as I've changed the characters in my video and my actor is now a male, I need to look at costume for what he should wear, and so I will research existing male acoustic/folk musicians and what they tend to wear:
From what I can tell from existing musicians, artists tend to wear quite baggy plain tops such as a T-shirt/long sleeve T-shirt, and then they sometimes wear a check shirt on top of that.
Going on what I had already look at in my previous costume research, I had already been putting my actor in a plain baggy T-shirt (intentionally to fit with the genre), so I may have him wearing a different top in other shots such as a check shirt to allow me to imitate the styles of existing acoustic and folk musicians.
I've also noticed that musicians tend to carry an acoustic guitar with them, which my actor is already also doing.
I love this video, and I think it's very relevant to what I'm doing, such as stop-motion.
This is a video for how the video was made. It was helpful for me to watch for it showed me the processes and planning that took place before they shot it, but it showed me it took four days to film and 3 months of planning, which was with a team of professionals - this would be very hard for me to achieve to the same kind of level as they have, but I think it could help me with a few more ideas to take away and help me with my current project.
Currently, I am working on the stop-motion parts of my film; I have my actor against a brick wall and I am drawing lyrics onto the wall behind him (in chalk) and talking photos to make it look as though the words are appearing as he sings them. I am finding it quite a hard task to get the lip-sync right in the photos and I'm getting my actor to mouth the vowels in time with the words in each photo.
When the lyrics get to the end of each line, I rub off the chalk words, usually in the short instrumental periods at the end of each line.
Up to this point, I have done the first two lines "And I know that there is friction between me and you", then I rubbed of the line and replaced it with "I know that you're uncomfortable-", as uncomfortable is quite a long word, I separated it and arranged it around my actor. I will next film close ups of the words "Believe me" and "I do", without the actor in shot. It has so far taken me approximately 2 to 2.5 hours to do this.
This is another video (again by Coldplay) that I found on YouTube and really inspired me via the use of stop-motion animation. I would love to do something in my video like this, but it would take so long to make, especially if it were anything like this. I will still do a stop-motion film (although some may be normal filming), but it will be a little more simple than this, but I still think I will make it effective and fit in with my video.
To give me inspiration and develop my ideas, I watch music videos on youtube and on various music channels on television. I was watching a music channel showing a special on Coldplay videos (creators of "The Scientist") when one of their newer songs "Every teardrop is a waterfall" was played. The video consists of the four band members playing in what seems to be an abandoned building, but the footage (excluding the part when the band plays in the dark) is made via stop-motion animation (mentioned in previous posts). It was made by either taking multiple photos or various tiny clips of footage, all combined together to create motion and to make it appear that the band is moving and playing. I wanted to use stop-motion animation but was a little dubious about using it in a music video and doing it well, but after watching Coldplay's video I am confident that it can work an I would love to try my hand at using it in a video of my own.
In the video, behind and around the band members there are various words and pictures made to look like they are real and moving around the band; this is done by drawing a small piece of the picture, then taking a photo, then adding a little more to the picture or word, and then taking another photo, and then repeating this process until you put all the pictures together and it looks as though the picture or words are moving, growing, disappearing, etc - there are many possibilities of what you can do with stop-motion animation.
For me, more information came from this video:
This is by a street artist who goes by the name of 'BLU'; he does various paintings and art pieces around the city, and has also uploaded a few videos, a lot like this example, onto YouTube. BLU, like Coldplay's video, uses stop-motion animation techniques, so he paints part of his art onto a wall and then another person will take photos of it. What I like about BLU's video is how he enables things to move forward by painting over parts of the picture in white - this allows them to make the picture do various things such as walk forward, but a big downside to this method is time. Although I love how he makes his animations, it must take up huge quantities of time to create, which is the reason he gets a separate person to take the photos so he doesn't have to constantly walk to and from the camera, wasting precious time.
I would love to use stop-motion in similar ways to that of these videos, but I may have to keep it to quite a simple level to stop me spending too much time making it.
My previous two ideas have both had clear narratives, such as the girl walking forwards whilst others go backwards, and the boy who sings about the girl (both having their own narratives through actors in my video), but for my third idea I may take a different approach to this. I would love to use stop-motion animation, so the video may focus more closely on the artist singing and playing their instrument rather than having a story-narrative (although I may have a brief one) with the use of lyrics and pictures being animated into the clip via the use of stop-motion - good examples of what I plan to do would be, again, "Every teardrop is a waterfall" and Laura marling's "New Romantic" (below, although it wasn't made via stop-motion).
I was also thinking of having the parts that aren't made with stop-motion, like in Coldplay's video when when they play in the dark it is recorded with generic filming techniques, but I think it could be very effective in my music video and look forward to experimenting, and filming my video.
(Also, after incorporating the use of animation techniques, I may be able to use my idea about the balloon in my video after all, which I'm happy about.)
After looking at results from my poll about people's reactions to my first idea, I got mixed feedback, such as one vote was for 'I don't like it' and another was for they like it, but think it needs work, so I've decided to in a way stick to my original idea, but just to reshape it.
In my video, I still like the idea of having the girl starring in it, but I won't have things filmed backwards. I have gone off this as I don't think it's a very good idea for a music video, and I worry people may not understand it, so I won't have everything backwards, but I may have one thing in reverse, possibly for effect.
After a lot of thought, I have decided not to use balloons in my video; although I really wanted to use the dea, I really struggled to make a way for the balloon to fit in, but unfortunately I just couldn't find a way so the idea's being cut.
For my new idea, I will have the artist (an actor) playing and singing the song in the video, and it will also have a narrative of the girl he is singing about. These narratives may eventually become connected, for example - the boy may not be stationary and may move to different places, and at some point in the video the boy and the girl may dramatically meet, etc.
