The Creative Process

We as a group came up with ideas ourselves for the Music Video Architects – Heartburn. We did this by listening to the lyrics of the song and tried to express what they mean visually. For example the lyrics ‘Hold out your hand and lean upon me I’ll be the one to make you smile’ we thought it would be a good idea to have Tom (the narrative actor) give money to a homeless person as its helping someone when he doesn’t have to resulting in the man smiling because of toms good being. The band is a heavy band which consists of low sounding guitar riffs and shouting vocals but this song is a soft mellow song with meaning so as a group we thought we’d film the music video in a calm secluded area with natural surroundings. We filmed the shots on dull days and we checked the weather in advanced to make sure the weather wasn’t going to be good as this adds an emotional effect on the video. The costumes links in with the weather also, as Tom is wearing a big coat and a wooly hat so the viewer’s know it’s a cold day and Doug ( The Performer) is wearing a jumper and at points you can see how strong the wind is as it blows through he’s hair. For the performance and the lip syncing of the video down a deserted path we were inspired by the band itself Architects. In the video for heartburn the band is pictured at some points walking through overgrown fields and contains close up on the vocalists face miming the words and we thought it was a good effect to have on the video so we did some parts of ours similar. The difference between our video and Architects official video is we filmed ours in dull weather and are going to add camera effects and the locations aren’t similar in the slightest but we sort of have the same idea as filming in a calm secluded place away from the public.

For the music video we are going to be doing a performance and narrative mixed together. Doug the performer is going to be walking through deserted roads and normal public places lip syncing the lyrics to the song, whilst tom is going to be acting out a story. Tom is going to first start off burning a picture of him and his girlfriend as they’ve just split up and the first lyrics of the song are ‘burn everything you have and leave them all behind’ so it links to the lyrics. Then the story begins and its Tom walking all over to different locations and things happen on his journey such as giving a homeless man money and feeding a horse to which leads to him meeting up with the new girl he likes and giving her a hug at the end of the video. The video footage we have links very well with the meaning of the lyrics we have things such as the lyrics ‘if only time stood still forever’ then we have filmed a clock speeded up with the hands racing around it and other things. As a group we have stuck to the original plans of the video but we have altered a few things whilst we were filming. The main road we was supposed to be filming Doug walking down had a broken down bus parked on it so it didn’t really give the effect that the road was secluded from the public. Instead we had a wonder around the area and found the perfect little actual secluded path for Doug to walk up and it had a view of mountains at the end of it so that gave us more ideas that we never thought of in the original planning to add into the video. It turned out a lot better than we originally planned but we have still stuck to the main ideas like handing a homeless man (Played by Tom’s friend) money and Doug lip syncing. Tom and Doug are moving constantly throughout the video so we thought it would of also been a good idea if both the characters clash with us half way through so they walk past each other and bump into each other it gives the music video an excellent effect. Most of the group’s creativity came at the planning stage but we also came to point during the filming process where we would look at something and think that would look really good in the video and start filming. The majority of it was planned but the group came across those little things that would make the video just look a lot better than it should have been.