R+P Post 19: My influences and vision for the project

We decided to create a visual representation of our music video to go along with all the ideas and interpretations we had planned so far. We realised that pictures and flat plans wouldn't be enough, and that to represent a full video, we needed another, preliminary video. This was the steal-o-matic, in which we took clips from various sources, mostly influential music videos and the pieces of classic media we were working into the narrative through interpretation of the lyrics, and then edited them together as if they were actual footage from a shoot into a rough visual representation of our plans. We were able to use clips from lots of our influential artists, as well as movie and even video game clips, all to build a real, viewable representation of what had previously just been research, ideas, and plans.

Our steal-o-matic. It is only a minute long as it is simply a preliminary test for what our video could be, not a full prototype for the final version. It contains clips from many sources, each relevant in different ways- they might have a shot type we like, they might have a colour scheme we wanted, etc. We edited them in the same way we are planning to edit the real thing. Click to play.

One way it helped us was laying out our ideas for where lyrics, music, and video/editing all interact. Right at the beginning, for example, there is an instrumental section, with some guitar chords interrupted by brief solos on the piano and guitar and so on- when the drum solo kicks in, so does the first verse. We decided to have our lead singer asleep on the sofa for this instrumental part, to set up the dream part of the lyrics and narrative. The musical interruptions would also be edited to interrupt the narrative with close shots of the instruments that were interrupting, and then when the first verse starts and the music really starts to pick up, suddenly we switch to a long and wide shot of the band with the lead singer now performing with the band(something we had picked up from Vernallis' ideas of breaking continuity editing and going from close to long and vice versa to make the video dynamic.) We found some really nice shots from some of our influential music videos that contained the framing, colour scheme, and actions that we needed to construct this section, and thus we edited them together into our steal-o-matic, and were all able to see how these ideas actually worked visually in a video.

The opening section of our Steal-o-matic. The sleeping is from "Feeling OK" by Best Coast, the keyboard is from "Montreal" by Roosevelt, the guitar is from "Crazy For You" by Best Coast, as is the handheld close-up from the next interruption, and the shot of the whole band is from "Geronimo" by Sheppard. Click to enlarge.

The steal-o-matic also allowed us to refined our performance segments, even in terms of set design and camera as well as the performance itself. For example, we have used Sheppard's "Geronimo" quite a lot- this is because, although we are not planning on having a large set with lots of props scattered around as they have, we are planning on having energetic long-shots of the whole band in a studio setting. Plus, the colour scheme of having bright pastel colours (in the form of the many props in the Sheppard video, and likely lighting and some props in ours) on top of a plain, more neutral background (in the Sheppard video, this is the grey room, but we will likely just have a blank studio cyclorama to experiment with) is something we have been working on for a long time.

A clip from Sheppard's music video for their song "Geronimo." We have used parts of this in our steal-o-matic, as the varying shot types, including the extreme long shots of the band in a studio setting, as well as the camera movements, are quite useful to us in visualising what our video might look like in terms of camera. Additionally, although they have more props to build mise-en-scene, this video has a similar colour scheme to what we are planning and has been an aid in planning set design for our video. Click to enlarge.

Narrative is also something we refined through our steal-o-matic. As we wanted to use references to various pieces of media in our video by recreating them in a style that fit our artist and aesthetic, we took this opportunity to edit in clips from films like "Singing in the Rain" and even video games like "Mortal Kombat," scenes from which we were going to reproduce as part of the narrative's storyline, in which the lead singer has dreams of interacting physically with characters from these pieces of media. This allowed us to see how these more unorthodox video clips would fit in with the rest of the music video- and in the end, we decided that (even without being able to recreate them in our own aesthetic and just using raw footage from the source media) they fit quite well. We could have a small dance scene like the famous segment from "Singing in the Rain," we could use a profile long-shot to mimic a match from a fighting game like "Mortal Kombat," and then edit them along with all the performance clips when it came to making our final video.

One of the most famous scenes from the film "Singing in the Rain," which we are planning to recreate in our music video. Dance scenes are not uncommon in music videos- we just have to re-choreograph this particular dance to be suitable for our video, while melding its darker colour scheme and set with our own colour scheme and mise-en-scene (possibly by making the orange light of the lamppost more pastel and simplifying the background.) Seeing these clips in the steal-o-matic made these developments possible. Click to enlarge.