Music Video Ideas - Audience Feedback

Now that we're back at school, we all got to present our three ideas to our class. Each student then gave some feedback and constructive criticism on the ideas - I filmed these responses and the video is embedded below.

In order to present my ideas I made use of photos I had found that best expressed the look I was going for with each of my ideas as I thought this would be the most effective, visual way of getting my ideas across to the class. For example for the Hold Ya video idea, I showed them lots of photographs that were taken in pink light by the photographers who had inspired my idea.

 I also briefly explained the different elements I planned to have in the videos, e.g. wether the idea was more performance or narrative based, and gave examples of music videos that had inspired me. Furthermore, I played the class each song and defined the genre of the music in order to inform their view of what the video should look like - e.g. indie rock band naturally means darker colours, a more grunge-y aesthetic, etc.

Presenting my ideas to the class

I found the feedback from the class really helpful as it allowed me to get different perspectives on my ideas that I had not previously thought of.  For each idea my classmates gave valuable feedback, which I have outlined below.

IDEA 1 (Sunflower) Feedback
- Phil said that he liked the split screen format and thought it could be cool to use it to tell different stories
-A few people said they liked the bright, happy, pastel colour scheme and thought that it would work well as it was 'aesthetically pleasing'
- Vova pointed out that it would be necessary to have more things going on as just two lip syncers staring at the camera is not that exciting and would be boring for a whole 2/3 minutes. Luckily I already felt a similar way and explained more thoroughly that I did plan to have different strands to the video - i.e. shots of the boy playing guitar etc.
-A lot of people felt that my idea was too similar to the video for Perfect by Tyler the Creator - however at this stage I had only used that video as a sort of 'moodboard' for my video so that it would be easy for the class to see the kind of look I was going for - I don't plan to make a video exactly the same as the Perfect video. For a start the Perfect video only includes one strand of narrative whereas  in my video I would have various ones so that there is more to point the camera at. My chosen song is also quite different to Perfect so it would be edited in a different way - faster paced editing for example as my song is a lot more upbeat than Perfect.
- I think the merits of this idea are that the colour scheme of bright pastels, flowers, clouds etc looked 'aesthetically pleasing' to the audience and they thought that it would be possible to pull it off in the studio. The uniqueness of the split screen format also drew people to the idea.

IDEA 2 (Hold Ya) Feedback
- A lot of people - mainly girls - liked the idea of using pink light in this video. They also liked the overall aesthetic of the video.
- They thought that the song went well with the vibe of the music video idea.
- My teacher, Phil, said that any idea with dancers is tricky because the dancers have to be really incredible in order for it to look like a professional music video. This does make casting slightly more difficult because I would need to cast an amazing male and female dancer and may have to look outside of school to find them.

An example of a music video with dancers that got it right :

A not so good example :

This made me slightly reconsider using a dance in my video, unless I can find really exceptional dancers who would be willing to perform in my video. It may be necessary to look for a different idea to go along with the girl lip syncing for this idea.
- I think the merits of the idea are that it could easily be set in the studio as I am not trying to create a realistic set of a house or anything. People also really liked the look of pink lighting and thought its 'softness' worked perfectly with the song.

IDEA 3 (Prague) Feedback
- Percy said she liked the fact that the theme of red ran throughout.
- Stacey said she liked that I had made sure to keep the same look throughout the video and kept it in style with the song.


I think overall the most positive feedback came from Idea 1 and 2 so at this stage it appears that those two are the most promising.

My next steps are going to be to review my ideas and change various aspects that were pointed out by the class, for example thinking of more strands of narrative for the Sunflower idea.