Research and planning - Locations

Locations are essential in a music video, as the location needs to fit the genre and theme, otherwise it can look unrealistic to the audience.

Music videos tend to have a variety of locations. This is a trend that we will follow in our music video.

Run down area

In our music video, we are thinking of using a run down area for the artists performance shots. This would be a good idea because many other artists have used locations similar to this, and it also connects with the negative feel of the song, as run down areas often connote depression and deprivation, and as our song is about war, this works very well.

If we were to use this location, we would have to make sure that everything about it is correct and suits the song. This means that the weather at the time of shooting would have to be very dull, ideally overcast, however rain would be fine too, as these types of weather connote gloominess.

We would also have to make sure the location is totally abandoned and derelict, as if there were people walking around as we were shooting and they were caught on camera without us realising, this would then look very weird in the final cut and in a way, it would take away the sence of negativity, as it would then mean that the artist isn't isolated, which is what we want it to look like.


House

In our music video, we are going to use a house to shoot all the scenes that involve the female and the male (not the artist). We have chosen to set these scenes in a house because the narrative of the video is about the male going to war, with the female staying at home, therefore we believe that it is apprpriate to have all of the females scenes in her home.

We want the house to be an average size house, meaning it cannot be tiny, yet it also cannot be very big, as this is very realistic for a soldiers average wage. The house must be semi-attached or terraced, preferably terraced as this is the stereotypical British house, and that is what we want to show in our video, as they are normally cheaper and more common than semi-attached houses. This would be good as it connotes stereotypical British normality and is appropriate for the narrative.

 

The interior of the house must be very clean, yet very simple/basic. We want this because in our narrative, neither the male or female are very well payed, therefore it would be difficult for them to afford luxury things.



Rural area

In our music video, we are thinking of using a rural area, for example a field like in the picture below, to shoot all of our performance shots in. We have chosen to use this sort of location to film our performance shots because it will look visualy appealing to the audience, and it will suit our style of music as the song we have chosen is very slow, which connects to a field like the one pictured ,as they have connotations of calmness and relaxation.

Another reason why we have chosen this location is because previous artists, similar to the artist of our song have used similar places like this to film in their music videos. The best example of this in our opinion is Lego House by Ed Sheeran, as a large part of the video is shot in a fielded area, and it looks very appropriate and it suits the style of music.

Ideally, we would also like a bench in our field of choice, so that the artist in our video is able to sit down and play/sing the song. We think this would be a good idea because it is seen as normal for singers to sit and play songs on park benches, therefore it would be appropriate for our song and video.

Charlie Mower