Costumes in Existing Music Videos

Whilst my group was storyboarding, we started to think about potential locations and costumes. Music videos of the indie genre (like ours) usually have a smaller budget, leading to limited locations and, usually, limited costume changes. However, indie music videos also place a lot of emphasis on mise-en-scene. I have looked at existing indie music videos to gain an understanding of the typical amount of costumes that are worn, hopefully providing some inspiration for our own product.

Aurora - Runaway:



This video conforms to indie conventions as it only contains about four different costumes. I particularly liked the costume choices in 'Runaway' as they are all of the same colour palette, this colour palette is also seen in the locations. This motif adds fluidity between locations and makes the video more visually-appealing. The colour palette of our music video is a very important element, we have chosen to use contrasting locations with contrasting colour schemes, such as day time locations and dark, night locations. We also wanted some of our costumes to contrast the locations that they appear in, for example, we have planned to use a white costume in our vibrant, graffiti-covered Brick Lane location. I feel that having a contrasting colour palette will help to convey our music video's theme of confusion and disorientation, the idea of 'contrast' also reflecting our protagonist's contrasting personalities - reckless yet sophisticated.

 

 

Halsey - Hurricane:



The costumes in Halsey's 'Hurricane' are plentiful, however this is due to the inclusion of numerous characters, each only limited to one costume. The lack of costume changes helps to make the video more realistic, focusing on the narrative. The exclusion of costume changes is also fitting for the short time-span of the narrative, again, making it more realistic. The costumes and other mise-en-scene are extremely important in grounding the narrative of the video in the past - the characters are styled in typical 90s fashion. This is particularly inspirational as we want to include 'grunge' inspired costumes and locations, a style that was popular in the 1990s.

Meg Myers - Monster:



Meg Myers' music video for 'Monster' in extremely simple - it contains only one costume and one location. This allows the audience to focus on the song and the artist's emotional performance.

After looking at these music videos, it is clear that indie music videos limit their costumes, however, include thoughtful and relevant costumes and locations to the style of song and video, for example, the slower paced 'Monster' uses one costume compared to the faster paced 'Runaway' that includes three. A recurring theme within these music videos seems to be the idea of having a new costume per location, the maximum amount being three or four. We plan to include about four locations in our music video, meaning that we would need about four different costumes - this number conforms to the indie conventions. I think that this is a suitable number as we don't want to make our music video to complicated and extravagant, we want to make the narrative the focus.