Concepts

Our current conceptual ideas for our music video is a mainly performance based structure along with some dance sequences and perhaps short but quite shallow narrative in the bar scenes. An idea that has arisen is making the video appear like a practice performance rather than like a performance to a big audience as a pop star would. The small, personal 'rough around the edges' feel of a practice would be conventional to the genre as it conveys passion for music and not image.

Our ideas for locations and props in the main, is a bar and a piano. The bar would make a good setting for the music video very similar to 'You Know I'm No Good' by Amy Winehouse and the singing on a piano location is conventional to the genre because it connotes dedication and passion to music which is often reflected in soul music videos.

Our concept in terms of costume has been much discussed, as a group we really want our artist to be a mix between Amy Winehouse and Duffy, similar to Paloma Faith but perhaps a little less 'out there'. Our main idea for costume is a black dress, like Duffy accesorised with big backcombed hair, red lipstick, dark eyeliner and tattoos similar to Winehouse thus creating a soul artist 'hybrid'. We chose this because is connotes that our artist, similar to Winehouse, is passionate about her music more than creating the perfect 'pretty' image which is more connected to pop artists than soul artists. However, we still want to create the soul brand image with tattoos etc and ensure that our artist is an aspirational figure for our target audience. In terms of other costumes, male character/dancers will wear black or grey suits which can link back to the decided conventions in our audience research questionnaire results as well as the origins of soul music in which most males wore suits. Although as our artist is contemporary, we have decided to slightly challenge the conventions by our backing dancers wearing suit shoes, shirts, tie and trousers but not a jacket as expected from a soul video. This is to connote the casual, 'down to earth' element of our artist and how music comes before image.

I think these outfits would be perfect for our artist as they have a vintage print and shape similar to the sort of dresses that could be linked to Paloma Faith. This kind of smart but glamorous clothing is very conventional to the genre, especially contemporary and really works well with our target audience who we expect would be interested in vintage clothing.

In our performance shots we also want to use a jeans/black corset combination for our artist which would link in with our colour scheme as the band who would be wearing these colours but again connote her more laid-back 'all about the music' essence we're aiming to put across.


In terms of effects and technical concepts for our video our main aims are to use lighting effectively as it plays a large role in soul music videos which often take place in a dark setting and to use green screen technologies effectively also which allows us to develop our editing skills and create effects and settings that aren't possible in natural life.