Mood Board

Below is the mood board that I have created. This is something that I will be able to take inspiration from when generating ideas for our music video.

Mood board from Emily_Field

Kodaline - High Hopes

I really liked Kodaline's video for 'High Hopes' as it has a very clear, and emotional, narrative. The story starts with a runaway bride interrupting a man's suicide attempt. Throughout the video their relationship is seen growing. Towards the end, the woman's previous fiancé is shown shooting the couple. The audience is then lead to believe that the woman has died, this is due to a close-up shot of her bloodied body and a shot of an empty hospital bed. However, at the very end it is revealed that she is alive.

I like this idea of a plot twist as it makes the audience more excited, particularly as this video is very emotional so the viewer forms a deeper connection with the characters, this makes the events of the video more impactful.

I like the simplicity of the music video and think that it is an excellent example of a well-executed narrative video. The video has the very clear overall message of love and hope, shown by the couple's strong relationship, and enforced by the lyric 'high hopes'. The idea of 'beating death', such as the man's failed suicide attempt and the couple's recovery from the shooting, also adds to the 'hopeful' atmosphere.

This video has been very inspirational and will help my group when we come to storyboard our music video in order to create a clear narrative.

Hypnosis

Our song 'Hypnotic' talks about feeling hypnotised, with the chorus repeating 'hypnotic taking over me', this is one of the most important lyrics in the song and one that we want to address visually throughout our music video. I thought that it would be beneficial to research the definition and history of hypnotism to gain a larger understanding, this will help us to incorporate hypnotic references in our video.

Below is a link to a webpage briefly describing the history of hypnotism:

 http://www.stateofmindhypnosis.com/men/historyhypnosis.html

Lighting Inspiration

Whilst researching other music videos, the group discovered two techniques that we are thinking of using in our music video. The first is from the Calvin Harris & Disciples video for 'How Deep is Your Love':

I like the use of different coloured lights as it helps to create an energised atmosphere. The vibrancy would make our video more unique and exciting, I like that we could use colour as a way to express the character's emotions as colours are usually associated with a specific feeling, I think that this would be very effective as we want to present a reckless, disorientated character. I think that we could achieve this effect either by using a filter on the camera, coloured lighting or in post-production where we can change the colours of clips in iMovie.

The second technique that we liked is from The Weeknd's video for 'The Zone':

I like the idea of projecting images or videos behind the character in the music video, it makes for a more interesting background instead of a black or white screen. As we wanted to film in an urban area, this would be relevant as we could project onto a brick wall similar to the one in the 'The Zone' video.

Initial Ideas

After finalising our song choice, we started to brainstorm ideas for the narrative of our music video. One lyric that jumped out at us was 'Make me feel like someone else', we want to show two different sides of the character in the video, her 'normal' side and the 'hypnotised' side. The lyric 'I don't wanna come back down' has connotations of being high, however, instead of drug use we are interpreting this as not wanting to return to reality from her 'hypnotised' state caused by her overwhelming emotions, we have the idea of presenting her as quite a reckless character. We though that, in order to shock the audience, her 'normal' side should be revealed at the end of the music video, showing the character to be a strong, professional woman, this would allow us to explore themes of feminism and what society thinks a woman should be.

We also started to think about location, we decided that we wanted to include urban areas to appeal to younger audiences as well as to create a busy, confusing atmosphere.

Final Song Choice

Today we looked closely at the lyrics of our three main song choices, looking for ways in which we could apply Goodwin's theory of having visual links with the lyrics. By doing this we discovered which song had the most potential.

Song Choice 1 -
St. Patrick - PVRIS

  

Song Choice 2 -
Hypnotic - Zella Day

 

 

Song Choice 3 -
Hold Me Down - Halsey

We decided that the best song was 'Hypnotic' by Zella Day. We felt that the lyrics were more substantial and that there is a lot more imagery. The verses in 'Hypnotic' are much longer than in 'St Patrick' and 'Hold Me Down', providing us with more opportunities for visual links. The words used in 'Hypnotic' are also more interesting and varied whereas 'St Patrick' repeats many words in the verses, for example 'chemicals', 'spiritual' and 'miracle', this makes the song sound dull, there aren't enough exciting, descriptive words to create an entertaining music video.

We also thought that 'St Patrick' and 'Hold Me Down' were too repetitive, both have extremely short verses that are overshadowed by the long choruses. In 'Hold Me Down' the verses are only 4 lines long as opposed to 'Hypnotic''s 8 lines. In total, the verses in 'Hold Me Down' take up 8 lines of the entire song whilst the chorus and pre chorus take up 36. This is a verse to chorus/pre chorus ratio of about 1:4.5 in comparison to 1:2 in 'Hypnotic'.

Although we felt that the beat was more powerful in 'St Patrick' and 'Hold Me down', we decided that lyrics were more important.

We hope that by choosing 'Hypnotic' there will be enough emotive and descriptive vocabulary to provide the basis of a strong narrative for our video, it will also make it easier to apply Goodwin's theory.

Hypnotic - Zella Day

Today the group discussed another possible song choice for our music video, 'Hypnotic' by Zella Day. I like the beat of this song, however, it isn't as strong as that in our other song choices. I think that there is a lot of interesting imagery created by the lyrics, this would allow us to have a variety of visuals in our music video.

Zella Day is an American singer-songwriter signed to Pinetop Records and Hollywood Records. Her music is classed as indie pop which is fitting as we wanted to produce an indie music video. 'Hypnotic' is the first track on her debut album, 'Kicker', that was released in June 2015. As she is quite a new artist, she is yet to make the charts but her album has received positive reviews.