Planning and Research

When building my core research for the making of the video, I decided that it would be fun and more creative if instead of using the original song to make a video for, myself and Dan, who is fictional hip-hop musician ‘Dan-I-Am,’ should actually record our own cover of the song using special recording software called ‘Auto-tune,’ which is used in this song to create the special effects on the voices. This worked very well and the song ended up sounding good and so I decided on going ahead with creating a music video for this version of the song, once again building further on the article I created for my AS project.

Before I began with filming I had to research music videos and started off by watching the original video for our song by Kanye West and Mr Hudson, I wanted to make my video so it is fairly similar to the original but with other effects making it different. I also watched other videos in this genre, which included such songs as Heartless and Love Lockdown by Kanye West, Human by The Killers and DOA by Jay Z. These all seemed to use one dominant colour in their videos, which related to the theme of the song or suited the feel of the song or the video. I thought this was a good effect to have and looked at the lyrics for ‘Supernova’ and studied its themes and contexts. I decided as it is a song about loosing someone or a bad relationship I decided that the colour blue would be good as the video will be shot showing the artists singing the song alone feeling, ‘blue.’ I chose a lighter blue would be better as not only does it have the certain feel for it, which I wished for, which was like a slight depression, but it is also very light and close to white, showing that the singer is pure and good showing a good clean cut image. I also watched other videos in all genres to widen my knowledge of how to display certain emotions and ways of filming a music video.


I chose a clean cut, smart image for my video by having the musicians singing whilst dressed in smart casual suits so they looked fashionable and smart at the same time. This fits in well with my own musicians, ‘straight-edge’ lifestyle, which I created for him in my magazine coursework. He has to be seen as clean cut and a ‘good’ person throughout as he is a role model for his audience and doesn’t want to set a bad example.




Here are the videos, which I watched when researching my video.




This is the original video and music for the song 'Supernova' by Mr Hudson and Kanye West.
I like this video alot and as my storyline for my fictional artist in my AS coursework is so similar to that of Mr Hudson, I wish to make my video very similar to this one as I intend to slightly mirror the path to mainstream success like Mr Hudson.






This is DOA by Jay Z. I chose to watch this song as it is by the incredibly popular Hip-Hop artist Jay Z and similar to the style of music that my song is and he is an artist which is closely linked to the song due to Jay, Kanye and Mr Hudson work together alot collaborating and producing music.
I liked this video alot as it has a real raw feel to it and also tend to focus on one shade of colour, dark orange.





This is the music video for Human by The Killers. This music video is slightly different to the other ones i have watched when researching. This is because it is by the popular rock group The Killers who make music which is in a different genre to mine, however this song has a real electronic beat and rythm to it similar to Mr Hudsons new style and this song and genre so i thought it would be good to watch.
In this video one key feature is that it is set in the desert. This directly relates to the image of the band. They are from Las Vegas and their style focus's on this and the Las Vegas deserts rather than the casino side. Another good point to this video is that it is focused around the performance from the band particularly the lead singer.






This video is one of two sings i researched by the Hip-Hop artist Kanye West. His new unique style of Hip-Hop is the most similar to that of Mr Hudson so i thought that his videos would be the most influential too for my own.
This video is done as an animation but still focus's on the lead singer performing his song and the deliberate use of bold colours.





This is the second video i researched of Kanye West's. This one is titled 'Love Lockdown' and focus's on the performance of Kanye West in a pure white room. However when the African style drum beat kicks in Arican tribal men start to appear and many other action relating to the style of rythm is shown.
This showed me a lot about the song and how to show the contexts within a song within the video. Even though the music video is similar to the others and features one distinct colour and focus on the artist it is very different also.