Shorlisting

Me debating the pro's and cons of my idea

The next stage of my production group's process of selecting a final idea for a music video was shortlisting, we had to decide as a group which two of the four ideas were the strongest and had the highest possibility of becoming a music video. 

We discussed the pro's and con's of each idea and came to a group conclusion that the strongest of the ideas were Victor's Boxing idea and my Rave/gang idea. 

me listening intently to other people's "opinions"

Here are the reasons why Simy's and Phoebe's ideas weren't strong enough:

Simy's:

Though a very visual concept, one that I was highly interested in, the main problem was logistics. It is nearly impossible to find an American 60's style bar within a two hour radius from our school, let alone gain permission to shoot a music video in one for a good 4-5 hours. Also the costume was impractical and it would have been very difficult to make the bar look full of middle aged men wearing suits - we simply don't have the actors at Hurtwood. Had we more time to scout location and a greater budget for actors and costume, this could have been a very strong music video.

Phoebe's:

Phoebe's idea was very cinematic in all of our imaginations, a strong idea in the pool of concepts shared by the group, but once we realised the prime time to shoot her video would be at twilight we couldn't get find a way to guarantee that every location would look aesthetically satisfactory, as the idea relied a lot on the weather being scenic, we would also need a few days to shoot multiple twilight sequences. On top of this impracticality we decided that as the idea only had a performance aspect it would become boring to watch as the viewer. One of the most important reasons why this idea could not be carried through is the impracticality of hauling a massive grand piano around different locations.

Idea Development:

Victor's idea changed drastically through the shortlisting process. The first thing we changed was the context in which the fight fell - we thought it could be a humorous fight, that two stereotypical geeks could start a fight with each other in the cafeteria, then imagine a very intense, stylised fight - cutting backwards and forwards between imagination and reality. Then we decided that basing the music video in our school would be too basic and boring, so we changed the geeks to businessmen in an office, which got us thinking about the relationship between the two workers that would give reasonable context for a fight. This thought process lead us into the idea that there should be two work colleagues that strive to out-do each other in comical ways, starting off small then getting bigger and bigger - a good way to show this would be through petty office pranks getting more and more elaborate. Eventually we forgot all about the fight and the idea became all about the men pranking each other. However we couldn't think of a song that would accompany the video, but we knew that there shouldn't be a performance element as it would be difficult to fit in with the comical narrative - so the ideal genre of music would be house. Our only suitable song suggestion so far is from my second initial idea - "Can't Stop Playing".

Me working hard

So that means that my Rave/gang idea was our group favourite, and the one that we would be primarily pitching to Luke. The idea itself was pretty much unchanged, we brainstormed the logistics of the idea - what was and wasn't possible, until we had a clean idea ready to be pitched.