Stage 2 - Developing Ideas

We are now in groups, starting to develop ideas. New ideas and thoughts have come from looking at the purposes and existing examples of music videos for the report. With this in mind we came together to compare are favourite videos, their devices and themes. From this we formed the idea I will briefly lay otu later.

I already had a basic narative for a paticualr track which I thought was very visual. The song was "I'm New Here" by Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX. The song goes on quite a journey, from th initial section, to a more phycadelic section, to a heavy drop back to the original samples. This had circularity as well as variation. Considering this, and given that I am heavily influenced by the non-linear, experimental narratives of Christopher Nolan, I thought perhaps we could intergrate some sort of circulatory, or restructuring the end to mirror the musical journey.

I was inspired for the narrative by a random post I saw on Tumblr. There was an artist, who's speciality was to find random pictures of people on the internet, from brouchures, promotinal shots, tumblr posts etc and draw them as a model. I thought this was a dark knid of hobby. I knew this had potential for a story, and matched with the song, I knew it could be dark, and also link the themes of the musical artist in the lyrics to the visual artist in the story.

All of these initial thoughts were before the brief, so once we'd recieved the final rules and regulations, and had to consider motion graphics, we started to work towards the product you will see when the project is finished. We tried to take inspiration from other videos that we liked as a group. Jack mentioned the video "Show Me a Sign" by Modestep, where real world objects and characters suddenly turned into comic book style, animated drawings. We thought this kind of effect could be recreated using the resources at our disposal. The client suggested the Cut out effect on Photoshop. I thought this could be effective, especially when only applied to select objects or moments in the video. Also changing the sliders per frame could give a kinetic, ever changing look, and really make it come to life. We knew we wanted to use this but it was hard to pin point where. Just before starting the Production stage of our schedule, we decided that we could use this for the perfromance of Gil Scott-Heron. As it is, we weren't ever going to be able to get first hand footage of the artist so we would be using the exisiting, pre remix official video. Also this artist has now passed away. We decided that the Cut out effect would be best applied to the footage of GSH. We could then make him look like a sketch on the artists paper coming to life. This fits in with the themes and ideas of the video (the artist character knows no bounds between his work and his life, GSH is bought back to life with music and visuals, the people in the portraits are no longer among the living etc etc).

Josh's favourite videos involved cause and effect, such as the work of OK-Go. Moments where a sound or action sets off another. As we knew the general structure of the video, it was hard to add in cause and effect. The story lends itself to a kind of reverse cause and effect. Instead later into production, we considered infusing motion graphics. The way to do this would be for a lyric to be heard or said onscreen and for an animated word to appear. Nothing tacky, something that responds to the sound and image. I looked at Pulp fiction for inspiration. I liked the clean, front on, solid colour, subtle animation, and also the typography of the title.



Pulp Fiction: Simple Motion Graphics + Cause and Effect

 At time of writing we are thinking of using a simple animation on the word "Everyword" to add emphasis to it and to round off the use of motion graphics with the cut out and the countdown clock (as referenced in production work I came up with the clock idea early on as not only does assure people that something cool will happen when the clock hits zero, but also will be used to anchor the audience when we jump backwards at the closing section of the video.

The addition of these features helped us round off the story and script. We had an idea of the themes, the intertextuality etc. The story would feature the artist, moving into a new studio in a new town (I'm New here, can you show me around?) He starts drawing a picture of a computer image of  girl. He works away at it and is invited to a party where he sees the girl (I met him at a party). They have a worlwind romance and he becomes obssesed. One day she stumbles upon his studio, entering she sees the portrait, and finds a stack of similar ones, before she is attacked by a stranger (presumably the artist). The narrative returns to the start where we see that he actually has looked up random girls on the internet, started drawing the girl from one of these images and then happened to bump into her at a party. He then moves on to the next town, and it's revealed to the audience she is just one in a sequence of girls.

Over the remaining days of pre-production we will go about finalising details, both creative and practical for the shooting, as well as going about the task of creating assets and obtaining props for the shoot.

Stage 1 - Music Video

Our final project, the music video, has started. We will be producing a video for the Global Beats competition, selecting a track from an exisiting lsit or pitching our own.

We started looking at existing student music videos. There were certain techniques that I liked which made certain videos stand out and look less like a student video, and more like a real video. The standout video for me was the Lulla Violet video. This featured heavy use of strobe lighting. This is something which gives a look of high production value, but was presumably easy to come by. This single technique, matched against the harsh, underground setting and mis-en-scene suited the track, but also took best advantage of the resources avaiable. Another video composited a motion graphics onto everyday objects and locations. This again shows how they are getting normal thigns we all have access to, and putting a spin on it to rise it above it's un-cinematic origin. Many of the videos had tried to recreate mainstream techniques and style, but the standard of the cameras and the lack of any adaption for resources made the more creative choices stand out to me.

These kind of decisions will effect my intial ideas. I will try to base ideas around plausability and making something creative out of something available to us.

I have started looking at my favourite videos as inspiration for the ideas we will concieve when in groups.

I like the black and white, heavily urban style of The View from the Afternoon by Arctic Monkeys and it's use of everyman architeture as some sort of grand setting. It's also quite ambiguous and each viewer could take thier own meanings from the video:


One interesting example I am also a fan of is probably not classed by everyone as a video, but in You Think You're (John Fucking Lennon) by Glassjaw they use a one take perfromance in what appears to be some abandoned squat. I like the fact that this captures the DIY, spur of the moment attitude of the band and has swagger even with minimal production value and completes the purpose of a video; to show a visual representation of a song:
Lastly, You've Seen the Butcher by Deftones, is heavily ambiguous, over stylised but importantly has a controversial and evil third act. This sees the band playing amongst loads of half naked girls, a convention of boasting rapper videos, but instead, everyone and everything is showered in blood. There is alot of subtext in the video and again, it's up to the viewer to make a decision on the meaning. It also perfectly represents the epic, heavy vibe of the song: