Final ideas for our music video

           After several lessons of storyboarding we decided on the themes we wanted to create within our music video (tragic love story) and that lead us to a particular genre of music (alternative/ indie rock). Lana Del Rey's début album stood out for all of us as a set of songs which suggest the themes we wanted to pursue. We then set out finding a song which had reference to strong relationships and found a song also released as a single "Born to die". 
           It was much easier to storyboard and get our ideas into some sort of format once we had the song for inspiration. The storyboard was not set in stone however as we had a few different ideas on how to order elements of the story. What we did agree on however, was that we wanted to start and end the video with the same shot of a girl in a bath tub fully clothed shown mid way through some kind of suicide attempt due to a break up. Leading on from this, obviously the video had to incorporate some kind of fight between the couple and also a scene showing the strength of the relationship pre-break up. 
          With regards to editing we decided that special effects would not really be relevant and would take away somewhat from an otherwise very serious subject. We did however want to leap backwards and forward from past to future, we wanted to show this by switching from black and white to colour footage. Other than this slight diversion from straight forward editing we decided on keeping the video quite simple because the music adds another complication to the video anyway.

Brief and masterclass

Our task for the remaining term time left (around 6 weeks) is to film and edit a music video of our own creation.
An ex-student from the school who has pursued video making at university was asked back for a double lesson, he was able to shed some light on the basics of music video making:

•  We first learned that there are three main types of music video:

 - Concept: Where there is more of a strong theme throughout the video rather than a 

   straight/ more realistic story being told, it often includes a lot of special    effects and also includes some animated parts, for example: 

         
- Narrative: This does have a story being told throughout, mostly this has some connection to    the lyrics/ theme of the song but not always. This can be realistic or completely fictional with elements of fantasy, for example:

- Performance - This style of video is one of the most common, it simply shows the band/ solo

artist performing their song normally in an out of the ordinary setting, for example:

He also gave us various ideas and tips for making our videos look as professional as possible:

• When shooting a band/ artist performing, make sure you shoot through lots of different angles and in lots of different lighting conditions. If you shoot too much it doesn't matter, but it is really important to have all of the footage you may need to keep the video interesting and dynamic.
• You need to keep your actors/ band happy! Bring food and water in order to make sure you can shoot as long as you need to.
• Plan for everything, you need to make sure you have permission to film where you do, and you must check the weather report if you are filming outside.
• Storyboards are the best way to plan your video and to be used as a reference when making a shooting schedule.
• Keep different locations to a minimum, simple is best with a music video to ensure it doesn't appear too cluttered and also to stop any unnecessary confusion throughout the filming process. Also, tripods are not always necessary, they sometimes make the production look too static and unrealistic.  
• Back lighting (having a large light source shining towards the camera behind the subject) always works well to create a quality finish in a music video.
• Use the hit points of the song to highlight important areas of the narrative and use the lyrics of the song to give you inspiration with regards to the theme of the music video. If the narrative doesn't match the themes of the song, you risk the whole production looking very disjointed.