Important Decision

This post describes an important last minute decision we undertook. This reiterates that when creating media products, sometimes things can change last minute. 

Throughout the process, we were planning to incorporate a sleepover scene that would provide a narrative to our video. The plan was that the band would be at a sleepover playing the character of normal girls. Then, they'd switch on the television and appear to watch all these different bands (whilst unaware it was them). Then, as the television breaks, a CCTV style footage shot would appear on the screen of them looking around the room. At that point the music video would stop. The message of this would have been that despite being in a girl band, the band members are still just normal girls.

Alternative idea

The idea we feel we are better equipped for with our footage is scrapping the narrative side of our music video that was the sleepover scene, and making it simply a conceptual performance. However, we will still provide an explanation for why the channel is changing, having the channel box on top of the footage. The message of our music video will have to change too - now it is you can be whoever you want to be.

The reasons we changed it are:

• It over complicates the video, why would the girls having the sleepover and the girls in the band be the same? Of course there is a message, but the audience would need to work this out and we don't want to be particularly ambiguous.
• The footage we had filmed appeared boring in comparison to the studio footage.
• The quality of the acting and the footage paled into insignificance against the vibrant studio footage. 
• According to Carol Vernallis, 'the video may break or disrupt many of the 'rules' of continuity editing'. Therefore, we don't actually have to explain the significance of the television breaking - it is conceptual.
• We had so much good studio footage that it seemed a waste of the music video time to be cutting back to shots of a hand changing the channel. Of course we still have this element of channel changing within the music video, just on top of the footage.

We are very confident in our decision, as we feel it eliminates several of the problems we had, making our music video more effective.