Group: Conceptual Development - Tuesday 30th October

On Tuesday we all went to Laurel's house, sat down and brainstormed every idea we had about our music video because we were't completely sure where we were heading. We started by screen shooting every still or shot that had inspired us and then started to come up with our treatment.

Originally, because we were so inspired by Bombay Bicycle's music video for Carry Me, we had always planned to create a conceptual video. 

However after many evaluations and inspirations from performance and narrative based videos - stated in previous blog posts - we have decided that in our video we want to incorporate all 3 different types in our video. 

Alex found the video Little Secrets by Passion Pit and how the audience in the performance video had bags over their head giving the video a depth with it's meaningful connotations. This video along with Sia - Chandelier and AlunaGeorge - Best Be Believing gave us the idea that we wanted to use our video to portray a societal message whether it be about ideologies associated with youth, mental illness or addictions.

A saturated shot from The Family Rain video

• Our first ideas were that Isaac should have a piece of tape across his mouth and a smile should be drawn across it showing that he is trying to force himself to appear happy when really he is the opposite. Then we remembered the video Trust Me...I'm A Genius by The Family Rain when it changes from normal saturation to hyper saturated shot to emphasise the situations.
• We then came up with the idea that the shots where Isaac has the tape over his mouth would be de-saturated to visually signify his depression and then he would have flashbacks to when he was much happier that have an increased saturation.
• Our thought so far are that he could be going back to the places where he used to be happy to try and find his joy again. The juxtapositioning of his happy flashbacks and miserable shots would parallel in comparison to emphasise his situation

• Because the track we chose is in the Dance genre we want to have dancers in our video and we have asked and had confirmations from 4 of our friends to be in the video.
• Some of the shot ideas we've had include: close up slow motion shots of the dancers in front of a graffitied wall and reverse shots of someone spinning on one foot.

• The lyrics and tempo of the song begin immediately rather than a gradual build up so we thought it would be better if the video starts before the track. We were inspired by the beginning of Rizzle Kicks - Down With the Trumpets where one of the characters gets out a tape and puts it in the stereo, when he presses play the music starts. We want our main character to press play and then our track to start.

• Before the main character presses play we were inspired by the beginning of Sylvan Esso - Coffee when the camera follows the feet of one of the characters without showing their face and who they are. We think that we will do this at the beginning of our music video to create illusiveness and an ominous feeling towards the main character.
• We were also inspired by the tourist edits and they are similar to digipacks previously created by Snakehips.

• We want the main character to mouth the lyrics and specifically we want him to mouth the second line of the lyrics because it would be too sudden for him to do the first. When he mouths this lyric we want there to be a black background with his face lit at an angle that creates shadows across his face.

• After coming up with all of these conceptual ideas we considered that because the main character is having such extreme mood swings from him being ecstatic in the past but depressed in the present that we could represent the mental disorder Bipolar. We thought it would be incredibly appropriate to the narrative after reading this description of Bipolar disorder from Wikipedia:
• Bipolar disorder, also known as bipolar affective disorder (and originally called manic-depressive illness), is a mental disorder characterized by periods of elevated mood and periods of depression. The elevated mood is significant and is known as mania or hypomania depending on the severity or whether there is psychosis. During mania an individual feels or acts abnormally happy, energetic, or irritable.