This is our poster to promote King of Spain's tour. 'Come Play With me' is an actual tour that is going to happen this summer and King of Spain will be taking part, The tour is promoted by 'Shifty Disco'.

For this poster I have used original pictures from the band member that were available at their website. The title on the poster is part of the actual King of Spain Logo, with I cropped and enlarged to fit the picture. This poster is supposed to be advertising the band and their upcoming performances; the style of the poster is pretty much my original idea, I tried to make as original as possible, but the way that I have placed the name of the places they will be performing was something that I saw in a NME magazine.

STEP BY STEP

1) This is the first image I used, I decided to use the 'sponge' effect to make nearly everything black and white so that the guitar would stand out more, and I also enlarged the picture a little and tilted it slight to the right.

2) Then I got the lead singer's picture and enlarged it as well, and decreased the opacity of the picture so that it had this transparent look, so we are able to see both pictures, and also I thought that the blending effect looked really good and unique.

3) After I used the bands original logo at the bottom of the poster, and from that logo I used a tool to crop the title 'King of Spain' from their original logo. Also I used an effect to change the colour of their logo and make it sort of negative and white so that it would stand out.

4) Then I added the extra information like the 'website' at the bottom if people wish to know more about the tour. and added the name of the tour 'Come Play With Me'

Finally I added the name of the places they would be playing and tilted it to the left to make it more appealing and original.

Narrative Storyboard

Bibliography and band web links

List of references for sources of information used to analyse and discuss music videos, and for information regarding the band King of Spain:

• Wikipedia for some basic information on Michel Gondry, Independent music genre and lo-fi music
• The Internet Movie Database
• The King of Spain home website and its MySpace and Facebook pages: www.myspace.com/kingofspainmusic, http://kingofspain.co.uk/, http://twitter.com/kingofspainuk
• Shifty Disco website www.shiftydisco.co.uk
• LongRoadMedia.com
• YouTube.com
• Media Magazine

Auteur Study: Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is a French film, commercial and music video director and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scene. He has scripted inspiring imagery in the form of commercials, music videos, shorts, feature films, and other media. He is partially credited with reviving the music-video format in the 1990's. Michel Gondry's age is deceiving, however: his works are marked with a child-like explorative eye. Like old-school hip-hop Gondry's films are his playground. He tells stories about people and their lives while questioning our definitions of reality. His characters are honest and human and his worlds playfully reflect the interaction between the worlds we live in: nature, society, and the mind.

In his video clips and commercials, he was a pioneer for a lot of things. For example the video clip he made for IAM (Je danse le Mia) was the first video clip using the morphing technics. And above all he invented the technique of several cameras taking pictures in the same time around somebody. This technique was used for the first time in a commercial for insurance, then in Björk's Army of Me" video clip and in The Matrix (1999).

His career as a filmmaker began with creating music videos for the French rock band Oui Oui, in which he also served as a drummer. The style of his videos for Oui Oui caught the attention of music artist björk who asked him to direct the video for her song "Human Behaviour". The collaboration proved long-lasting, with Gondry directing a total of seven music videos for Björk. Other artists who have collaborated with Gondry on more than one occasion includeDaft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radiohead, and Beck. Gondry has also created numerous television commercials.

Our Top Ten Music Videos

The previous post of our Top Ten Music videos did not include video links to view them. For analysis on these music videos please look for our older post under the same name under our December archive of the blog as this post does not contain the analysis of the following music videos.

The embedding code for the Daft Punk - Around the World music video is disabled, so unfortunately we can't show it.

Short Version

Long Version

Flick the Switch music video

King of Spain

This is the band we have filmed for the performance of our music video project called King of Spain. We first developed an interest in the band when we sampled their music on their MySpace page when we were looking for a 3 minute track to use in the video. What particular peeked our interest in the band was the demo version of their song Flick the Switch, which after several listenings to the song we instantly knew that this was the song we wanted to use for the video because we felt that the song had depth and different interpretations without the restriction of a defined narrative by the lyrics. Also because the band was unlabelled and not signed on to create any of their songs into a music video by a record company, this meant that we didn't have to follow a similar narrative or structure that was already predefined by previous videos.

Their website and blogs told us that their next gig would be in London at the Notting Hill performing ArtsClub. We then arranged with the club manager to get permission to film the band performing at the club, which we were allowed to do. After King of Spain's performance at the club our group leader asked them to perform for our music video which the band happily agreed to for us. Thus our contact with the band was arranged and we begin pitching and sharing our ideas with the band for the music video. Since we were using a demo version of the song 'Flick the Switch' the band gave us the permission to place the video on YouTube as the official Demo music video version to the song. The studio performance took place in a private recording room at East Putney.

King Of Spain, who have been together for 3 years, were also featured on ShiftyDisco10, a triple CD compilation album celebrating the Indie label’s tenth birthday back in 2007. They also run 'flux=rad', a regular night at London's legendary 12 Bar Club aimed at showcasing the best in lo-fi/alternative music.