Alizay Fatima A2 Blog

We used youtube to watch various music videos from students of Media Studies around the world to get an idea of what was required of us. 

Mood Board for storyline Ideas for Storyline 

We wrote an email to XL Recordings who produced the album Anima by Thom Yorke from which our song Last I heard was taken in order to obtain permission to use their music for our video: 

My partner and I researched for hours and hours, watching different concept based music videos and films related to the idea of dreams. The following are the artists and films that inspired me the most for our music video: • Micheal Gondry director  • Mike mills director  • Thom Yorke musician  • Radiohead musician  • French new wave cinema  • Inception film  • Mood indigo film • Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind film • Last I Heard music video  • Anima musical short film  • I am easy to find music video • Beginners the film  • Music video director Matilda Finn

The final song my partner and I chose was Last I heard by Thom Yorke. There were several reasons for this, expressed here in the slide i’ve shared. This is from a presentation we made for a class assignment where we showcased our idea for the music video. 

 This slide is taken from a presentation my partner and I made for our class assignment about our project: 

I had to build our concept in the midst of a pandemic: one that my own family had been a victim of not so long ago. Surrounded by such grief and loss in the world, it was hard to muster up my creativity.  The way I actually came up with the concept was through a personal experience. I am a very vivid dreamer and I have around 3-4  dreams each night that I can remember when I wake up. Because of this I have a habit of writing down my dreams and have a great interest in the meaning and significance dreams hold in our life. I read more and more about the theories of Sigmund  Freud  and his belief that  dreams  represent a disguised  fulfilment  of a repressed wish. His  theories  state that  dreams  have two parts: a manifested content, which is the remembered  dream  after we wake, and a latent content, or the  dream  that we do not remember which is considered part of the unconscious. Both myself and my ...

Together my partner and I researched about the different styles of music videos, and what they entail, while also planning what we wanted to do with our own. Websites such as SlideShares.com were extremely helpful and full of resource for this.  As the writer and director for our music video, I decided I wanted to go with a concept based music video; there were several reasons for this: • I found performance music videos to be repetitive and lacking in semiotics; I wanted to create something that spoke to me and could represent my unique world view, which I felt could not be done with a video that just required my actor to lip synch the lyrics of a song, this also played an important part in my selection of a song for the video, which I will discuss further later.  • I found narrative music videos to be the opposite of my personal style, I like to keep things subjective, almost abstract and open to interpretation by the audience; so that each viewer is able to find their own m...

Through research, we learnt that there were various distinct types of music videos and their own conventions being put out in the contemporary world. I felt that we needed to select the type we wanted to create first and foremost, in order to establish a foundation to work on.