- Costume, Hair and Make-Up
- Lighting and Colour
- Body Language and Facial Expression
- Settings and Props
- Positioning in the Frame
Costume, Hair and Make-Up
The costume in our video is very simple, we chose to dress our characters in casual clothes as if they looked too dressed up they would not compliment the alternative genre. It is common in alternative music videos for the characters to be dressed either very casual, like we chose to do, or to be very quirky or imaginative. Because this is quite a slow song we thought it were best to tone down the outfits and relate to a typical British teenager house party.
Hair is a common aspect in "indie" bands to be wild and different, like their music, this is seen on artists like Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys), Harrison Koisor (Peace) and Sebastian Pringle (Crystal Fighters). Because of this we needed our main character, played by Matthew Brown, to have an interesting hairstyle that makes him stand out from the rest of the crowd, we chose to style his hair in a 1950's, John Travolta, Grease look to try and give him a unique style. Although we filmed in black and white the character is actually still dressed in blacks, greys and whites, this was because it represented his feelings at the time, which we tried to portray as upset and lonely.
As for the female character presented she is wearing a very simple red dress. We originally chose to highlight the dress in red whilst the rest of the video remained black and white, after practicing we realised that this looked unprofessional and did not work with the rest of the footage. Her hair is straight and dark, giving her a look of seriousness and mystery, we thought that this would make the audience want to know more about her.
The rest of the extras and band members are much more casually dressed, mainly fashioning jumpers, jeans and dresses (for the women). We did not want them to be wearing anything too outrageous or it would draw attention away from the main characters. Although the band are seen in the video and are vital for the music video we wanted them to almost appear as "background music" to the narrative as otherwise it would draw the viewers away from the storyline.
Body Language and Facial Expression
The body language of our music video is one of the most important aspects of the mise-en-scene as it is the actor's performance of these paralinguistics that transfers onto the viewer what the characters are really feeling. These expressions tell the story as much as the script, camera and editing does.
For Matthew Brown's character, our protagonist, he is seen to be miserable, lost and lonely, we made sure that he did not smile once in filming to ensure that this image comes across to the audience. We wanted him to appear isolated, even in a room full of people. There are a couple of shots where he is sat alone, away from everybody else, whereas the other characters are celebrating and enjoying themselves.
It is only in the flashbacks that our victim appears to show any other emotion that's not upset, and this is when he is arguing with his newly ex-girlfriend, where he looks angry and appears to be the antagonist of these shots.
Our female lead is a lot more reserved than that of our male, she is calm and also appears to be enjoying herself at the party and appears oblivious that he even exists. This is to represent that she has moved on, even though she was the one who was originally going through the pain in the breakup (when she is crying into her hands in the flashbacks) but now she has emerged happy and it is the male character regretting his decision.
The last shot is of the boy looking on at his ex-girlfiend leaving with another man, this shows him looking upset and full of regret. relating to Todorov's theory of narrative structure as at the end of the music video we have a new equilibrium of the boy being alone and the girl finding somebody new.
Settings and Props
The mise-en-scene of our video at the beginning is the boys walking through a town, we did not want this to look modern but more of a backwards town that you might see on This Is England or Skins, both of which have very similar themes as to what we are trying to attempt.
The setting is a backwards English town, pubs and a teenage party. To set the scene we have the group of boys walking around the town and going into these pubs, appearing slightly drunk and disorderly.
There are not many specific props in the scene. The only ones feature are the band's instuments and the alcohol bottles/cans/glases. For the instruments we mainly displayed them being played by the band, we use close ups of the mic stand and along the guitar to establish a connection between the band and the party. We did a lot of work with the alcohol props as we wanted to make the audience think the characters were drinking a lot, so we used multiple shots of opening bottles and cans, filling glasses up and we used quick shots of the bottles appearring and disappearing off of the table as a montager for time passing throughout the night.
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