Song: Keep Your Head Up
Director: Scott Hackett
Pitch
My music video will use a mixture of performance and narrative. The main idea of the song is that a young male has come out of a relationship and is finding himself. This means that I will use one male character going out and doing the fun things now that he is 'free'. This is not to send out that he is happy, but to show that he is making the best of a bad situation. At certain points, the character will be using narrative to get across the emotions in some particular lyrics. My desired locations for this video include an open field for the majority, but with an old and half demolished building as well for the character to be climbing and walking through, exploring. This will give reference to him finding himself.
Treatment
The song Keep Your Head Up is one about the stages after a break up with a partner. The song is very slow in places to show the sadness about the situation however, in later stages and during the chorus, the dynamics rapidly increase to demonstrate the character getting over the break up and moving. This does not show happiness, just excitement. The music video that I plan to create will demonstrate these moods accordingly. Further from this, as Ben Howard is a reasonably lesser-known artist, the focus will be on the character of Ben to enable promotion of the act. The narrative will be important to this as people watching the video will be able to link a voice to a face and therefore a name and not just recognise the voice without knowing the performers name as is so very common.
Over-all the video will be mostly performance and visual based, giving the audience the opportunity to match the acting of the character to a particular mood and therefore allowing them to understand what the character is feeling. The video is telling a story, so the visuals should be able to do this even without the lyrics or music in the background.
To start with, the main character will be walking along an open field. This is to demonstrate moving into the emptiness. The time of day will be around 6 o'clock in the evening, where the sun begins to set. I would like to get the low sun in the background of the characters legs walking. The character will be walking through this field alone for a while, being shown at many angles, for the duration of the slower section. As the song speeds up slightly, the character will approach the remains of an old building, climbing up onto it and exploring it. This will give the idea of exploration now that he is no longer in a relationship. Throughout these slower parts of the song, I will not have the character singing at all - this will all be performance based.
When we come to the chorus, the artist will be singing the lyrics throughout. During this, i will have the character sitting down on part of the building, and it will be filmed looking at the character from different angles and shots - I will have a long shot as well as an extreme close up of the character, for example.
As the song slows back down, the tone of the video will drop slightly but still be at a faster tempo than any verses before. This will leave the character to have an attitude much better to what he had at the start, walking around with his head higher. He will then continue to talk along a long path through a forest leading to an area surrounded in small hills. This will then enable the character to do some more climbing and running etc. to pick up the tempo of the song. Again, there will be no singing in this section until the chorus. Here, the character will be standing on the hills, giving off a more positive attitude. The camera will this time be looking up at the boy, showing power and resilience while he sings this chorus. However, just after this, the boy's face will drop and he will proceed to sit down with a glum look on his face. The two line verse will show the realisation of the situation, and the character will sing to this looking rather sad.
The verse continues with backing lyrics repeatedly saying 'keep your head up, keep your heart strong' getting faster and louder each time. With each time it's said, the character's mood will pick up and he will eventually stand back up, ready to sing the final chorus with every last piece of aggression. The same two lines that were sang previously are repeated but this time, they are sang with confidence and not sadness.
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| I would like the start of the video to have the character past the sunset. |
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| I would like to have the character to climb up a hill. This is a possible camera angle that I would use. |
