Planning: Our Music Video's Pitch

To ensure we were headed in the right direction, we had to pitch our idea to our class. By producing a lengthy pitch to explain why we had chosen our particular song, it allowed us to review the progress we had made so far, as well as making us review our decisions - had we made the right ones?

(Above) A recorded version of my group presenting the 'pitch' for our music video idea

Indeed, we entered the pitch with two song ideas, 'The Only Exception' and 'Misery Business', both by the band Paramore. This meant by speaking to our class about the reasons we could do either of our choices as our final song, we could clearly see the positive and negatives aspects of both of the songs.

Although it seemed a difficult decision intitially, we carefully constructed an argument for each video idea and through discussion we then concluded that 'Misery Business' was the clear choice; here's our ideas for each:

Paramore's 'Misery Business':

 + Short, fast cuts; this allows plenty of scope for complicated editing - add zooms, pans, and increase the speed of shots to create movement and therefore speed.

+ Strong narrative: themes of jealousy, competition and lust allow for a variety of possible scenarious.

+ Music involes a full band; musically,  the song is contructed using a conventional band of the rock genre, (vocalist, two electric guitarists - lead and rhythm, bass guitarist and drummer), thus allowing us the oppurtunity for exciting band shots; having a band consisting of five members allows not only shots of intereaction between musicians, but also shots of different instruments - giving us areas of inspiration in itself - a point-of-view shot with a camera attached to the guitar's neck; an extreme close -up of an amp being switched on and many other ideas.

(Above) Annotated notes on the lyrics from 'Misery Business'

Paramore's 'The Only Exception':

+Long, slow shots; the majority of editing would focus on slow zooms.

+ Strong narrative: With love being the only theme, it narrows our inspiration for a narrative although due to the universatality of love it still has plenty of scope.

+ Band Shots: these would consist of a vocalist and an acoustic guitar, usually a two shot; an oppurtunity to be simple yet effective.

(Above) Annotated notes on the lyrics from 'The Only Exception'

Evidently, despite being produced by the same band, there is in fact a stark contrast in the style of these two songs; one upbeat and fast, whilst the other slow and romantic. With the evaluation of each, we decided that the slower 'The Only Exception' could potentially be overlong and slightly tedious - simple bands shots of just a vocalist and acoustic guitarist coupled with the difficult task of avoiding becoming too predictable and 'cheesy' when dealing with a romantic narrative. However, 'Misery Business', with it's fast tempo allowing complicated editing, it's lyrics involving themes like jealousy - that allow a narrative to have a clear yet more exciting cycle of equilibrium - as well as giving us the full potential to include a variety of instruments, meant that 'Misery Business' was our clear winner, and so became our choice for our music video.