Initial Ideas for Music Video

Our initial ideas were quite different to our current genre and artists as of now. We originally wanted to go for a slow classical song as we wanted to make our music video have low-key lighting. There was no reasoning for this, apart from showing off our colour and saturation skills in the post production.  We really liked the idea of having a man and a woman in our music video as a duet, because we wanted a more deep narrative based music video by showing a story between them. We also wanted to use a song that wasn't so well known and overplayed because it will be more likely that people would have seen the original music video and we didn't want our own music video to be compared with it. 

Up - Demi Lovato and Olly Murs

We started with looking for music videos which had duets and weren't too well known. The first one we came across was the song 'Up' by Demi Lovato and Olly Murs. We were interested in this as we could incorporate our idea for low-key lighting because of the meaning behind it which is emotional as it was about a breakup. We then saw that the music was the genre of pop which made us think that we should do pop. Originally from the music video of 'Up' there was a shot we really liked which was this:

We really liked how this looked with both artists facing away from each other and being down about the story. We thought we could create something similar for the front cover of our digipak. After looking into this song we decided it wasn't right for us because we felt that too many people would know it as it used to be quite popular. 

Airplanes - Hailey Williams and B.O.B

We carried on researching and next we came across the song 'Airplanes' by Hailey Williams and B.O.B. We thought this would be a great idea as it has the perfect narrative for our future ideas with post production and also included the duet we wanted. We also liked the piano in the background of the music and had an idea of incorporating shots of a piano being played adding to the performance aspects. However unfortunately 50% of the song contained rap, which was a genre we really didn't want to include in our music video because if our actor playing the artist doesn't know the song it will take them a long time to learn the words and make the lip syncing perfect.

We Don't Talk Anymore - Charlie Puth and Selena Gomez

By this point we had decided we wanted to base the narrative on a break up between the two artists singing. This is because we had many ideas for showing a strong narrative in this way and wanted to incorporate them. We came across the music video for 'We Don't Talk Anymore' by Charlie Puth and Selena Gomez which is about a break up. Therefore narrative and lyrics were exactly what we were looking for, but we decided this song was too mainstream and too well known to use for our music video. However we loved how they used a split screen between the two characters after their break-up showing their separate lives and how they aren't coping being apart. So we thought it would be a great idea to use this sort of idea in the song we would eventually choose.

We then went on YouTube trying to find music that had an opposite sex duet, with a perfect narrative for our ideas. We came across the song called 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' by Shawn Mendes and Camilla Cabello which matched our ideas perfectly. The song, genre and music video overall matched for what we needed. From all the research we gathered from the other music videos we considered, we have decided to try and implement all of the ideas into the finished product of the song we chose.

Now of course there are a lot more things we need to consider, for example casting the right actors that are like the the original artists and sound like them, the lighting we should use to match the narrative, how we add the right use of colour corrections in post production, etc. This is so we create the right mood in the music video to match the emotion between the two characters right before they break up. As the the meaning of the song, is about the male artist finding out about the female cheating on him and representing the moment right before they end their relationship. We need to kept the narrative in the lyrics in mind so that our music video makes sense to the viewer.