Post 8: My music video

Timeline and brainstorm

My music video will involve a narrative section and a performance section. By editing both of these together it links in with Goodwin's theory of key features in a music video, by creating a performance and narrative-based video, encouraging repeat viewings. In order to plan all of this out I first brainstormed any potential themes for my music video through the lyrics and my thoughts for the potential meanings behind them. After finding a suitable theme, being a crazy ex-girlfriend chasing her boyfriend, I created a timeline laying out the basic order of scenes for my video. From this timeline I could then begin to think about where I wanted to shoot all of my scenes. For this I created a location reccie, where I could plan out all of my settings, and work around any dangers that were brought up by this.

My location reccie

My storyboard

One of my shootboard pages

After all of this I could begin to plan all of my specific shots, which I added onto my shootboard. I colour coded this, with different colours of the post-it notes being different settings, and drawing a snippet of the scene to plan out my framing. After all of this I could begin to create my shootboards, detailing the action and dialogue happening in each shot, and the order each shot was shot in, allowing for more efficient shooting days. These 3 documents are seen below. The music video 'Hot N Cold' by Katy Perry influenced my ideas greatly through the use of multiple codes and conventions. She incorporates an intro scene before the music starts to clearly convey the message of the video to the audience, being an indecisive groom. This helps the audience to understand the video, which reduces confusion on their part. This influenced my initial ideas as I wanted to include such a scene to directly convey the message and meaning behind my video, which I then added to my timeline. Katy Perry used a wide variety of shots in her video, from CU to ELS, and this paired with quick, jump-cut editing creates fast and engaging scenes. In the running scene at the start of her video, a large number of camera angles were used, which created a chaotic atmosphere, something which I wanted to replicate. When planning out my final running montage, I planned to shoot a multitude of camera angles of the same scene to be able to quickly cut between them in the editing process, which I added to my shootboard.

Hot N Cold costumes

The costumes in Hot N Cold play a large role in the video as well, signify each of the characters' roles and personality. At 2:15 into the video, the scene with all the brides in features them with dripping black makeup from their eyes. This along with their ripped dresses presents them as chilling, encoding to the audience that they are feared by the groom. This influenced the planning of my video, as I used costumes for the ex-girlfriend character to be bright coloured and erratic, which encoded her crazy personality for the audience to decode. 'Hot N Cold' also uses a variety of settings, which keeps the audience engaged. I chose to mirror this in the planning for my video by adding my settings onto my location reccie, with the ending montage featuring a variety of settings being cut between frequently in order to keep the audience interested and entertained. A wide variety of ethnicities are present in 'Hot N Cold', representing a large number of social groups, with Caucasian, African American and more cast members present. When casting for my music video I also did the same with a diverse cast, featuring Indian, Asian and Caucasian actors.