Planning

The planning process is perhaps the most important as it incorporates the pooling of ideas and creative endeavors as well as then converting them into storyboard representations of what we envisage for the screen. This means specific analysing of the lyrics and the meanings of the song as well as it's context. Particularly for our video as we intend to use Sylvia Plath as our song. This has connotations with a poet and her lifestyle and takes on a more serious tone. For this reason we need to research her a lot more as well as the singers interpretation and viewpoint of her. The themes of the song are indulgence, excess and self destruction. We want our video to appeal to the general mass, not in the way that mainstream music does. As our song is more of a ballad, it will be a lot different in it's visuals but not to the extent that it narrows its viewpoint to only appeal to a niche audience. In a nutshell the singer is longing for a woman like Sylvia Plath, someone who is intelligent and yet almost crazy at the same time, as the song progresses we see her flaws, they become more apparent. As our video follows a story involving two characters we need to introduce them and show their place and situation as soon as possible at the start of the video so that the audience understands what is going on. For this reason we would use the main (male) character reading her book before picturing her so that the audience realizes that this is a part of the book, that she is not actually there.
The visuals will be in muted tones, blues and greys combined with certain amount of orange.  It gives the video a bleaker edge so that when we do use flecks of colour they stand out against this backdrop. The colour scheme will be similair to those in the screen shots from Queens of The Stone Age and One Republic videos that i have shown in my research section. We want to show that this woman the singer seeks is unatainable that is why we would cut between shots of him with her book and then in the shots where he is visualizing her the style of shot and transitions will be slow and in an almost dreamlike quality, this will stress the fact that this woman is not real and that she is unattainable. We will use the combination of one actress and one actor in our video.
Our setting is an important factor in the video, we need a large house that has a high class feel with a large staircase and we already have a location in mind. This is because we want our actress to have an aristocratic upper class feel. She will be costumed in a long black dress with long gloves on and a pearl choker around her neck. The setting needs to be extravagant in order to make the cracks and flaws seem bigger. Her hair will be tied up and she will be heavily made up. This elegant appearance will contrast well with what becomes of the character throughout the video as we begin to see the cracks in this beautiful public persona, and instead notice her flaws as her self destruction becomes apparent.

The institution we would aim our video towards is mainstream MTV. Our videos lack band footage, something that is more apparent with established artists who do not need to get their personas' across, rather focusing on the video and the story to it. It also does not fit into the narrower channels i.e. MTV dance or MTV base. If it were on one of these channels it would be MTV Two as that channel is focused on bands with smaller but strong followings. Our artist is someone who falls into this category, so if we are basing it on the artist then we would be on MTV 2, but the video is more aimed at an MTV audience.

In our AS production we used two different cameras in our production. The first, a Canon XL2 was our main camera during shooting as it's quality was of a higher level than that of any other camera we used. We were able to manipulate the look of the shot more so on this camera than any other and thus used it most. For re-shoots we used the XM2 as it was lighter and smaller allowing us to get shots that we were not able to get using the XL2. For this years production we plan to carry on the usage of two cameras, catching as much as we can with the XL2 and shooting the make up shots with the XM2.



work in progressssss =]