Previous Initial Ideas

In case of the 'Gold' idea having to be rejected entirely....

We will either need to go back to the punk/pop/rock boy band idea that we were thinking with 'Crash and Burn' by Busted or a McFly song, or consider a different genre entirely.

I thought it them a good idea to blog some of our previous ideas in order to show our progression of thought, and why we rejected them or moved away from them.

Idea A
Near the beginning we were considering doing a very abstract, montage-style video.
This could include body-painted figures, or even synchronised dancing.

Example: Duran Duran had quite an abstract video for 'Planet Earth':


It does have about 50% performance however. And certaily a very 80s vibe, which could be very difficult to emulate.

These are some videos that Luke brought up at the time that were quite inspirational to this abstract theme:



Idea B
We also thought to have a video similiar to 'the Macarena' or 'The Ketchup Song'.
We thought we would have a very simple dance routine, and have (possibly the members of the group) a group of people dancing through different places/situations/in different costumes.
It would just cut from one scene to another, so there would be no great difficulty with continuity. Deliberate continuity 'mistakes' would even be built in; perhaps they walk in with no hats, and enter the next scene with mexican hats and marraccas?

This could allow us to engage the audience with the visuals: mostly this would be the changing mise-en-scene (e.g. location).

Finding enough locations should not be difficult, as they do not all need to be particularly amazing. Off the top of my head a church (perhaps during a quiet part of the song, with them acting reverrant), a rather stunned teenager's bedroom, central london, a bus etc.

The video for 'The Macarena' features just lots of different people dancing/lip-synching to the song:



The main area we would have needed to focus on with a similar idea is getting the mise-en-scene perfect to be entirely effective. Forming a band identity with this song would be immensely difficult, however. It is significant in this respect that 'Los Del Rio' appeared to be one hit wonders (at least in 'the west') and also do not feature very heavily in their own music video.

It also relies on finding a similarly very catchy song with good 'hit' quality, that does not have a music video; very difficult I believe. Also, we would need to compose a dance sequence. This could be difficult, but then again many student videos appear to have dance sequences so it cannot be impossible.

Positives also include that we could be very creative in the aesthetics of this idea, as narrative would not be the main feature (if we were indeed to have any narrative: I think perhaps just a beginning i.e. a reason for the dancing etc and also an end, like they walk out of a room and turn the lights off behind them would be enough narrative).


It is after these ideas, and after the Busted video shoot that we thought of the idea of doing a punk/pop/rock boy band similar to McFly and Busted, and there is an existing post on this idea.

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I think this brings us about up to speed with our current state of events, and some of the ideas we considered more seriously during our group development so far.

-Angela