Inspiration

As we are aiming to create a popular styled promotional video but with a number of different features to it, we naturally have had a lot of inspiration from other videos and media. One of these was Gotye’s video for ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’. This was because we felt that there was an element to the song that was like ours, and this was how it begins with only one or two instruments, but it becomes more powerful and louder as the song goes on. This meant that we looked at the video for the song to see how they approached this style. We liked how the artists were seen in just one room and had strange face paint on. In the video, paint builds up across the walls and goes onto the bodies of the performers. We found this very creative and thus were keen to use face paint to make the performance of an artist more interesting than just seeing their face as they sing. For the chorus of our chosen song, the lyrics are ‘underneath my skin, as the ink settles in’. Therefore the idea of paint building up and spreading across someone’s skin could be linked to the lyrics. Similar to this is the Marina and the Diamonds video ‘I’m Not a Robot’. There are different shots with the singer wearing various extravagant make-up styles.

We were also inspired by Adele’s video for ‘Rolling in the Deep’. We liked the idea of the video alternating from the performer on their own, to lots of other shots of varying length that showed simple actions; glasses of water vibrating, somebody drumming, someone dancing on a floor covered in white powder, plates being smashed etc. We think that the song we have chosen would not lend itself well to a video with a linear narrative. Instead we think a better approach would be similar to this video as it has performance but also a whole range of other occurrences that link to the lyrics and the tone of the song.

Stop motion is another idea that we have had for the video. An example of when this technique has been used very successfully is Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’. Throughout the whole video we see the singer’s head, and around it stop motion has been used to animate lots of objects that link to the lyrics. For instance, as he says ‘You could have a steam train’ a track is built around his head and a toy train starts to move around it. We think using stop motion is another way of keeping the video interesting and would challenge us to use more skills. As the song uses only two instruments it gives a simplistic feeling and we think that stop motion would be very suitable for this as it is quite a simple technique itself. For the part of our chosen song when the lyrics are ‘underneath my skin, as the ink settles in’, we thought we could use stop motion here because it could show ink spreading across someone’s body or down their face.

Even though the video is slightly dated now, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is never the less an inspiration for us as it uses multiple effects to maintain interest throughout the promo. The way it uses many effects suits our plan to have lots of different goings-on.

  

The Mumford and Sons video ‘Whispers in the Dark’ is another video that uses an effect that we think could work well for our own video. It splits the screen into quarters to see different parts of a narrative. An idea for using this in our promo is that it could show the various instruments being played, or the different parts of the rhythm. This links in with another idea because it could show four sets of lips and using an effect to put them all in different colours. This is similar to the art of Andy Warhol, as he would show the same picture in different colours four times. It would sort of be in homage to his work.       

Quite like ‘Rolling in the Deep’, we like how the video for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ uses a combination of performance and lots of events that are symbolic of the lyrics. It is a very unusual and melodramatic video but we like the theatricality as it makes the video quite majestic.