Task Five – ideas
You need an idea for every scene of a music video which you will then translate into a step treatment. From this you will storyboard two or three scenes.
Someone once said that: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!” Basically this means that we can all have really good ideas, but they won’t just fall in our laps if we stare at the wall (or the telly, or FaceBook) hard enough and long enough. The best ideas come after hard work – therefore you will need to give yourself every chance to come up with a good idea.
- Listen to the track time and time (and time) again
- Print out the lyrics from the interweb
- Listen to the words, what phrases stand out, which are repeated?
- Does the song already tell a story?
- Think of the genre of the music and think about the pace
- Think of the conventions of music videos
- Are any abstract ideas created by the song
Then: Mind-map possible narratives, characters, settings, props, visual images, etc
Basically – write anything down that comes into your head, a scene, a shot, a person! Anything can spark bigger ideas; The Usual Suspects has possibly one of the most complex narratives of any American film of the past twenty years and yet the entire film came from an idea the writer had for what he thought would be a ‘cool looking’ movie poster and a single line of dialogue that had been going round his head!
Remember: You are being marked originality and creativity – don’t be afraid of creating something abstract or unusual – if this is something your research has made you think about and you can justify it, go for it!
You are going to have to work through that 99% of blood, sweat and tears before you find that 1% of inspiration!
Task Six – step treatment
So you’ve got a good idea for a 3 minute Music Video and you want to make it look as dynamic and visually interesting as possible?Good! But before you turn into Steven Spielberg and start the storyboarding process you need to get organised.
Visualise the promo in your head and write down step by step everything that happens in the video.
This is the template you use...
...and this is how you use it...
Watch Radiohead's excellent video for the song Just.
The scene changes not necessarily when the setting changes but when something significant or new happens in the story. This would usually be a change of location or setting - in the case of this video the setting remains constant throughout although significant things happen when various characters arrive.
You should be able to read a step treatment to someone and they would have a pretty good idea of what happens in the video.
Once you've done that you need to choose two or three scenes that you want to storyboard and write a shot by shot account of what happens.
Using the Radiohead example again. Watch the video from 18 seconds ini up until 1.04 - as you are watching look at the shot by shot treatment below.
If done well then a step treatment is extremely easy to turn into Storyboards, which means you must be ready to learn how to make Storyboards!
