Research- Hurts

I would have preferred to have work in a group for my media studies task but due to uneven amounts of people I will be working solo. I do enjoy working by myself but this year I want to involve lots of different people in my music video so it isn’t so personal I can share the experience with others. This year we have been assigned the task of creating a music video for an official band or artist.

The band that I am focusing on is a duo called ‘Hurts’

They are a British synthpop duo formed in 2009, from Manchester

The duo consists of singer Theo Hutchcraft who was born August 30, 1986 in Richmond, North Yorkshire and synthesist Adam Anderson who was born May 14, 1984 in Manchester

Their debut album Happiness, which was released in September 2010, has reached the Top 10 in 12 European countries, and has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. The band has also sold more than 1 million singles worldwide.

I have found it really difficult to obtain any decent and accurate information on this band so I have sourced all over the internet for real interviews by the Hurts to try and get some accurate information from them.

I recently found an interview on the BBC music website and its only a 1.58 interview and is basically a short summary of the were they are currently creating their music and a brief summary of how they formed.

They are terrible at interviews Adam Anderson the sythesist doesn’t actually talk throughout the whole interview its left to Theo Hutchcraft the main singer to talk to the interviewer. There are more ‘urrms’ than words in this interview, as Theo really does seem to struggle to string a decent sentence together.

I wrote the interview down to try and get some sense out of it. They don’t seem at all excited to be interviewed and Theo only seems to reply in a very monotone voice.

I was quite lucky to come across a written interview, in my ASOS magazine

It was quite interesting as there are some questions answered that I would have never of found.

It is quite interesting to know that their musical influence is Prince. “He is actually the main muse throughout everything we do- production, visually and aesthetically speaking”

I was quite intrigued by their response to ‘your videos are very dramatic are you a dramatic person’ their response being.

“ Personally we are both quite devoid of emotion- we’ve had it beaten out of us. But we like to make people feel intelligent and value and lots of pop music patronises people- for that reason we try to cram in as much drama as possible’.

I actually found of the ‘real’ reason why they called ‘Hurts’

“Its means two things- the frequency we measure sound in and an emotion. It’s simple.”

What initially interested me in Hurts was their connection with 80’s theme, they physically resemble the 80’s Synthpop look but bring new vocal and musical talent to the genre(ADD)

I knew someone that I could get in contact easily when it comes to an individual lead vocalist.

As I know quite a bit about their background already I am able to distinguish that this was a band that suited a style that would be easy for me to distinguish

I wanted to keep the video to the stereotypical genre style so it would be easy to distinguish the elements of other Synth pop videos so the audience could engage and understand what I’m trying to achieve as intertextual reference is concern I am researching in great depth the key elements of other synth pop videos for example props, costumes, settings, and editing to achieve a successful outcome for my music video

I actually listen to their music and have their album I think it is a good idea to focus on a music group that I am passionate about as it would allow me to interpret the music video with ease and easily be inspired and not mind listening to it over and over.

After listening to their music constantly all week I have decided to focus on the song ‘Illuminated’ as it is a enjoyable simple song I’m quite lucky about the lyric the songs tempo is mainly lento which is the music terms for a moderately slow pace the lyrics are sung very slowly so this will allow lip syncing to not be as much as a challenge as I presumed. My biggest challenge is understanding and producing enough successful elements in the music video to match the Synth-pop genre.