Third idea

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.)