Inspiration

We had a variety of ideas of things that we should have included in our music video and drew our inspiration from a variety of other music videos. One that was very influential was Metronomy - Radio Ladio. Here the bright colours and dead pan faces of the band members makes this a interesting video to watch, as the viewer is taken on a strange journey, as well as the band playing cardboard instruments. We decided that we would use band member too and film them in bright colours on a green screen and not in black and white, this would make them stand out and due to our questionnaire the majority of people prefer light, happy themed videos. The song we chose by the band was 'Sit Down have a Biscuit' and the ending of this song contains a loud screaming from the singer which takes away from the upbeat nature of the rest of the song and for this reason we decided that the calm dead pan faces of the musicians and the bright colours were not going to work for our video. The band's name is ironic due to the fact that they are privately educated - 'the proletariat' is the lowest social class - this lighthearted approach to the nature of the band is reflected in their song names and lyrics - the song 'sit down have a biscuit' is based around the band's time in the school common room where biscuits are supplied at break and the general rowdyness due to how crowded the room becomes. We favoured this song due to it's intriguing changes of pace and how literal and almost comical the lyrics are; we also liked how ambiguous the meaning of the song was and could already see how we could create an interesting video - the pace alone made us imagine how the song could become frantic at the fast paced parts of the track and neutral at the slower parts. From watching Indie videos, we realised that jump cutting was used quite often; near the end of 'sit down have a biscuit,' there is a fast paced, agressive section where Jamie's vocals and the playing of the guitars becomes chaotic; we thought the jump cutting technique would be effective here in amplifying the effect the footage would have on the audience, i.e. to cause more paranoia and confusion as well as allow them to decode the video in a greater number of ways.

Another song we looked at was Maths Class - Emporio Laser which was a video in washed out colours making it almost black and white this colour scheme worked with the abstract theme of the video focusing mainly on the band members. When we realised the band could no longer work with us we started to think of other locations which we could film. This video made us look at outside and also the inside of houses. We liked the fast cuts of the filming and the build up of tension, this fast cutting was used in our film as the paranoia built up in the biscuit eating scenes we had. We liked the fact they were outside because it was surreal yet realistic - surrealism is generated from how the video is edited; a considerable amount of jump cutting is used to quickly cut band members in and out of shot - this conflicts with the sense of realism gained from the fact that they are playing in someone's back garden.

It also meant that we had more to work with because we could film in more locations than just focusing in a few places within a house. However we started off in a house because we wanted a contrast from outside which complimented it with a sense of realism as we did not want to delve too far into the surreal - we wanted to retain the realism so that when strange things happened the audience could still draw comparisons between real life and the surreal events that occured - India was the best example of the realism we retained as she could appropriately react to the odd events that occured and reflect the audience's reaction that we intended to evoke.

Vampire Weekend were another band we gathered inspiration from due to the fast cuts and jolty movements of the band members as well as the actions being sped up to improve continuity which we wanted to improve on in our film. There video is entirely based upon the band and their music which is something we wanted to incorporate into our video. However on the other hand we wanted to create a story theme throughout due to the answers from our questionnaire as well as linking the video to the lyrics of the song hence most of our movie is about our protagonist's paranoia and insecurity seeing biscuits everywhere. However, our main focus we took from this video was the simplicity and the fast cuts which made it look like they were slightly delusional whilst playing their instruments.