CONTENTS

PAGE 2,3………………………………………………… Camera Shots

PAGE 4,5,6,7 ………………………………………… Mise en scene

PAGE 8,9,10 ………………………………………………. Visuals/

Effects

Page 11 …………………………………………………………………. Music video

theory

It was a long process regarding how and where we would start drawing up ideas and
inspiration for our music video.

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We thought to ourselves, what do we enjoy in a music video or even a film?

It then dawned on us, not many music videos focus on a solid narrative. We felt this
could be an opportunity for us to pursue such an idea. With little chance of copyright
issues, due to the originality of self-produced music it gave us a scope to be
unconventional. Our ideas however had to come from somewhere, and this will now
be explained.

In terms of conventions, we based our focal point around documentary. We liked the
Ryan Leslie video in particular as we where able to identify social realism, which is
certainly different in a music video. Below is a shot from the Ryan Leslie video (this
is a documentary)

The tracking shot has recently been popular within Hip-Hop videos, we where
inspired by these two music videos as well.

‘The show goes on’ Lupe Fiasco

‘Beast Mode’ B.O.B

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Referring back to the ‘documentary feel’ before we even set of on our storyboard, it
was extremely important to understand the conventions of documentary. Having
collated research on this matter, we felt that the ‘handheld’ camera was a notable
convention to consider. The film theorist Jonas Mekas explained that by using
‘handheld’ shots it helps the audience pursue escapism .We felt we captured this well
through the following shot.

We chose to include social realism as we feel that the audience needs to be engaged
within the narrative, and due to our video being purely narrative based this was a great
opportunity to do as such. The question at first was, is there any videos that engages
us in such a way? We then took stepped back and looked at film, a famous example is
Cloverfield, directed by Steven Spielberg. The way in which I personally was drawn
into the narrative was through the ‘handheld’ camera. Of course, we had to water
down this sense of realism, as music videos can hardly be as elaborate as a feature
length film.

When we looked at music videos we where able to find the following

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This shot is from the ‘game over’ video by Tinchy Stryder and is a ‘handheld’ shot,
which helps gain the perspective of social realism as well as being visually pleasing.
The blur into the shot also gave us inspiration into incorporating a transitional ‘blur’
throughout scenes.

With this in mind we looked at how music videos use transitions to get from one
scene to the next, this helped us to construct the transition with professional music
videos in mind.

During the process of storyboarding it was clear that we had to establish the Mise en
scene, our focus was on music production and therefore had to reflect such imagery in
our shots. We began drawing shots, which could potentially be used in the video

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 This process is really important as many music videos we looked at had the well-
established Mise en scene of music, this depicted through artist playing instruments
and simple filler shots of instruments.

As you can see, not much had changed from the initial storyboard. This was because
we felt that the shots we drew up already captured the strong notion of music and
music production. Looking at an array of hip-hop videos it was clear that such shots
would only make sense and was therefore conveyed with the shots shown.

As the music video is spread out over three locations, we had to represent the Mise en
scene for each of the locations. With regards to generic conventions we had to
consider many aspects in order to be realistic and representational. The scene
involving the selling of CD’s had to be considered wisely. The idea was to have it in

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an urban location; we had to therefore consider what people deem as ‘urban’ we
looked at several street photographers during this process, the following images
helped us pick an appropriate location

These photos are from a photographer called Nabil. From these two photos in
particular we can identify urban decay, perfect for how we planned our shots to look.

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We had learnt that even photos could help us identify potential locations and we
therefore adapted the visuals from photography into our music video medium.

Our narrative throughout the music video involved the emotion of being ‘alone’ and
the characters needs being neglected by society. We had to look at short films with
zero dialogue, the camera shots had to portray everything.

Stumbling across the short film directed by Giuseppe Vetrano ‘Alone in New York’
we finally understood the effect of camera shots and perspectives. This is where our
inspiration came from into how to convey actions in our video. The film can be noted
as being visually stunning; we tried to replicate this idea in our video with the
following shots.

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We where not able to capture the same depth and quality that ‘ Alone in New York’
has. However I feel that due to technology constraints this issue would have been
dealt with by simply using a better camera. Having tampered with lighting we where
able to give of a similar impression. Aside from the difference in quality, as
mentioned the connotations behind the shots are far more important in building up a
narrative. If we look at the above shot it is ‘sped up’ indicating time going by, it also
builds a notion of being disconnected with society and almost being seen as a ghost
from the perspective of the camera. With this being our intentions, the idea was to
simply speed up time, which was a simple but effective task. We were inspired to do
this through the following music videos.

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Kid Cudi ‘ Pursuit of Happiness’

Jason Durulo ‘ What if’

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The reception theory was a factor we took into account. We were the producers who
‘encoded’ the music video and the audience was therefore expected to ‘decode’ it. We
expected that people would read the video differently and we therefore had to make
sure that people would at least make similar assumptions about the narrative. This
meant that we had to follow the conventions in order to ensure the audience could
decode the music video and get the general motive and purpose of what was going on.
It was clear that we had to be coherent and I feel this was shown well through the
following shots.

We also conferred with John Berger’s idea about ‘ ways of seeing’. Take for example
a dance video. We would likely see one consisting purely on performance and/or
‘abstract’ imagery. The audience would pick up on ‘how the video would look like’
purely on the music alone. Our music is fairly simplistic; I feel the audience would
picture the video as also being simplistic with however a strong story behind it, which
we feel was achieved.

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