Lemon Jelly - Influences for Visual Communication 1

As my project is to create a music track I think it was only natural that I was most likely going to be influenced by other music videos. My research for this project started with me looking back at music videos that I liked. I tried to analyse what I liked about them and if there were any aspects or techniques that I could take away from them.

The main video that I really thought I could use aspects of was ‘Stay with you’ by Lemon Jelly. The track is taken off their last album, which was released in 2005 and named, ’64-’95. The accompanying video is infused with animated psychedelic visuals that respond to subtle changes in the music, such as the beat and vocals. The video was created by Airside, which is a specialized graphic design company. They are best known for their stylized and colourful animation as well as illustration work. They are directly liked to Lemon Jelly, as co-founder Fred Deakin is one half of the music duo. All promotional material for Lemon Jelly to date including posters, album covers and music videos has been produced by Airside. They released a DVD under the same title as the album that contained all the albums tracks with accompanying visuals. Some of these visuals are progressive and would work as stand-alone music videos, while others are more repetitious, ever-changing variations of a given visual theme.

The reason I like the ‘Stay with you’ video so much is that it works extremely well with the music. The animations have a relationship with the music and the visuals change when the music does. There are also really subtle changes like the gradual changes in colour schemes as the track progresses as well as the changing visuals that pop up as part of the animation. I think that this creates a more sophisticated way of matching visuals to music rather having a more traditional performance video or narrative driven video and in turn gives it a better sense of atmosphere. It also means that the track and video are closely linked so people will associate the track with the video and vice versa. In my music video I want to use a similar approach but using footage I’ve filmed and minus the bright psychedelic colours, but still embodying the concept of subtle changes that are linked to changes in the music. I think that colour could be a very effective way of doing this, what I have in mind is having sections in black and white and then introducing flashes of colour.

This brings me onto vjing, which is exactly what I’ve been talking about where you link music and visuals. It is this idea that I want to run with and I think my music video will have a sense of vjing to it, which is why I am working with Dan. I need to make sure that it still feels like a music video though so I want to have a running theme throughout the video but not so limiting that I cant chop and change the visuals as a vj would.