Steve Archers Narrative and Performance theory...

After researching into different media theorists I came across Steve Archers 'Narrative and Performance' theory. He quoted:

"Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band. Additionally, a carefully choreographed dance might be a part of the artist's performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualisation and the 'repeatability' factor. Sometimes, the artist (especially the singer) will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-syncing close-up and the miming of the playing instruments that remains at the heart of the music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it."

It is clear that we have conformed to Archers 'Narrative and Performance' theory as we have used our artist in both the narrative elements of the story and in the performance side as if she is a part of the story. We have also included close-ups of our artist lip syncing which we feel, like Archer stated, "remains at the heart of the music video".

Storyboarding...

Now that we have our idea in place we needed to create a storyboard so that we can easily and clearly plan our shots frame by frame, which will make the filming process faster and more efficient. We all spoke about the type of shots we would like and where we wanted to place them, and we already had a few locations in mind before our planning so we tried to incorporate as many of them as we could.

Mood board...

Below is a mood board I created with a selection of images that I felt would work well in our music video and helped us while we were on shoot.

Audience feedback 2...

After adding in our narrative we wanted to show the new video to a group of media students just to see if they have any comments for adjustments we can make. We also wanted to see if they prefer the music video with the narrative or without and if they understood the story we were illustrating. 

From  reading the comments the overall opinion was that our audience much prefer our video now it has a narrative as well as the performance, they said that they understood the story and that they loved the ending. From doing this audience feedback it has made us more confident in our narrative and we are pleased it has had such a positive reaction. Although there are a few adjustments to be made from some of the feedback we will take these on board and make the changes we feel are needed.

Hozier - Take Me To Church

Whilst watching the music channel on TV I came across the music video to Take Me To Church by Hozier, this gave me some ideas into how we can incorporate our narrative into our existing music video. The opening of Take Me To Church is a wide shot of a bonfire, the video then cuts to some shots of the narrative whilst cutting back to close up tilts of the bonfire throughout the opening to the video, this instantly gives the bonfire some significance and will stick in the viewers mind. As the video progresses and the narrative unravels we see the importance of the bonfire and it is used as the very last section of the video as the shocking element in the narrative.

By having the short cuts of the bonfire at the start of the video it makes the link to the bonfire in the narrative at the end a lot more important and seems to create even more of a shock to the viewer. We decided to try and create this effect by having shots of the pebbles near the start of our video and throughout, which made the connection to the narrative and the ending of the video. 

Editing...

Sticking to our schedule, after school me, Tara and Stef continued the editing. So far we are really pleased with the new footage and it has blended in well with the existing video and the narrative has defiantly added a lot more and we have been able to cut parts that were repetitive.

Shooting schedual...

Now that we have decided to add a narrative to our video we felt that it would be helpful to create a shooting schedual so that we have a clear structure of what we are working on.

Once we created the schedule we went straight out to begin filming, unfortunately I had lessons in the afternoon so I couldn't stay long but Tara, Ciara and Stef went out and continued filming. After filming they returned back to school to upload the footage and begin editing, at this point I was able to joint them and we had a very successful editing afternoon.