Inspirational media for music video

This is an extremely famous piece of art by Edvard Munch called 'The Scream' it is so famous that he actually made several. We have the concept of being haunted by past relationships in our music video, but we have left it ambiguous within the video as we do not clarify whether the male protagonist is dead or is just a memory that is possessing the female through grief. The main message that we get across is that she has lost him in one way or another. We were inspired by this artwork because of the look of despair on the wasted face of the character on the bridge epitomising our female protagonists thoughts and feelings which fits in with the lyrics "I hear my devil start to sing", showing the torment caused by their inner demons. On top of this the dark background meeting the sunset juxtaposes the nightmare with romance which is a predominant theme of our video. Lastly the vanishing point disappears into the side of the picture which signifies the never ending journey of our character's plight to find their lover.

This is another work by the artist Edvard Munch, and is called 'The Madonna'. It has influenced our video with the sensual fantasy element of the picture. The female's alluring and inviting posture also bears a mysterious, dangerous air with the dark swirling background adding to this feeling of intimidation and dream like state. Within our music video we are trying to create a dream like state of fantasy about the female or male to signify their love lost. On top of this we want the characters love to seem pure just like the name Madonna which signifies the Virgin Mary and the narrow dark band around her head furthers this. However there is very little holiness around this image and we believe that is exactly like our video with the innocence of the characters love juxtaposed with their inner demons.



This Scene from American Beauty was also of great inspiration to us as it is another sensual fantasy scene. The protagonist (played by Kevin Spacey) describes his feelings in an internal monologue during this scene and says:

“It’s the weirdest thing. I feel like I have been in a coma for twenty years and
I am just now waking up... Spectacular”

This feeling of a dream like state is what we are trying to convey within our video with our fantasy scenes. The film has lots of dream fantasy scenes but this fantasy scene is particularly clever because the way in which it takes place on the ceiling which shows that it is not quite reality, it also enables the falling of rose petals on to the bed signifying lust and passion. Dream scenes will be great for our video because then we can vary our choices of locations, also it shows the love that still belongs between the couple although they are no longer together. These are examples of the use of the male gaze within media to portray women, in what some audiences would argue is a negative light, however we are not intending to have sexual dream scenes because we understand that they would alienate a proportion of our audience, but we are going to include innocent dream scenes, that mirror memories of the time they spent together as a couple.




The video above also influenced us; it is the first dream scene in American Beauty. We would love to do a dream scene where the background is dark and the female is lit by a spotlight; using this chiaroscuro lighting encompasses the dark side of the fantasy where she is not actually real and the other alluring side.



This is The Rumble Strips video Not The Only Person which influenced our walking scenes because in this video the walking leads us through the journeying narrative to the penultimate scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmjPrdTNxQ0

This is a link to Coldplay's video for their song The Scientist which has influenced the beginning of our music video greatly as you can tell by playing the video backwards adds interest and an extra focus point is added to an otherwise bland beginning to this video. However we have decided to not use lip-sinked lyrics during these shots because to learn to sing the song backwards is labour intensive and takes too long, so we do not intend to have Tamas lip sinking to the music whilst walking backward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMHGgnlXfSA

I was trawling through some older music videos the other day to see if there was a great deal of different between then and now and i stumbled across this video by Celine Dion which has the same sort of narrative and has some of the same shots as what we have already used. This Just goes to show that nothing is ever really unique.