Final Treatment

Todays activity was to review our feedback and decide where changes need to be made. One of the main problems we realised, via peer feedback, is that Domino by Jessie J is not a song that has a narrative itself, so in turn it would be hard to create a video with narrative to a song with no narrative. Therefore as a group we have decided to focus more on performance in our music video. Below is an final version of our updated draft.

Final Treatment For Music Video

Outline of ideas

My music video will be focusing more on the performance of an artist during their music video, as opposed to a narrative concept. The video will open with our character who is representing the artist, performing her song (Domino) in what appears to be a studio. There will be a shot of perhaps studio lights turning on, to indicate the beginning of the song. As the intro to the song builds up, we will use a variety of shots, mainly close to the actor, that put emphasis on things such as make up, clothes, shoes and setting. 

As the lyrics begin the video will cut to the artist who will be lip syncing the song, the shot will be perhaps a mid shot that shows the top half of the artist and some of the location. The shot will change every time a new line is intorduced into the song. As the shot changes, so will the location, costume and possibly lighting. This will conform to pop music conventions as the shots will keep up with the pace of the song, making the video more enticing. 

For the stanzas just before the chorus, we will aim to make use of extreme close ups of facial features, particularly lips and eyes, to connote phallic imagery, which is conventional of pop music videos. 

As the chorus is introduced, as will a new location, for example when the start of the chorus comes is; 'rock my world into the sunlight, make this dream the best i've ever known...'. This location/costume change will often be referred to during the chorus parts of the song.

The character will continue to perform the song, dancing and lip syncing in rhythm with the beat of the song, up until the bridge. At this part of the song, the location will change to an unseen one yet. The setting will be low key lighting, so that the characters silhouette is emphasised. This footage will last for the most part of the bridge, interspersed with the shot fading in and out of black. This will connote that the bridge is a different tone to the rest of the song, and the song is likely to be ending soon. Toward the end of the bridge, the shots will speed up as the lyrics overlap. For example the lyrics include the note 'yeah' repeatedly over the top of the usual lyrics 'oh baby baby, got me feeling so right, oh baby baby dancing in the moonlight'. The shots will cut to the character lip syncing the bridge and the yeah's back and forth until the bridge is over.

The character will not lip sync the entire song, the shots of the character singing will be broken up with body shots, and shots of the character dancing.

After the bridge the speed at which the shots cut will increase, and all of the 'scenarios' will be used, and the cuts will include all the settings that have been seen so far, but thespeed at which they change will be considerably faster. This will indicate to the audience that the song is nearing the end.
As the video ends the character will lip sync the last lyrics, and will walk towards the camera and perform Jessie J's artist motif of pushing the camera away, before the video fades out the music and it fades to black.

During research I discovered that product placement in a music video is a typical pop music convention, thereore we will try to include some product placement in the music video, preferably at the start of the video.

Resources:
Technical equpitment - Tripod, camera, artificial lighting, Final Cut Pro (for editing) and a white screen for the character to perform in front of that will reflect the lighting.

Actors/Costumes - Actor to depict Jessie J, bright coloured clothes - mainly dresses or party clothes.

Locatons/settings - 'studio' setting, we will use our schoold 'oracy space' to film as it is well lit and big, yet also has a place where darker lighting may be used.

Justification for my ideas:

There are a number of reasons for chosing this concept. My group and I underwent a lot of research in order to determine what our target audience wanted to see in our music video. 49% of responses said they would like to see us remake the original domino video, which is total performance, so we will bear this in mind when making our video. A vast majority of our audience are aged 15-17, so this age group are more likely  to want to see a performance of their favourite artist as opposed to something more low key. Also when we asked our audience to describe Jessie J, some of the words we got back included; fun and confident, therefore this must be incorporated into our video. Although 70% of our audience said they would prefer to see narrative in a music video, we have as a group concluded that in order for the audience to enjoy our video as much as possible, we should keep with a perfomance based video. In further research we discovered that performance is a key convention in pop music videos, therefore this supports our desicion to create a performance based concept music video. When our target audience were asked what colour theme they would appreciate in a video of the pop genre, they suggested colours such as pink, purle, gold and blue, which is why we have decided to have a bright colour theme to add some colour to our lighting. 
                                                                                                                                                                   

This activity has taught me that it is important to get feedback on your ideas, as you may be blind to some flaws with your original ideas. Recreating this treatment has been useful, because it has given up a detailed guide to follow when we begin filming our music video.