Music Video Treatment

Modern Winter is a local band that plays mainly rock music. I approached them on the subject of appearing and performing the song for my music video and they agreed. For this, I allowed them to choose the song that they wanted a music video as I was quite happy to create a music video with whatever song I was given. In the music industry, directors do not ask artists to create a video of a particular song, they get hired by the producers to make a video of the song the producers want making. Using this ideal, the band gave me their song “Free” to use.

“Free” is about making the most of life and not letting it pass you by. That is the message that I have got to create within the music video and the best way of doing that is to create a performance and narrative based video. The performance based part of the video will hopefully take place on a semi-professional stage as that is the most authentic location for the band, however, I may shoot a lot of my video outside because of lines like “Wake up baby smell the fresh air where” in the song. This would then link into the narrative aspect of the video, for which I have the idea of a girl walking through a field in an incredibly cliché way. She might bend down to smell the flowers and look like she’s in paradise. In an ironic fashion, the visuals will be suggesting that paradise is just a dream and to wake up from that dream and make that dream part of reality.

The video will attempt to make use of a dynamic camera, even if the speed is slower than expected so that it matches the speed of the song. Pans and tracks will be used alongside static shots like in the Foo Fighters’ ‘The Pretender’ video, even if it is at a much slower pace.

The visuals will be neither black and white nor full colour. They will instead be muted in the band’s segments, like in Air Traffic’s ‘No More Running Away'. This will make these segments seem like a dim look on reality in comparison to the bright and airy narrative scenes (Reminiscent of the first minute of this: Child of Eden Intro).

I may also utilise some intertextuality to reference the 2011 film ‘Sucker Punch’, through using a similar method of scene change between ‘reality’ and the dream world. In ‘Sucker Punch’, the main character is seen in close up, before she closes her eyes and the camera turns around her, swapping one location with the next after the turn. This would be an interesting shot and would make the video memorable even if many do not get the reference.

Still, the key of the video will be memorability. The best videos are the ones that are unique enough to be remembered and that is what I am going to attempt to do. Whether or not it is a success is a different matter, but if I can include numerous unique elements in the video then it will surely be better than if that was never a goal to begin with.