R+P Post 19: My influences and vision for the project

We created a 'steal-o-matic' video in order to portray our visions and influences for our music video.

There are many benefits for producing this video:

• gives a sense of structure
• shows both performance and narrative aspects and how much of the video each one takes
• suggests our London location and certain shots we want to get
• helps us know what to experiment with, e.g. split screens
• gives an idea of how much the girl and boy feature in it

     

The main things we wanted to show with this video are:

• The narrative story throughout - girl gets into argument with her boyfriend about what she is wearing and shortly after receives a text from her mother telling her what to do, she feels so pressurised by everyone in her life she goes into London to let off steam but her boyfriend follows her there in attempt to make up which they eventually do at the end of the video
• The performance elements - girl and boy singing and djing in the studio, sometimes there's individual shots of just the girl or boy in the studio
• The type of location shots we want - urban streets such as in Shoreditch or Hackney and shots of red London buses
• The colourful make up and clothes that the Mira and the narrative performer wear - demonstrated in the video by Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry

Some of the studio shots we included are from 'American Boy' by Estelle which show a male and female in the studio lip syncing the song. This a key part of our video as it experiments with the different kind of shots we can get of the duo in the studio.

Some of the narrative shots we used are from 'Habits' by Tove Lo as they show a girl in the centre of the frame with changing backgrounds. It was important we put this in the steal-o-matic because it is something we are keen to use in our own video.

After we'd created this video, we asked our teacher to watch it and give us some feedback. Here is some of the constructive criticism she gave us:

• Edit the shots with quick cuts between them to allow them to fit the beat of the music
• Focus on how much percentage of the video will be performance and how much will be narrative
• Include lots of major close ups of the performers faces to contrast to wider and longer shots as this is a typical feature or music videos
• Experiment with interpretations of the lyrics, e.g. include shots of narrative performer throwing away phone to signify getting rid of restraints