Inspiration - A Letter to Teenage Girls

In the pitch we did on Monday Caitlin Moran's 'A Letter to Teenage Girls' was mentioned. Here is a video of her reading the letter.

This may be an inspiration for our music video as although the main character will be a child younger than a teenager, we may still address the idea of speaking to your younger self and wishing you could reassure your younger self that it will all be okay.

Our Music Choice

Although we are still working on the narrative of our music video, we have decided which music it will be set to and that is "Wash" by Bon Iver. I like this song as it is calming and I think easy to put a narrative over, as opposed to a song with more clear lyrics, which might steer the direction of the narrative. This song gives us full creative control.

Pitch and Audience Feedback

Here is our pitch for our initial music video idea. The idea changed quite a lot over the course of the pitch.

 

We got a lot of audience feedback and suggestions over the course of this pitch, so much so that our idea changed quite significantly. We were originally going to have a child running away from growing up in a Peter Pan-ish narrative, with the older version of the child meeting them and telling them that it will be fine and its okay to grow up. Audience feedback helped us to reflect on how difficult that narrative may be to convey, particularly without sound. So the idea developed into the story of an older girl moving away from home and reflecting on her childhood, perhaps with the more feminist angle of "this girl can" even though she was told she couldn't as a child. This idea hasn't been fully developed yet but the pitch was very useful as it reminded me that any narrative we do will have to be conveyed without sound.

Song Idea- Dream

An idea I had for a song we could use was "Dream" by Tessa Violet. This is because it fits with the indie genre we had decided on and I like the beats of the song and think they would be good to edit to.

The lyrics are:
would you be embarrassed, think I'm being careless, if I said you're all I want and more
finger tips and collarbones, if I caught you on your own, would you mind my hand stitched into yours

I got it bad, bad, oh
I see you in my sleep
and I want you mad, madly
come running after me

you're in my bones bones oh I gotta let you go 
but I don't know how when you're rooted in my soul
I gotta tell you

I had a dream last night you came back to me after our goodbye
My arms you fell into and you asked if I'd run away with you
I ain't felt that way before like I couldn't wait just a minute more
and I don't wanna let you go, but dreams slip away I know

You saw me clear as glass I thought you bold as brass, never knew how lovely love could be

forty hours give or take you call me when you are awake and from our phones we'll crumble time and space

I need you here here oh I see you in my sleep
and I want you dear dearly come running after me

you're in my bones bones oh I gotta let you go 
but I don't know how when you're rooted in my soul
I gotta tell you

I don't know if you still think of me (come on come on over)
how you used to love me lovingly (come on come on over)
I know when we left we left a mess (come on come on over)
but if you ask, I promise I'll say... (come on come on)

We could use these lyrics to create symbolism and to match the visuals of our music video. For example, we could use soft focus to imply dreams.

Performance and Narrative Videos

Something that I have noticed is that music videos are hardly ever either narrative and performance, usually a mixture of both. This is what we as a group would like to do. Most of the time this is a character in the video lip syncing or cuts to the artist performing dispersed throughout the narrative. Here are some examples:

 

Mac 3 Vlog 1

Thriller Music Video and Narrative

The Thriller music video was a game-changer for music videos in that it introduced the concept of an extended narrative to a music video, which is something that we as a group might be interested in.

 

Since this video was released, most music videos contain at least some kind of narrative and some are entirely narrative. Some examples are below and I have noticed that they often contain a shocking twist at the end.

Bohemian Rhapsody

The music video to Bohemian Rhapsody was very advanced for the time (1975) and the use of lighting and different camera angles is very effective. Although we can't match Queen, the way the video mixes between a live performance and very dramatic lighting could be used as an inspiration in some way.

Performance videos

We have been looking at the different types of music videos, although we are not looking to do a purely performance video, it is useful to see what the typical videos look like, as we may want to include some performance elements to our video. They usually involve dancing and a band.

Inspiration: Colour Bandits

Today in my group we were discussing ideas for our music video and we liked the idea of using coloured powder. The video below is a spoken word piece, but I think it uses powder very well.

My Group

My group for making the music video is Megan, JB, Kirti and myself. The links to their blogs are in the sidebar.