Monday 21 September 2009

GCT - Group Discussion: Potential Ideas & Concepts

Cameron and I have been discussing potential ideas and concepts for our music video over the last few days. We both talked about our ideas and merged some of them together to create new ideas. We both agreed that we would not want our video to be solely performance, narrative or conceptual based but a mixture of all three. We believe that this would be much more interesting as well as being in keeping with the genre of our chosen track, which is 'Split Needles' by The Shins which Cameron has already posted about.

Our main idea came from the lyrics of the song itself, when analysing the song’s lyrics we interpreted the meaning to be about a young boy growing up and his future unfolding in front of him, unfortunately he is being pressured into the set religion and ideological ideas of a capitalist job where he will be wearing a suit. By doing this he will be paid with an idyllic wife living in suburbia. The idea is that the boy does not want this and the video will show him trying to break away from these conventional ideologies and choosing his own path.

We also discussed visual techniques and how we would accomplish our preferred reading of our video through the use of these techniques. One idea that came up which we both likes the sound of was using awkward passage of time. We believed this could be used to show how the young boy is different from all the other men who have followed the conventional lifestyle. We would do this by showing the boy standing there whilst businessmen rush around him as they have been sped up. Another way to do this would be to get the actor to walk and do everything backwards, and then if we reversed the footage it would show him walking forwards whilst all the other businessmen walk backwards, showing how the boy is different from the rest of the men. Towards the end of the song the lyrics suggest that the boy has given in and that it is his time to embrace the ideological lifestyle, this is evident from the lyrics “You're old enough, boy, Too many summers you've enjoyed. So spin the wheel, We'll set you up with some odd convictions, Because you're finally golden, boy” Because of this we decided a good visual technique to illustrate this giving in to the convention ways would be the use of awkward passage of time again. The boy would be shown stepping off the curb in slow motion whilst all the business men rush past him, as soon as his foot touches the road he would rush off to as if he has joined them all.

Cameron and I also discussed some camera techniques that could be used when showing the lead singer during a performance based section of the video. We have thought about the use of a fish-eye lens during first person mode of address shots as a quirky twist to show the singer as present but absent from the viewer whilst still breaking the fourth wall.

Other ideas we discussed included things such as random people tapping on objects as the drum beats play, as if they are making the sounds of the drums by tapping their hands. Other ideas involved literal concepts which would illustrate the lyrics, performance based ideas and having a band member playing in awkward places in the corner of shots as the narrative unfolded.

We have also looked at other existing videos for inspiration and have taken a keen interest in Carpark North – Human. We believe this video has used visual techniques very successfully. Here is the video below:

2 comments:

  1. Your concept is really shaping up. You are thinking already about possible visual techniques to convey your message. 'Human' is one of my favourite videos in recent years. Beautifully shot. Obviously HD helps - but look particularly at the use of light in this video. Because it is an external location, the director was able to control this. Trickier on external location.

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  2. Lighting is going to be pretty difficult for us. We're going to have to make the best of it during editing, might have to spring for a couple of trches ha.

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