PRELIMINARY MUSIC VIDEO CONCEPTS

“Season of the Witch” by Donovan

Our first song of choice is a quirky, psychedelic track from Donovan. A music video for it would be highly artistic and conceptual; to accompany the quirky psycadelic tone of the song, there would be a number of confusing shots which link to the lyric themes of paranoia, schizophrenia and cultural activity such as witchcraft

We have had a number of ideas for scenes and shots, mostly close-ups, to potentially capture the vocalists’ lips when singing, a guitar and a bass being played along (focus on the player’s hands), people’s hands and feet tapping along to the rhythm, confused or lost people’s faces, etc.

Other creative shots could include someone writing lyrics such as “so strange” onto a wall in graffiti and items being dropped to smash in slow motion; to create a sense of disorientation and paranoia, tilts, pans and tracking shots would be used along with edgy straight cuts, and various visual effects could create illusions of hallucination, such as juxtaposition between black and white with colour.

When trying to piece together a visual concept for a video, we turned to minimalist and surreal photography. Whilst our ideas are more centred around people’s faces and various objects that relate to paranoia, stress toys for example, such photography makes it easier to evoke a clearer image. From searching through other music videos for inspiration, we found that some captured minimalism in interesting ways, for example “Lazaretto” by Jack White

“Sweet Dreams” by Emily Browning

Our second song consideration is Emily Browning’s cover of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. Although this song is a lot slower than the first, we personally visualised a very similar concept; a video sequence for this track would also serve to create confusion, however in this instance in reference to the themes of abuse

The potential difficulties we have identified are that the song includes a number of instrumental breaks, is very cinematic (it was in fact performed for a soundtrack), and the deeper meaning of the lyrics refer to sexual desire and abuse, which links lines such as “some of them want to be abused” directly to the title of the song

“Action Cat” by Gerard Way

This is a very different song to the previous two, and the video would be very different also. To correlate with the fast, upbeat and fun tempo of the track, the video would follow a youthful scene, involved in skating, drinking, smoking and generally having a good time, making the most of their youth