The Creative Process

During the pre-production of the music video, there were a lot of meetings that had taken place to fully decide as a group on what song would be used. Firstly we looked out different genres that we were interested in using. The genres were Rock, Dub-step and Rap. We felt in order to create a unique creative performance and narrative music video; we would have to use a rock genred song. We then listed all the songs that would be a possibility to use.

We all had good creative ideas for a lot of these songs on the list. Deciding on the right one to choose depended on, if we had the right resources, locations was a possibility and we would have the right, perfect performers for the video. Brain Damage by Pink Floyd became the final choice for this project, for the reason that its lyrical theme of insanity and pessimism, would be ideal for us to convey in the video. The psychedelic rock theme to the video would be interesting to use in our contemporary music video. The song was released in the mid 1960s and it would be very interesting for us to modernise the song by using rock video conventions of todays music to create an appealing piece of work. For inspiration and research we all looked at music videos in the contemporary music industry. The music videos for ‘Leave before the Lights Come On’ by the Arctic Monkeys and ‘Flashing Lights’ by Kanye West had a crazed woman as their Main character, so we felt we should follow this and also take specific bits that we thought we good in those videos and use that idea for our own. We also looked at many psychedelic rock music videos from bands such as The Beatles, The 13^th Floor Elevators, Jefferson Airplane and more. The majority had a soothing, ludicrous theme, so having that would be essential to create a good fitting music video. We gained inspiration from TV shows and films as well, which featured scary, crazy women like Jennifer in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ and Rose in ‘Two and a Half Men’.

The editing software that was available for us to use, was professional equipment also used by real music video in the industry. This ensured us with the fact that during the editing process, our ideas will have no boundaries due to the lack of good software.

When we filmed the performance part of the music video in an actual recording studio, it was important to film as much as possible, in order to have enough clips for editing. We filmed the whole band ‘playing’ the song with all the instruments in our location all the way through. We also filmed each band member individually playing the whole song with a handheld fig rig. The fig rig enabled us to keep the camera as steady as possible, while handheld. It was most important that we were creative while filming, and tried using unique shots with variance shot types. Though, when it came time to filming the actual narrative side of the video, we felt as a group we should plan the basic sequence of it beforehand. Thoroughly planning in advance was very favorable because we were able to brainstorm a large amount of ideas and then were able to bring additional props to improve the video’s realism. Additional to that I feel this also helped us with the time management during filming.     

            In conclusion, we found ideas from many different areas in media and mainly ideas from our own imaginations. It was also interesting how we were able to fuse our different ideas that we had individually to gain compromise and even a better idea. The idea that we have to modernise an old rock song by fusing modern day music video conventions with the old ones would create a unique piece of work. 

Raph Jims