Before we had even started our music video we all already had good knowledge of the forms and conventions of real media products due to our planning and research. This meant when we became a group we put together our ideas of how we could conform to as well as challenge real music videos. As our artist and song is pop and aimed at teenagers who are mostly female we decided it would be best for us to make our music video have a narrative, but also include some performance from the artist. We decided to do this because it is what most successful pop music videos did, but also because the lyrics of the song are meaningful its needs a good narrative to help get the meaning behind the lyrics across and as it will be our artist, Eden Summers, first single we wanted her to feature heavily so people could recognize her for future singles.
For a lot of the lines in the song we attempted to get it so the lyrics matched the visuals for example ‘the traffic is stopped’, ‘reports of a girl’ and ‘I get in the car’ and we managed to get these to also fit in with the storyline we wanted.
The narrative we decided on was very complicated, it focused on a rich girl as well as a poor girl with neither of them paying any real attention to all the crime going on around them, for example when the poor girl walks past a news sign and when the rich girl ignores a text message. I feel we managed to effectively show the rich girl/poor girl different way of life well and this was mainly down to the mise en scene. The rich girl, Hayley, wore nice clothes as well as jewelry, whilst using modern technology such as a laptop, a mobile phone (which were both in her bag which the mugger stole) and a fairly nice car. Comparing this to Jo, the poor girl, she wore more scruffy clothes and was not seen using any of the signs of wealth Hayley was, having to rely on public transport as well as a free newspaper. Eden wore a pink top, this was to show a sort of femininity as well as, importantly, not appearing either rich or poor as this was the role of the other two girls and we wanted Eden to be mutual. All 3 of the main characters wore the same clothes throughout the video to try and give the impression that the narrative is all in one day. For the mugger we played on the stereotype the British media has portrayed teenagers as, wearing a grey hoody with the hood up. We didn’t use a large amount of props but the ones we did use were quite effective, for example the flowers at the memorial site and the phone/laptop Hayley used to emphasis her wealth as mentioned earlier. I feel the best props we used were the cardboard signs saying ‘I am one of them’ as this showed a form of unity at the end of the video which was quite happy and co-incited with Jo and Hayley’s coming together at the end of an otherwise sad narrative.
We thought it would be important to vary the camera shots throughout the video to prevent the audience from getting too bored, I think we did this most effectively when Hayley got mugged, at this stage we used a variety of shots to build up tension, but it also showed Hayley’s fear (when she turned around and also when she started to run). However other shots we used for continuity, for example the news reports at the beginning as well as near the end when we get people to hold up the signs we made. We thought it was important the news reports shots remained the same as we wanted it to look as real as possible, and we kept most of the sign shots the same as medium close up shots made it easier for the audience to see what the signs said (some other shots proved to be too far away).
When choosing a setting we thought London would be most appropriate, as it has both rich areas and poorer areas extremely close to one another which went well with our narrative. We also thought it would be good to incorporate the famous landmarks into our video to easily show where the narrative is taking place. We did not only film in London though, and our varied settings for the shots I feel helped make our final music video much more interesting. The setting for Eden singing we felt would be more appropriate in a natural setting, surrounded by trees etc. as this would help with her hippy image.
Our aim with the video was to promote the message rather than Eden herself and this is very different to nearly all pop videos, especially when it is a new artist. Despite this I still feel we managed to show Eden as the star quite successfully, with a large number of different shots when she was singing. The ancillary tasks focused much more on Eden however, with the MySpace, Twitter and digibox all focusing almost entirely on her. With the MySpace we looked at other pop star MySpace pages and decided that we would ‘mirror’ them and have a banner at the to of the page, promoting the artist and their album.
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