When first presented with the project, my group and I were very excited to see that we had gotten the opportunity to work with Alternative music, as we are big fans of this genre. The three of us spent the time listening to each of the four songs and trying to figure out which would be the best to use for our music video; luckily we were all on the same page and chose “Night Running” by Cage The Elephant. We thought that this song would be the best choice to be able to portray the overall genre of music, while giving us the room to explore different techniques and styles we can use for our video. During the research process, we were easily able to split up the chart in order for all of us to complete equal parts. Sophia and I each did a case study, Arctic Monkeys and Gorillaz, and completed the history and groups of the two companies, SubPop and Warner Records, while Shannon completed the other two case studies, The Shins and Modest Mouse. We gave ourselves the weekend to research and find information about the section we were to complete, which went very well and we finished pretty quickly.
When starting to think of ideas for the music video portion of our project, at first we just listened to the song a few times to get ideas. We were able to share basic thoughts about what we should include, like filming during the night or have someone physically running, but we wanted to go more in depth. We decided to print out the lyrics of the song and watch the already made music video to pull more ideas and get an insight into what the song was trying to say. After doing so, we decided on making the video a story about someone trying to run away from intruding thoughts or just an obstacle that stands in their way. This gave us more to work with, and eventually we would include a more horror concept with aspects of distortion both within the music and within the visuals presented in the video with different editing techniques.
Some of the issues we faced while working on this project was coming up with a way to film the video, since setting it during night time would create challenges for us. However, after talking about it, we figured out we could use car headlights, a large flashlight, and a lighting kit from class. Another thing to consider was the editing that needed to be done to achieve our finished product. Even though my group and I have basic knowledge of Adobe Premiere, we knew we would have to search up videos and do more research on how to achieve some of the effects that we are aiming to have in the video. One of the main problems of this project is meeting up to discuss and film the music video, especially within the limited time frame and not being able to due to scheduling issues or following COVID-19 restrictions. Eventually we discussed a meeting time to safely get together and draw out the storyboard of our video and start to film if there is enough time. After a few days of working on the video, we will be able to spend the rest of the week editing, creating more content for our project, and filming the marketing presentation.
We discussed many ideas during class time and at home and here is some of our brainstorming.
