Idea development

Today has been an important milestone in the production of my group's music video. At first the news that our top location choice seemed like a disaster, as the whole premise of the context to the video was altered as we wanted to set the video in a dystopian age - an abandoned and heavily eroded building in an urban area would have been perfect for it. However we were struggling to come up with interesting ideas and a plot that fitted in well with the environment. After discovering the news we had to think about a new context for the idea, and quickly too in order keep up the pace and to not put ourselves in a difficult position as we are so close to the shoot. 

We listed all the elements from the previous idea that we liked and wanted to keep so that we didn't have to start all over again and attempted to build a believable idea from there. We attained information that we could potentially rent out the floor of a multi-story car park at night as our location - this location intrigued us and got us talking about how we could revolve the narrative around the car-park. We came up with the following narrative concept:

• The video begins with man panting, out of breath and panicked, it must be evident that he is being chased and that he is danger. He is in the carpark, looking for places to run/hide.

• Then we see a group of gas-masked men running up the stairs of the car park, they must be represented as evil and clearly pursuing the man we have just seen.

• The group of men enter the same floor of the car park as the man

• The man attempts to run, but he has been spotted

• The group of gas masked men corner him, pin him down and start attacking him. 

• A POV shot from the perspective of the man looking at a fist flying towards his face is used, the motion of the fist is then used to cut to the next location, again a POV shot as the fist moves away from the camera.

• We see that they are now in an all white room, with furniture caped in dust covers.

• The gas masked men beat up the man once again, this time in a much more aggressive and vicious way. 

• They start to really make the man bleed (the video needs to be brutal) 

• They then wrench the arm of the man of - this is the money shot. Blood splatters on the wall, and over the men.

• The men then proceed to collect the blood of the man in a dirty metal bucket, before diving their hands in and aggressively painting the white walls with blood.

• They paint the emblem of the band/album, which will be a menacing image of some kind - probably linking into the gas mask theme. 

• The conclusion of the video is the men forcing a gas mask upon the protagonist, the arm is then reconnected to the body and he becomes one of the gas masked men.

We then decided that for the performance element we would have someone covered in sweat and blood, wearing a gas mask, dancing aggressively in strobe lighting - edited in a way that is going to be disorientating for the viewer. We would also have a drummer, with a single drum, really aggressively playing the drums - he is also wearing a gas mask...and the drums will most likely have some blood on them to make it visually more interesting...and disturbing.

Essentially, there's going to be a lot of blood. It's going to be overly gory and perhaps quite difficult to watch as we want something that may not necessarily be pleasant for the audience to watch, but that will stick in their minds and have an effect on them. To be notorious and to get noticed.