Initial Planning Ideas...

When I first found out about creating a music video I immediately knew I wanted to do a video to a Paramore song because I love the band and knew I wanted to have a female singer because I didn’t know anyone that would be willing to lip-sync to a male one.

Narrative:

We want our video to fit the conventions of a lot of Paramore videos so we definitely want to tell a story as well as having performance footage. The song is quite angry or sad so I think it’s a good idea to get that across and maybe have the character crying and lip-syncing. I thought it would be a good idea to film by a lake because the lyrics talk about water, drowning and sinking so we could relate the video to the lyrics.

Visual Style:

I think we want the style to be the same as some of the Paramore videos, for example they wear jeans and a t-shirt quite often but in more of the recent videos they wear more than one outfit – something casual and something formal so I want to incorporate that into my video, maybe have a different outfit for the narrative and the lip-syncing in the studio.

I think the lighting should be editing to fit the mood of the song. For example we want to film in the woods so we thought putting a blue filter on the camera might make it look eerie but there would still be enough light to see everything clearly.

Also with the time of year that it is all the leaves are falling off the trees so hopefully that would work to an advantage. We were also thinking of filming the studio recording in black and white because I’ve seen this in videos before and it looks really and keeps the video varied.

We need a lot of detail on the facial expressions more than any other part for this song because it’ full of anger and that’s an important part of the song. I think the camera shots should vary a lot and using high angle shots will show the vulnerability of the character. We’re going to try and get as many shots as possible so we have a lot of footage to choose from.

I’d like to find out how to do certain effects in the post-production stage such as putting two videos over each other to get a merged effect because I saw it done in a music video and thought it was really effective.

Cast:

We’re unsure yet of who will be the one performing in the video as I think we both would like to have a shot at doing it. We came up with an idea that somehow there will be both of us in the video, but the idea hasn’t been developed any more than that at this stage.

We want some shots of guitar in our video because the song is really guitar-heavy. I have a friend who plays guitar and he said he doesn’t mind playing the song for the video as long as his face isn’t shown, so we have permission from him for that.

It’s early stages of planning so we haven’t really thought through if we will need any extras but I don’t think it’s likely.

Practicalities:

We want to go to Apley Wood to do some of the filming because there are some really atmospheric woods and a lake with a pier and I think this location would be really good to film at. The idea of filming at a lake came to me int he holidays when I thought it would fit really well to the lyrics of the song:
'You were my conscience, so solid, now you're like water
And we started drowning, not like we'd sink any further
And I let my heart go , it's somewhere down at the bottom...'
I think this could look really cool being filmed by a lake.We'd also like to film in the recording studios at college because there is often performance footage in this genre. I have a friend that had access to the studio so it shouldn't be too difficult to film in there and I think a black and white effect on the camera would keep the video varied.

 

Storyboard