Monday 13th September - Planning (Narrative Ideas)

Planning - Narrative Ideas

During this lesson, amongst the camera angle ideas we also worked on the narrative and plot of the video because we thought as a group that it was vital for music videos to have a flow and/or story, not only to give it a structure but also to engage the audience and make them interested in what the character is singing/saying and what the song is about.

Our first idea, which was later developed on, was the fact that the character wanted to design her perfect boyfriend, because there were faults with her current one. This would tie in quite nicely to having a scene in an empty shop (so without any people) with her singing around the clothes and mannequins (male ones) and acting amongst them. (this would require planning and organisation to try and contact a shop to see if they were willing to open their shop for an hour after closing hours for our use). We then discussed having a section in the song where she picks up "clothes tags", which would have negative traits of her boyfriend on as she picks them up like "coward", "bastard", "violent" (possible ideas). This would link well to the idea we had in our first planning session about her designing her own world.

We also had an idea of the main girl teenager having two different sides to her, almost like a split personality. One side being all naive, vulnerable and innocent (which would hopefully gain sympathy from audience) and one side being rocky, angry, violent, destructive, due to her experience with her boyfriend. This would show different layers to the character and hopefully make the video more interesting. This would require different costumes, which most music videos consist of.

Also, we had this idea, to include the other members of our group, we could have black whole body suits on, and pretend to be mannequins and choreograph certain sections like a mannequin routine with the teenager designing our posture and shape etc. - This links to the song by the line "I'm not designed for this". This line in our sense, is being taken literally and then flipped around to show that she wants to design her own life, but also have an element of her not being able to cope with relationships.

We wanted to incorporate something being broken or smashed in this video to show her frustration, however we all understood that this would be a very difficult effect which, for a music video, has to be enhanced considerably. I mentioned the link between "Broken Strings" - James Morrison (Feat. Nelly Furtado), and our idea, in which several objects like guitars, mirrors etc get broken. However in this video it isn't because of anger its because of love and frustration. We also wanted to use some mirror shots in our music video so portray the teenage girl's normality but also show the multi-role side to her and to perhaps edit shots so she looks at herself as one side of her personality and it reflects her other side.

(above are examples of effects we would like to achieve taken from the "Broken Strings" - James Morrison (Feat. Nelly Furtado) music video, obviously taken in different context)