Music Video planning / Initial thoughts

For this project we are being tasked to create a full length music video for an unsigned band. To do this we obviously needed to pick a band and a song, we figured a good starting place would be www.unsigned.com since it is a website taht compiles a large number of bands with no record label into one place. we came to this website with an open mind regarding genre of music as whatever music we picked, we would then do extensive research into the style. This research will include famou musicians in this genre, some of the conventions of music videos of that genre, and some of the history of the videos of this genre. In the end we decided to choose Rock, since a lot of videos from this genre tend to be very light hearted and comical. This would play to our strengths as writers because we tend to like comedic themes.

We finally picked a song, from a band called 'Scar' called 'As long as you know'. We decided to choose this one because it is simple, catchy and light hearted. The simplicity of the song is a godsend as it gives us an immense amount of creative freedom story-wise, shot wise and editing wise. The tone of the song can allow the video to swing both ways, both serious and light hearted.

Link to the song:
http://www.unsigned.com/scar

 

To get a load of early ideas we sat down as a group and took it in turns to listen to the song properly for the first time. While before we had briefly given it a listen, we hadn't been paying attention to the lyrics or general tone of the song. Whilst one person in the group listened to the song we had them recount and details or themes they thought suited the music to allow us to get their very first impression. We felt this would be important as we want to connect with what the majority of the audience will think of the first time they hear the song. Hopefully this will create some kind of familiar feeling image for the audience and be easy to relate to.

 

 

For the most part our thoughts about the songs were split almost 50/50 in a lot of aspects. We all decided that it should follow some kind of narrative, instead of being primarily band shots, however Elliott and i felt it should be disjunctured from the song lyrics while Becky and Eddie felt that it should be illustrative. We all agreed there should be some kind of female character that is the focal point of the story, however some of us thought we shouldn't have a serious tone while some of us did. Overall it came down to a group decision to piece together the best ideas from everyone to get initial ideas for a storyboard.