Specific Research: Birdy- 'People Help the People' Continued

We have decided to use many original ideas for our music video such as the contemporary dancing and the fade from black and white to colour. However, we have gained inspiration from the A team video, specifically the section where the young homeless person, in this case a woman, is sitting down, shown to be in slow motion while the rest of the world rushes by. We plan on shooting this differently but using the same editing feature, speeding up the surroundings whilst keeping the main character still. 

We plan on using the same form of establishing shot in our video as the original music video, although ours will be of a field, which will be where the video starts and finishes- playing with ellipsis of time. The original Birdy video uses an establishing shot of london, showing the scenery of the city, making a slow succession of cuts. We plan on mirroring this, however, we plan on using the more natural scenery of a field, the flowers, the sun shining through the trees etc to ensure the video beginning is not too similar although the concept is closely linked as we feel this is a strong way to introduce the video. 

Additionally, we have decided to take our lead on a 'journey', to enforce the narrative that where ever you go there are always people in help. We especially liked the shots in the original video of the lead walking and hope to recreate this in our own video with the girl walking off the pier and through the high street.

Using these concepts, along with our own original ideas, we have created a storyboard and time line for our music video although this may need to be tweaked slightly in the final cut. 

This is the original music video for our chosen song. We have focused primarily on the journey aspect, incorporating the use of scenery such as every day people, cars driving past and close up shots of the artist herself etc.  

We then also looked into more music videos which focus on the journey, particularly with multiple walking shots. The Verve- Bitter Sweet Symphony, showcases exactly this, with the lead singer miming to the song whilst walking down a busy street. The music video location is particularly urban, shown by the shutters of the shops, the road sign and multiple people walking. We will use this urban mis en scene in our music video, as both the Birdy video and the verve video incorporate this. We will use the high street as our 'urban setting'. 

The location shots in Sinead O'Connor- Nothing Compares 2 U are also something we would like to use as inspiration, particularly the use of the water which is reflective and matches the theme of our song. The video also shows images of the lead walking through the park which we will try to recreate. 

As we plan to change our video from black and white to colour, we researched into music videos which were mainly in black and white. There were many videos which used this feature yet limited ones which changed to colour. We found the scripts- If you could see me now as this used both colour and black and white in the final cut. The black and white is inter-changed throughout the video, rather than the black and white changing to colour as we are interested in trying to achieve. We do, however, we do like the fact that the colour is used symbolically, during times of happiness which we also want to use.  

As we were interested in initially incorporating dance into our music video. We struggled to find a dance video which used a soft ballad rather than a full dance to a club song. We settled for Pink- Try as this used the contemporary dance which we liked. The music video uses a vary of angles when shooting, which makes the overal look dynamic. The music video also has other features other than dancing, meaning we can also add a narrative which seems to be a usual choice for most music videos. We will have to look further into the dance filming as the sequence will have to be choreographed around the camera to ensure fluidity.  


Research: Hannah