2. Influences for characters Clothes - Male Clothes – Female For our female character we wanted to create a person to which people would recognise in their own lives. We put her in regular clothing for this age group and made her as typical as possible. We did this so that our audience would be able to identify her character perhaps with someone that they know. By doing this, the audience will hopefully be able to identify with the male character more as they can put a face to the female character. The song itself was written and performed by Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. As well as a great musician he is also at the forefront of style and fashion. So we wanted to take some of our influences from him. From this picture you can see that he is wearing a grey double-breasted coat and black slim fit jeans. We wanted to duplicate this part of his attire. We wanted to make sure that our protagonist was in fashionable clothes for the time of the video. For example, in 2006, Arctic Monkeys produced a music video for their song ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’. Alex Turner is seen in the video wearing a pink polo shirt; this was fashionable at the time.
3. Locations Storyline Many of the Arctic Monkeys music video locations are set on the streets of urban towns and we wanted to try to replicate some elements of this ‘gritty realism’ by using the real streets that we use in everyday situations. However, we wanted to contrast this with a regular house which our couple would live in, we used a very nice house. A diverse storyline for pop videos is the story of boy and girl and the issues they face in a relationship. Although it is quite cliché, we feel it could work for a song like Mardy Bum because the lyrics suggest a clear dynamic between a couple. We also wanted to include a live performance with real musicians and instruments, as most music videos do.
4. Band Shoot As part of our band shots we wanted to stay far away from a studio edited location, so we decided to use just a regular practise room in order to keep the realism of just a band playing and singing about what is going on in their lives. As the band shot would be referred to throughout the song and due to the choppy nature of the cuts in a fast paced song, we decided to get a large quantity of shots and angles. Master Shot Musician One Musician Two Musician Three Two Shot Instrument Shot
5. Colour Pass For this part of our piece we decided that we wanted to emphasise the main focus of the shot which was the gift. We felt that this was important within media language as this Tiffany necklace is a good use of symbolism to represent the love and commitment within a relationship – furthering the turbulent nature of their relationship by contrasting this moment with the other negative aspects. I decided to use an effect called ‘colour pass’ to make it stand out against my, already, black and white background. I searched for ‘colour pass’ in the effects search bar and went into video effects. I then dragged it into the clip that I wanted ‘#0090’ and clicked on ‘Effect Controls’. I then used the sliding scale of similarity to find the colour of the box. This only worked because it was a different colour to everything else in the shot, otherwise that would have been highlighted too. Cross Dissolve We decided to include a ‘cross dissolve’ at certain points in our project. This effect has a strong connotation of the passing of time. This is a very simple example of the cross dissolve, this effect is done by choosing it from a list of video transitions and dragging it on top of the layered clips that are put on top of each other. This is a shot of our character walking down a street, but as it would take a long time for him to walk the entire way we cut the middle part out, it is also aesthetically pleasing and suggests that his walking.
6. Colour Curves ‘After Effects’ This is a print screen of a shot the colouration of my piece after exporting from Adobe Premier After I had exported my final piece in all the right order out of Adobe Premier, I felt that my shots were missing something. I decided to import the file into Adobe After Effects and wanted to play with the colour to see if I could enhance the feel of the piece. I had imported my project as one sequence into After Effects so by highlighting and changing it, it changed the entire piece. I Looked at the colour curves and manoeuvred the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ colours, until the piece turned a golden-orange colour which gave it a nice sun-kissed look. I feel this enhanced the image enough to add character but not take away from the realism and send it to a clearly fabricated state. Here is a shot showing the difference between the ‘Colour Curves’ being changed in After Effects.
7. Title Tag In order to be more realistic I decided to add my own version of the song information strip. I decided to go for the effect of as though it is a piece of masking tape that somebody has stuck on top of it. I exported it as a PNG in order to make sure that it didn’t have a background on the video. I included the same information as the songs on ‘Freshly Squeezed’ a morning music channel with a similar target audience to my own, although, I decided to also add the name of the album too, as this is the item that is actually being promoted. Back in Time Towards the very end of the song, I wanted to create the effect that my character is going back in time so that he can be given the chance to have his time over and do things the right way. In order to create this effect, I duplicated all of the shots between him going back in time and the point that he starts again and put them into a separate sequence. Then I removed all of the band shots and flashbacks so that I was left with just the actual happenings of these characters. Then I reversed the motion and increased the speed by over 1000 times to fit into a 3 second gap. Then this comes back into normal speed and finishes the section with on the clock showing the time that was indicated earlier in the video. I feel that this effect gets the point, that he is going back in time, across quite clearly and doesn’t complicate the story so much that it is difficult to follow.
8. Quick Cuts – MTV cuts During the bridge section of the song there is a steady bass drum on each beat which lends itself nicely to quick cuts. So I decided to integrate these cuts between three parts. The current narrative, (The guy running home) the band shots (instruments and band members) and the pivotal points of the story so far. It was important to make sure that the cuts took place on the beats of the song as well as being the same length as each other, to create an even balance amidst the pace and frequency of cuts. By using this effect, it creates a dramatic tension as well as a chaotic element to the story which correlates to the characters emotions at this point. Here is the short clip of this bridge. Black and White for Memories There are points during the narrative that the characters look at flashes of their relationship that have happened at some point in the past. From the outset, I had the idea to use a different colouration for these parts of the project. I had looked at Taylor Swift’s video for her song ‘White Horse’, during similar moments in this video, the colours turn to a more pastille colour from their regular saturation. I felt this worked well but for this video I wanted to stick to a standard black and white because I felt it had stronger, perhaps more obvious, connotations of memories.
