Early Stages Of Planning

The group's planning started off pretty easily, as after discussing between ourselves what styles of music video we liked, and what we thought would fit the style of our music, the idea of a P.O.V. video was originally decided. This inspiration came partially from one of the most well known videos in modern music, The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony", which depicts the band's leaad singer Richard Ashcroft walking down a road whilst singing the song. The concept we originally had was seeing a similar, abstract video, but from the singer's point of view. However, this idea soon ran into problems in the way of disagreement within the group. Jobe had the idea of changing the continuous, one-shot method into a series of images put together into a stop-motion style video. This friction created a temporary stop to production as we debated on which style would be more effective, with myself putting forward the case for the original P.O.V. idea and Jobe supporting the stop-motion effect. However, the decision was originally made to stick with the original concept, due to the agreement that this style would present less problems during filming, and would also suit our music more than the stop-motion idea. However, during these discussions, we also decided that it would be a better idea to have more of a narrative theme to the video rather than the original abstract theme, as it would help us to produce a better storyboard, and therefore would make the filming process simpler as we would have a clear idea of what and when we needed to film. The story was then written for the video featuring an unseen main character, the character who's point of view we are ostensibly viewing the video through, whose life is clearly on a downward spiral. Taking the inspiration for our story almost entirely from the lyrics in the opening verse of our chosen song, we built a picture of an alcoholic man who has spiralled almost out of control. The opening line of the song gave us the idea of our central character, as it opens the theme which runs through the lyrics, of someone being "down on their luck". The images we see in the first section of the video, the internal house shot, are themed almost entirely on the lyrics of the video. The mentions of alcohol in the lyrics gave the theme of our character appearing to be an alcoholic, and the line "I've never had so many bills to pay" directly gave us the idea of having the character have bills hanging out of his letterbox, and them being thrown onto an increasing pile of bills on the table. We then ran with the idea of the character we had created, and in search of a powerful, enigmatic ending to our video, came up with the final shot of him throwing himself off of a train platform. However, our original idea was much removed from the final product. In our first plan, the character was going to spend less time in the house than he actually did, and the camera cut used early on where he laves the house and looks into the sky was going to come down in a city centre, rather than a local station. However, we eventually changed this as the local station was an easier location to film in, and we had more ideas for the scene inside the character's house. However, the ending of the video remained constant, as we had always thought this would make for a strong, effective ending which would make our video much more memorable.