Ideas - Ongoing

"This song was written when I was 13 years old. It is about finding the strength to not be affected by the media and magazines that portray "beauty" as something unattainable. This is an anthem-like song to help others find and embrace their own beauty. I rerecorded it for my latest record Heartwood because to me, this is an important song. Who gets to decide beauty anyway? We are all so different and the differences are where beauty lies."

- Amanda Rogers on writing This Beauty

Stop Motion

• Taking stills from recorded video, quicker and easier, involves less planning.
• OR separate images taken slowly frame by frame.
• Flip book. Easy to film and create, keeps the stop motion as a simple element of the video rather than the key feature.

Other Ideas

• Red thread the constant theme running throughout both live action and animation. This also links to the Heartwood album artwork in which a red thread heart is held in the palm of the artists hand, meaning there is also possibility for us to mimic this shot in the video.
• Different lead roles, representing various types of beauty. Quick succession of shots at one point in the video to join these together.
• Seperate locations, such as the forest, stone walkway and magazine room used to reinforce the contrast depictions and perceptions of beauty.
• Colour changes and focus points - the artist in the magazine wallpapered room would be in black and white whilst the rooms magazines will be in full colour. As she begins to rip of the magazines and reveal black and white newspaper underneath, she gradually regains her colour. For this, I researched a little about how this would be achievable in the editing process on our Final Cut Pro software: http://www.macprovideo.com/forum/video/final-cut-pro/22318
• Taking inspiration from fashion, a dress which is designed to be covered in flowers. The flowers then fall and decay as the model walks. Whilst it may not be possible achieve, we though this said a lot about nature and beauty, the two main themes we are looking at and therefore think it would be nice to recreate it in some way.
• We also looked at a cople of locations to film, which will be looked into further at a later date. Many of these include natural locations such as forests and cloaked areas, whilst others are more secluded such as the single room covered in media imagery.

Research - Music Imagery and Visualisation

Synaesthesia -
one way to view this word in media terms is the visual representation of a medium, such as music, through another medium such as light or colour. Synaesthetics (people who have the condition Synaethesia) make conections in their brains between seemingly unrelated senses. For example, some synaesthetics see colour explosion of red when they hear a C sharp played on the keyboard, or taste strawberries when they hear the word "Hello". It's a strange and imaginative condition that allows the people who have it to see the world in a different way.

In thinking about music video in this way, we hope to be able to create the best visual representation of the song that we happen to choose. As a class group, we listened to two contrasting songs  - Red by Phoria and Never Gonna Let You Go by Tina Moore and armed with pens and paper, drew what the song influenced us to. We did this for the duration of the song, interpreting each part of the music as we went. Thisn resulted in what looked liked a piece of paper with a mass of scribbles filling it's space. But when we looked at what it was we had drawn  and found something quite valuable and interesting.

The styles of what we had doodled throughout the songs progression varied emmensly. For the first track, Never Gonna Let You Go (an upbeat, dance style track), the shapes that we could see were angular, jumpy and quite erratic. Lines ended and began quickly and abruptly, were straighter, contained break off points that transfigured into dots etc. Conversely, the page for Red (echoing and slow, yet powerful) consisted of long, flowing lines, curves looping them around each other and swirls overlapping. Whilst there were the odd few occurances that seemed to represent when the beat changed tempo or intensity, it surprisingly reflected the melodies and rhythms of the song very accurately. Using this, we could then begin to brainstorm some ideas for themes and shots that could potentially be used in a music video for the song. Our immeadiate thought on this occasion was water, possibly brought on by the patterns and swirls that were present from our visualisation process.

Thinking of the music in this perspective gave us some new things to think about for it when it comes to approaching our own song. Making a visual representation of the song such as this will undoubtably allow us to create a video that is far more visually dynamic and impressive, with definite links and connections to both the lyrical content and the instrumentation and timbre of the song.

Research - Early Location Ideas

When we began think of some ideas for the songs we were exploring, we started discussing possible places to look for inspiration. Both songs contained aspects if nature that we wanted to try out with the vague shot ideas we were tossing around.

We also considered the fact of ease of travel and budget. It is crucial that we recognise these as important things before we go into the main process of creating our video so that we can produce something of the highest quality whilst keeping it realistic to achieve. I took it upon myself to visit a few nature parks and scout for possible places.