Song Choice | Planning

When discussing, as a group, what song we wanted to do our music video too we decided that we should stick to the pop genre.
The songs that we started off with were:

• Ugly Heart - GRL
• Louder - Neon Jungle
• Human - Christina Perri
• Photograph - Ed Sheeran
• One Way or Another - One Direction
• Really Don't Care - Demi Lovato
• Story of my Life - One Direction

We watched each of the songs music videos and agreed that we should pick a song with a female lead. The reason for this was because we wanted the main character in our video to be female, so it made sense to have a song by female artists. When listening to the songs and watching the videos, we all had some ideas but we still weren't sure what song we wanted to do. We agreed that we should narrow the songs list down to three so we could focus on just thinking about those three songs.

The songs we placed in our top three were:

• Ugly Heart - GRL
• Louder - Neon Jungle
• Human - Christina Perri

We listened to the songs individually again and wrote down some ideas that we had as a group for each song. We didn't really have many ideas for 'Ugly Heart', so we decided we shouldn't do that song for our music video. We gathered some ideas for 'Human' and 'Louder' and discussed the possibilities of doing each song. We all agreed that we wanted to do an up tempo song as we felt we could experiment with props, different shots and the pace of the editing. We had some good ideas for 'Human' but we knew it was a slow song, so we decided that 'Louder' by Neon Jungle would be the song.

We listened to the song and recorded some ideas down for the music video while also deciding whether we wanted to do a narrative video or a performance video. The song doesn't really have much of a story line so we felt it would be quite difficult to add a narrative plot to the video. Some of wanted to do a narrative, and the rest wanted to do a performance. We discussed the pros and cons of both narrative and performance and decided on sticking with a performance type video. We chose this because it would have been difficult to create a storyline since the song doesn't have a clear plot, and also we knew we could experiment with different shots and effects while editing the footage to make the video stand out and eye-catching.

The video is set in a warehouse type building with dark low key lighting to exaggerate the emotions that are being portrayed in the video. Many close-ups are used to highlight the four individuals, as well as mid shots to show them all together as a group. A mix of colours have been used in the video to add some interest and colour to the video. The video is very powerful due to the close-up shots, the panning shots and the smoke used in the video. We weren't sure we wanted our video to be powerful, we mainly wanted it to be eye-catching and entertaining. Quick cut editing has been used in the video to increase the pace, and this is something we want to add to do with our editing in our music video. Also slow motion effects have been used to emphasise the emotions, which is something we were all interested in as a group. While watching the videos we all had some good ideas come to our heads and we are all very happy with our choice of song.