Coldplay- Mise-en-Scene- Female Performer's Costume

We decided to dress our female performer fully in black in our music video as it is a non-stereotypically feminine colour- which is a stereotype of "Indie-girls" (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Indie%20Girl) obviously matching the indie-genre of our chosen song.

Black also has connotations that we wanted to portray in our video. http://maisieheskethmedia-advanced.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/connotations-of-colour-black.html

She is going to wear a floaty top to show femininity, jeans to portray a casual and almost masculine imagine, and long boots to suggest sophistication.

Costumes- Coldplay

In our production, we are going to be dressing our characters and musicians in basic colours and simple clothing so we didn't draw attention away from other things happening in the video, but also to fit with stereotypes of the genre. As we saw on the guardian music blog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/sep/01/gender-stereotypes-indie-music) it is stereotypical of the genre for "the boundaries and differences between masculine and feminine stereotypes" to be "blurred".

Black and white were the colours we chose to dress the people in our video in to keep it simple, and not to distract from any of the other things happening in the music video.

Connotations of the colour black:
http://maisieheskethmedia-advanced.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/connotations-of-colour-black.html

Connotations of the colour white:
http://maisieheskethmedia-advanced.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/connotations-of-colour-white.html

Permissions to Use the Song- Coldplay, Clocks

In order to use the song we have chosen (Clocks- Coldplay) we needed to begin by requesting permission from the record company who own the rights to the song.

Lyric annotations: Clocks- Coldplay

The lyrics to our song (Clocks by Coldplay) with annotations for what we planned to do in our final version of our music video:

In planning, I suggested using varied shots of the same thing to make things more interesting but to keep with the simplicity of a storyline-narrative:

In production, we amended the shots, but chose to use this idea with both the male performer:

...and the piano:

Clocks- Coldplay: Planning/Brainstorming

When we chose the song, we sat down and listened to the song on repeat three or four times. Whilst the song played, each of us had paper and a pen and we brainstormed anything that came to mind in which we felt was appropriate, could be used, or could be built on.

From this we came up with various ideas and put them all together to create the idea behind our video.

We wanted our video to be quite abstract and very simple, in order to follow the genre.

Immediately, the idea of clocks triggered time- and so all three of us wrote down the word 'clocks.' From this we decided that a clock would definitely be featured in our video.We then developed this to the idea of creating a time lapse. The clock would continually appear throughout the video and different stages of its cycle showing a passage of time, we wanted to speed the movement up so it created a time lapse. I set up the camera and filmed a clock for 10 hours in order to create this effect in the most effective way possible.

From this, Brogan particularly imaged a character trapped. And the trapped character needs to be free and needs to escape. However they are unable to do so, all the character can therefore think about is the idea of time. The fact that time is passing, time is being wasted and time is running out. We liked this idea a lot and thought it was versatile enough for us to work around when filming our video. We felt that it could be incorporated into our performance element and we could also use the clock idea alongside this to make the idea stronger.

Tiffany felt that the idea of using candles, or flames would be appropriate and fitting with the genre as they were not ever lasting, but almost an aid in a trapped situation.
Personally, I felt that the video would be most appropriate and effective simply using shots of the performance- the piano and the singer. We therefore, incorporated all of our ideas together and created our final idea.

We then discussed the ending of the song; should it be uplifting or not? We thought it could go either way, the lyrics of the song are not very positive and the idea behind our video was not leading us more towards a negative ending wherein the character doesn't escape being enclosed. Or we also considered an uplifting ending where the character finds freedom before 'his time runs out.'

Coldplay- Clocks: Brainstorm

After brainstorming we went on to the internet and created a mood-board type brainstorm to help visualise our ideas: