Conventions of the indie genre

In today's lesson we began to think about what we wanted our band's image to look like. We chose the genre indie out of a hat at random, which as a group we felt confident with coming up with a stereotypical indie artist's image for our digipack.

Typical conventions of an indie music video are:

• Location is usually outdoors or urban
• Close ups of the band/artist musical instruments
• Tends to be in black and white/dull colours (depends on tone of lyrics)
• Band/artist are focused on throughout the video
• Dark locations
• Lots of extreme close ups and long shots
• The band/artist are shown playing their instruments and performing at gigs
• Show their fans
• The band/artist wear casual clothing

Some examples of Indie artists and bands today are, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Iver, Bombay Bicycle Club, Bright Eyes, Florence and the Machine, The Fratellis, Ellie Goulding, The Pigeon Detectives, Noah and the Whale, Kate Nash, Mumford & Sons, MGMT, The Maccabees, Lykke Li, The Kooks, The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, The Zutons, Damien Rice, The Script, The Smiths, Snow Patrol, The Temper Trap, Two Door Cinema Club, The Vaccines, Vampire Weekend and The Wombats.

Typical conventions of indie digipacks:

• They show an image of the band/artist - typically with their instruments
• List of tracks on the back
• Handwritten style font
• Uses all capital letters
• Have an ongoing theme throughout the digipack e.g a colour or image

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnhXHvRoUd0

 In Kings of Leon's 'Use Somebody' music video, they focus on the bands image as they perform to fans. This is a typical indie video as it not only focuses on the band performing but also has another story going on in the background which in this video show the band as human beings as they are in a pub playing snooker with cars and girls. There are also special effects used as there are shots of cars on the motorway at night which is sped up.

Sometimes the artists do not even feature in the music video for their songs. However Indie music videos can be performance based either featuring the entire band, or simply featuring the main vocalist. Narrative music videos in the Indie genre are typically quite arty, and symbolic, rather than spelling out exactly what the lyrics say.