Location Planning

 

 
The locations used in Jhene Aiko - Spotless Mind are perfect for that of a date night. We could use some of these locations throughout our music video as date scenes or just to give us inspiration for places the protagonist could go in their recovery. The bandstand would be a good location for our singer to perform because it is aesthetically pleasing, we found a nice one in hilly fields that we could use:

Inspiration For Domestic Violence

Now that we are moving towards the development of our storyboards I decided to do some research to clarify some of our ideas to make it easier for us to turn them into a reality.

We want the underlying message of the music video to raise awareness about domestic violence. we want to reveal the fact its the man being abused in a subtle yet unexpected way.  A good example of this is in the music video 'Cherry wine - Hozier' where viewers are only informed about the abuse towards the end of the video when she reveals her bruised eye. There is a possibility that we could inform viewers in a similar way to add a shock factor.

To suggest there being abuse in the relationship we want to do series of match on action shots with the couple fighting like in 'Be without you' by Mary J. Blige. In her video, there is a slow-motion fight cut up with insert shots of the singer which were really effective:

Research for logistics of the video

I've been doing some research for our music video by looking at other music videos from our genre, here are some of my findings and ways that we could incorporate conventions from these music videos into our own. these ideas are main focus around ways to display the domestic violence as well as inspiration for mise en scene and effective ways to position our artist in the shots to create the effect of an omniscient narrator. 

Starting to storyboard

Now that we have a clearer idea about what our music video will consist of and the content that we want to include, we have started to storyboard. We are planning the shots in accordance with the lyrics to help us when we are editing to know the order of shots against the song. We are also noting what we want the actors to be doing in the shots so that we have a clear idea of what we are doing on the filming days. 

Treatment Pitch and Feedback

We presented our ideas for our music video to our classmates, the feedback was very constructive and we have a few things we need to iron to make our footage as convincing and realistic as possible. Here are a few of their comments:

 
A lot of the comments made were regarding the plot of the video and how the relationship in our music video is a cliche. This means we will have to work a little harder to develop the unique selling point for our music video in order to prevent it falling into the plethora of videos of its type. 

Narrative Development

We really wanted to challenge the conventions of music videos with our project and one of the ways we have decided to do it is by introducing domestic abuse into our music video, only the female is the abuser and the man is the victim. We hope to raise awareness to the issue of domestic violence which is often overlooked in the media. The representation of men and women is another issue we wan to explore because men are usually represented as the more dominant and controlling in a relationship when in reality they are just as susceptible to physical, emotional and mental abuse from their spouse as women are.  

The plan is to introduce short shots of the violence throughout the music video but its not until the end when we reveal that it is actually the female abusing the man and not the other way round.