Planning a music video

Our music video

We chose MGMT-weekend wars because we wanted to do an abstract video and we felt this song fitted our requirements.

Lyrics

Evil S I yes to find a shore,
A beach that doesn't quiver anymore,
Where we can crush some plants to paint my walls,
And I won't try to fight in the weekend wars
Was I? I was to lazy to bathe
Or paint or write or try to make a change.
Now I can shoot a gun to kill my lunch
And I don't have to love or think too much

Instant battle plans written on the sidewalk
Mental mystics in a twisted metal car
Tried to amplify the sound of light and love

Christ is cursed of faders and maders
Might even take a knife to split a hair
Or even scare the children off my lawn
Giving us time to make the makeshift bombs
Every mess invested was a score
We couldn't use computers anymore
It's difficult to win unless you're bored,
And you might have to plan for the weekend wars

Try to break my heart I'll drive to Arizona.
It might take 100 years to grow an arm
I'll sit and listen to the sound of sand and cold
Twisted diamond heart, I'm the weekend warrior
My predictions are the only things I have
I can amplify the sound and light and love

I'm a curse and i'm a sound,
When I open up my mouth,
There's a reason I don't win,
I don't know how to begin

We think the lyrics will be fairly simple to convert to film as they mention lots of everyday objects which we can use in the video. The lyrics themselves are pretty abstract so this should help us when it comes to making an abstract video.

My role

I will be sharing the filming and directing with one other person so we can alternate and get a good feel for both experiences.

Ideas so far

So far we have the location, which is going to be Tidemills which is part of Seaford beach, we also think we are going to film it all from first person perspective of a group of 4 people on drugs because this gives us a massive range of ideas we can use. For the chorus we think we are going to use animation where we take an object from the video and animate it and then at the end of the chorus do that in reverse, and then we are going to reuse the same animation for each chorus but alter it slightly each time so it seems different as this will give us more time for other things. At the beginning we think we will use a time lapse of the sun going down as MGMT use time lapses in more or less all there videos and the effect works well.

Video analysis

MGMT have a video for there song Electric Feel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtUI5MC9tVM) is set in a very bright forest with a group of people playing the song. Although this is different to our plan it has some similarity such as the use of one location devoid of other people. They also have very brightly colored liquid coming out of the moon, we might use an idea like this to draw attention to certain objects by painting them with rave paint. This video ends with the moon turning into 2 motorbikes and everybody dances, as you can tell this video is very abstract.

In Time To Pretend (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE) another video by them it shows them dancing around a campfire before going into some very weird animations done with a green screen, we could use this for some of the tripier parts of the song. This video doesnt make much sense apart from the lead singer shooting animals such as zebras and giant spiders with human mouths with a bow. Colour is used extensively in this video with many bright colours on screen at once which makes the video seem very trippy.