A2 Advanced Portfolio - Entry 3 - Own Concepts

For a while now we have been working on three separate music videos to pitch to The Brink. I began researching for my idea by listening to the chosen song 'Can I Find You' over and over to get a feel for the song, I also listened to some of their other songs in order to try and understand the band's sound. From there I Began looking into other bands that share a similar sound, such as The script, Scouting For Girls, Coldplay, The Killers and watched music videos from each. at this point we as a group ran into a minor problem, the main trend with bands of this Genre tend to involve the band visually in the video, either taking on the part of a character within the narrative or performing live every so often. This posed a problem as it would be unlikely that we could create our video in this manner due to the fact that The Brink are a working band and would struggle to find the amount of time required. Due to this we have decided on purely narrative based ideas for the video rather than the norm of cutting back and forth from band to narrative.The next step was to discuss with the band what they wanted out of the video and to see what sort of style they'd envisaged for the song, I asked them if they were after a more traditional music video or more of an abstract, artistic video. They told me that they initially were leaning towards a more traditional video but were open to any ideas which we have for the song. After this we decided that Alec, Jack and I would work on more 'traditional' style video pitches while Ben worked on a more abstract one, keeping the balance in keeping with thoughts from the band.

Video Concept

My concept focuses on idea of the distance that can come between a couple and the journey you go through during the course of a relationship; going through the motions as it were. The point of this idea is really to emphasise the distance implied by the song title 'Can I Find You?' also implying something that's missing. The video will depict the classic idea of the final fight for love, and is based around boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy runs to get girl back. The story tells a man whose girlfriend is leaving him, so in order to catch her before she leaves he begins to run down the street, through shopping centres, down hallways, through buildings. he then gets a taxi and makes him speed through the city until he Finlay arrives at the train station, all of this up to this point it shot regularly in colour and modern day, however once he arrives at the station as a car passes in front of shot briefly blacking out the screen, this point is used to turn the video into a pre-war, noir-like film all in black and white and in period costumes. This rehashes the old romantic finale and places a twist in which instead of a dramatic romance scene ending in 'happy ever after' the girl is emotionless and callous, and leaves not caring for the feelings of the man breaking the stereotype, and when she goes to stop on the train the video switches back to full colour and modern costumes. This concept stems from my studies in postmodernist film, taking an old style genre and changing it to suit a more contempory audience, twisting a stereotype.

CD Cover Concepts

From here I also developed ideas for an CD cover for the track, I decided to take three different concepts from the track for the CD cover. I looked at numerous examples of CD covers, such as:

The first I decided to display a humorous irony using word play from the title of the song. The cover is a picture of a large crowd in which on top of numerous faces there is the face of 'Where's Wally'. I have done a quick, basic representation of the sort of look for the cover from a collection of images form the internet, the actuall one will be shot by us if the Brink choose this idea.




















The Second CD cover idea is taken from the idea of journey and distance in relationships, I have decided to create the lettering to represent magazine lettering, again this is only a makeshift image.






















The third is created using my postmodern influences and depicts a classic shot from a black and white movie, in which they reconcile before one leaves the other. I chose this imagae as it play off an irony of the content of the video, I have also decided to have an old style font in a bright colour to contrast with the black and white image. I believe this is the strongest idea for my pitch.