Which Song Should We Choose?

We have found two great covers of two Lana Del Rey tracks which we are undecided on which to use for our final music video. The songs, lyrically, are very different but have the same sombre tone to them. Blue Jeans has a video made for it while Dark Paradise does not. Here are the two tracks we are choosing between:


Blue Jeans 

Dark Paradise

Personally, I like the Dark Paradise cover more as its slightly different to the original so we could change things from a usual Lana Del Rey-type music video to make it our own.

Some Ideas...To Develop

Me and Kirsty have been looking at ideas on how to make our video stylish, current and artistic as well as tell some kind of story or message. For inspiration we began looking at video's on Vimeo and we came across this video of a girl dancing. Lots of current 'chart' music video's have dancing in them (although not quite like the dancing in this video!) but dance is also a great way to express emotion and tell a story. We really liked the idea of having someone dancing in our video, maybe not having the whole video of just someone dancing but breaking it up with other things. Here is the video we found which inspired us:

Obviously, we may not be able to create this professional standard of dancing however it helped us begin thinking of other ways we could make our music video look and different ways to tell a story then by a basic narrative which may not come across. 


Last year when creating Science Boys we had to re-shoot because our idea was strong enough so to show we have progressed hopefully this year and this project we will have done enough research and investigation to come up with a clear & strong idea so we are fully prepared.


Power of Dance


Personally, I have a real passion for dance because you can tell a story without words and make some beautiful shapes and lines. We don't know any professional dancers that may be able to help us with our music video but we may still be able to find a way to include dance in some way. Although previous Lana Del Rey videos don't have dance routines in them (many of the videos we've looked at don't), we don't just want to create a low-budget version of one of her previous videos. A captivating piece of dance can be very memorable and this may encourage audiences to view the video again, which all makes money for the artist which is what a music video is all about. It also might open Lana Del Rey's music up to a wider audience as it is great contemporary dance music but may be undiscovered as this hasn't been expanded on before in her videos.

Preliminary Video = Not Great!

For our preliminary video, me and Kirsty stuck to a very simple idea: we followed one character through corridors and then saw him come out of a room with an envelope then pass it on to another person. We learnt from last year that it is very hard to pull off a complex idea with the equipment we have available to us and also the time we have.

            However, the video is definitely not one of our best pieces. As the idea was so basic, it isn’t very exciting and there isn’t a wide enough range of shots. Also, we still hadn’t decided what song we were definitely going to do for our music video so we just chose one and stuck it over the video once we had edited meaning we didn’t edit to the music. Clearly, the result we had did not look like a professional music video! However, the whole point of doing the preliminary video is to make sure we don’t make these mistakes for our actual final piece. Therefore, I have learnt that for a music video we need to be more exciting and challenge ourselves with what we can produce. Also, we need to have clearly chose which song we are going to do so we tailor the video precisely to that song and then when editing, edit to the track.

            The idea for our preliminary video came from wanting some mystery in the video so audiences would want to watch it again and this idea I still like and want to incorporate into our final piece. What I feel is the most important part of creating a music video is to capture the mood of the song and try and portray the thoughts of the artist as they wrote it. This is why I really like Lana Del Rey’s music as I think it fits a particular mood and has strong imagery in her lyrics. Also, by looking at her previous music videos she has an ‘old-school’ retro-movie feel to her songs and videos which I think would be exciting for me and Kirsty to re-create in our own way.

            So, we haven’t posted our preliminary video because a) we didn’t finish editing it in time before we broke up for summer b) it isn’t an exciting piece of film making and c) it’s not one of our best pieces. However, we will be posting it later on so look out!