Audience Research Task

Audience Research Task

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Narrative Development

Narrative Development

Although we had previously created an almost full narrative for our music video, after two shooting sessions we encountered some difficulties. We became concerned with a general lack of substance and the strength and purpose of our initial idea of the use of masks. We therefore decided to call a succession of group meetings in order to discuss what should be done.
During these meetings we agreed on the following basic changes which we must make:
· The female character must have a more prominent role, taking some spotlight and pressure away from the male protagonist and allowing for a multi-dimensional narrative
· A greater variety of locations should be incorporated, creating a more exciting mise-en-scene
· There must be more twists in the narrative providing more excitement and more substantial potential for shooting
We agreed that these three factors would be the focal point of how to improve our ideas, and that any new ideas should be relating to these concepts. We were eventually able to produce a revamped narrative, detailed below:

Revamped Narrative

Crucially, we decided against our initial idea regarding the use of masks, scrapping that idea completely. Instead, the most important new narrative detail is that one of our characters, either the male or female, will in fact be dead throughout the narrative. This would be a narrative technique similar to that used in Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), in which Crowe (Bruce Willis) is shot in the opening ten minutes of the film but, assumed recovered, is the main character throughout the film, only to realise at the end that the bullet had in fact killed him. Crowe’s fading relationship with his wife becomes an important aspect of the narrative, and is ultimately the means by which he realises his death. This is the aspect of the film which we are interested in incorporating in our music video. The idea is fitting to the music as the lyrics clearly suggest a protagonist searching for a lost love, in our case the lost love has died. An important idea to consider is that of perspective; who is doing the searching, and who is the lost one. The ‘searching’, however, could be applied to both the living and the dead character. For the living character it is simple, his/ her loved one has died, he/ she cannot move on and is still looking for anything to bring back the past. It could also be applied to the dead character, as it is done in The Sixth Sense, where the character may be unaware of his/ her own death and is surprised at the loss of contact with his/ her partner. However, both could be true; both characters could be searching for their aforementioned reasons, and with both of our characters having recently been given equally important roles in the narrative, this is what we will aim to achieve. By incorporating this idea of a dead character, then, we will have improved our narrative by using two of the three concepts we nominated as our goals, as it allows us to give the female character a more prominent role, incorporating her perspectives – thereby creating a multi-dimensional narrative – and to introduce an important twist creating more potential for shooting material. Furthermore, the idea also allows for the inclusion of a greater variety of locations. Our original location ideas were urban settings; narrow streets, alleys and cobbled streets. However, if there is a character that is dead yet the audience isn’t intended to find out until the end, then certain locations connoting a death are required, to prepare for this theme. The idea, then, allows us to incorporate locations such as a Church graveyard, which has the potential to provide very atmospheric scenes, as well as being a break from streets and street corners.

However, what we still had to decide on was who should die; the male or the female. After discussing the pros and cons for each, including possible opening and final scenes, we decided to opt for the male character to be dead. We decided this because it is perhaps less conventional to have a dead protagonist searching for a lost love than it is to have a living protagonist looking for a dead loved one, hence the popularity of The Sixth Sense. However, in a philosophical sense, both character are dead; one in the literal sense but the other in the sense that the person she was when she was with him is now dead, therefore our music video will be exploring these themes of loss, searching, remembering, contemplation, love, sadness, death and moving on. In order to do this, we must incorporate certain genre conventions and a certain style.

Style and Genre Conventions

For the themes of death, it is important to include aspects of gothic signifiers, for which a church graveyard will be perfect. Also, as well as for the themes of remembering and moving on, we will look to use conventions of film noir, in particular the use of shadows and tilted angles, as these represent two of the key themes of the genre: a nightmarish reality and a haunted past. These elemental themes are the foundations for almost every film noir (such as The Third Man, 1949, Double Indemnity, 1944, The Maltese Falcon, 1941 etc.) and mise-en-scene features such as the tilted angles, low angles, elongated shadows and wet shiny pavements which connote these themes are therefore crucial to the instantly recognisable style of noirs.

Story Boards

Although we had already created a sequence of storyboards, we felt obliged to create a new one reflecting our new narrative. During our group meetings where we decided on our new narrative, we agreed to all sketch any ideas for possible scenes, cut them out, and then arrange them together into a sequence. By doing this, we could also re-use some of the drawings from the initial storyboards as some scenes were relevant to the new narrative as well. Much of the initial pencil drawings were done by myself, whilst the colour was added by Helen. Arranging them into a sequence, however, was a real group effort.

Storyboards With Commentary:

By following this narrative, we will be creating a similar music video to those such as Madonna's 'Like A Prayer' and Celine Dion's 'It's All Coming Back To Me Now' which, although are a different genre and are very different songs to ours, do explore similar themes and emotions within the lyrics to ours, thereby allowing for a similar narrative.

Madonna - Like A Prayer

Link to Celine Dion's 'It's All Coming Back To Me Now':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMHGgnlXfSA