format to create what we feel is a top quality video that our audience demands. We knew what we intended to do and combining what we feel were the culminating parts of videos and re-interpreting them is how we came to construct our video.
The pictures below prove where we have found our inspiration but also are evidence of how we have changed our video to suit our style and make it unique. It is obvious to viewers that there was a heavy influence from the band Metronomy from their video from the song "The Look". We liked their setting of a plain studio so that the focus was on the music and the band. However our video differs from theirs in many ways. We wanted to strip it back even more and opted for a black and white effect as we felt it was captivating and challenged the conventions of many music videos of our indie/alternative genre. These include Mentronomy - The Look and Vampire Weekend - A-Punk. Both of these videos have colour and have a quirky touch to them. However we didn't want to target our audience in this way. We felt to really exploit the music we needed to have our video in black and white and to coincide with this we had every band member emotionless. The deadpan expressions leave the band looking removed and detached and you could say this follows the band name of being "hollow" and having no emotion in them.
The screenshot of Vampire Weekend - A-punk shows how they have a colourful theme and the video is quick paced and they have sped up dancing. This is the opposite to our video as we have a basic black and white visual and our video speed is slow to not effect the focus of the viewer listening to the song. They have all the band members wearing a different colour and standing out from the background. We liked this idea and felt that we should have each band member in different clothing (top). However we felt that to look effective that all the band members should wear black jeans as seen in The 1975 - Girls video. Another way we have developed conventions of another real media product would be through the setting/studio we decided to film in. In all the examples below they are based in a plain white studio to focus on the band. However we decided it was better to have a smaller studio as it helps focus in on the band members and them playing the music as I keep saying. Our main priority is for the viewer to really see the music not just hear it and we felt that The 1975 achieved this best which is therefore why we were guided/inspired by their idea.
It has also been suggested that the Advert and Digipak use conventions of Foster the People's posters. We did take inspiration from Foster the People after seeing this poster. We felt seeing as the video was so basic and plain that we would challenge modern mainstream conventions by switching it up and having a brighter enticing colour scheme but still sticking to the simple theme and this explains why our digipak isn't busy. We liked the colour scheme however we decided we didn't like the image and therefore after testing various images we dropped the idea and went for a simple yet quirky look.
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