Video Research

I decided to do some research into other music videos in the psychedelic genre to find the conventions and common features. What I found were the occurring themes of abstract/surreal narratives and settings, the heavy use of visual effects, attempts to make the video feel vintage/amateur through the use of handheld cameras etc and natural settings and mise-en-scene. I decided to look at some different videos within the genre to look at how they used these features.

Half Loon- Swearword
This video by London Based band Half Loon contains some elements of performance blended with visual effects. However these visual effects are used to create a vintage style feel using sepia colours. The video follows an abstract narrative and features scenes of nature. I like how it uses a mix of features however I feel it gets repetitive with its lack of any sort of narrative structure.

Melody’s Echo Chamber- I Follow You 
This video features a heavy use of colourful visual effects along with a nature related mise-en-scene with features such as the protagonist swimming under water for the whole video and a reoccurring film of a tiger. It follows an abstract narrative that doesn’t seem to bare any relation to the lyrics and no performance elements; making it more of an art clip than a conventional music video. I like how even though it follows this abstract narrative; it still seems to suit the song very well and I love the slowly changing colours in the visual effects. However I feel like sometimes it is hard to tell what is happening in the narrative.

Allah Las- Follow You Down
This video heavily features vintage style filming techniques and a surreal narrative and setting that seem to be loosely based on the western film genre. I am a big fan of this vintage effect achieved through the use of effects such as purposely grainy filming and hand held camera filming which really gives it an old-school/amateur feel. The band themselves perform as actors while there is limited performance elements; only featuring lip syncing by the backing vocalist. I believe this video is very successful so I am struggling to find a negative point about it; however it’s lack of colourful visual effects does make it less conventional within the genre than other videos.

Temples-Shelter Song
This video is a very conventional psychedelic music video. It features performance, vintage style effects/filming, psychedelic visual effects and patterns and nature settings. I like how it uses a good mix of all the features of psychedelic videos, however I dislike how the abstract narrative seems to have no sort of order at all.

Tame Impala- Half Glass Full Of Wine This video features a heavy use of visual effects mixed with performance. It also uses a large amount of psychedelic art and animation compared to other videos; which I liked. It again follows an abstract narrative using montage editing. What I also liked about this video is that it turns the clips of performance of the song into psychedelic effects themselves, creating a very trippy feel. I also like the use of the image of a walrus which could be seen as intertextually referencing the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus” which is seen as one of the first psychedelic songs with a m video. The only thing I slightly dislike about this video is the sometimes heavy use of drawn animation whereas I prefer video and visual effects.