Creating a narrative

After our band had let us down, we had to quickly come up with a new idea, and found a copy right free song on the internet, with the problem that it was only a minute and a half long. We agreed that, after editing it to make it an extra 45 seconds, we would still need a narrative to make our video a long enough length. This decision lead to many decisions needing to be made. 

My first question was whether we wanted to have a voiceover narrative or not. Before making a definite decision, I found some videos that I found inspiring which I knew had narratives at the beginning.

Here is a list of a few pop or indie pop videos that I knew with a narrative we could study to try and find common features and aspects, and what we should include.

This Lana Del Rey videos is one of my favourites, as it tells the story of the song imaginatively and always captivates me whenever I watch it. However, it is 10 minutes which is way too long for what we want to do. 

Another Lana Del Rey video we looked at was 'National Anthem' which had a really interesting twist to the way narratives are normally done as there is narrative at the beginning, middle and at end of the video. The purpose of this video is more than to entertain, which is the purpose of all the other videos we looked at. Instead, the purpose was to recreate a historical event (JFK shooting) in an abstract and original way. However, this video is also too long for what we wanted to do.

Some more stereotypical videos with narratives that I found were Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Taylor Swift's 'I Know You Were Trouble' is very similar to Lana Del Rey's narrative in Ride as they are both speaking in a voiceover with music in the background, and both of the narratives link very closely with the lyrics and the name of the song. As well, both videos focus on the artist throughout the video and the narrative, which made it easy to identify the artist and helped us realise that whatever we decide we must include the artist as much as possible. Beyonce's 'Drunk In Love' is also similar to this.

The artist I found most inspiring when we sat down to brainstorm what to do for our narrative was Sam Smith. He uses narratives in many of his videos such as 'Money On My Mind' and 'I'm Not The Only One'. When watching 'Money on My Mind', we discovered it was different to the other videos we had watched, as there was no background music in the narrative, only the sounds of the city, and we really liked this aspect of the video. The sounds also linked with the setting of the video as well as the lyrics of the song, so the video was still similar in some ways to the other videos we looked at. Most of all, I loved the way the editing made the video seem like it a collection or a collage of images, and thought it created a great vibe and reflected the mood of the song amazingly. I loved watching it, and I think that's why it was so inspiring. From then on we knew we wanted to create a similar sort of video. The casino lights and the city vibes were something that we wanted to recreate in our own way. This is when Amy came up with the idea of driving to Weston Super Mare to film on the beach and on the pier. Then, I thought of a video which had filmed in a similar kind of setting, Beyonce's 'XO'. We both loved it, and loved the idea of the dodgems and filming someone going on rides. 

We decided that we definitely didn't want a voiceover to be used in the narrative as there was a risk of it sounding cheesy, and may make the video too much like a pop video and wouldn't fit with the tone of the rest of the video. My favourite openings were both by Sam Smith, and took inspiration from simply having the city sounds to open the video. I loved this because it sounded raw and honest and real, and is a more stereotypical opening for an indie-pop video, in my opinion. However, as we want to film on the beach, we are going to try and capture as many shots of the sea and the sound of the waves as we can, as this is a more original idea and means we're not copying any other established artist. It is also an idea we are both very excited to film. 

  We also decided we didn't want any background music as it was stressful enough trying to find a song at the last minute without copyright, we didn't think we'd have much luck a second time around, and didn't have enough time to create a piece of music ourselves. This decision was kind of made for us by circumstance, but luckily we were both very happy with that anyway.

The only thing left to decide on was who to ask to feature throughout the video, as this was a common feature in every video we watched. I volunteered my sister as she is a budding artist and I knew she'd definitely be up for it. As well, we agreed that we wanted to keep a stereotypical feature of indie-pop videos, meaning that we wanted the artist to be filmed with an instrument, preferably a guitar as it's easy to transport. Luckily my sister has several guitars and was very willing to bring one along to use.