Developing ideas for our music video – Flume: Never Be Like You

There are many reasons why Flume ‘Never Be Like You’ would be a great song to use when creating our own music video. One reason is that the song has a good, clear, storyline within the lyrics. The meaning behind the song is a breakup, and love story, told by the female vocalist which to our target audience (older teenagers) is highly relatable. We also all know the song well as a group, however, despite being vaguely successful, it did not manage to make it high in the charts and thus, won’t have been overplayed by our audience as much. This was an important factor as we did not wish to pick a song that had been overplayed and that our audience would be bored of or find annoying.

The style of video we are doing is narrative, as it fits best as the lyrics have a story which we will be able to portray well throughout the video.

We are going to explore the style through highlighting the pain of heartbreak, through using a lot of close ups to show emotions and props such as photographs. The editing is also going to feature strong visual effects, with filters to create a specific chilled atmosphere.

The actors we would need are a teenage girl and a selection of boys to create the love story we are after. We are wanting to use as many locations as we can, to create the feeling that her heartbreak is with her wherever she goes. We also feel the more locations we use, the less repetitive it gets, and thus, less boring and more engaging. Locations would include a normal home, places like the beach to use for flashbacks of a ‘better’ time for her. We also thought about having the males always shot outside, and the teenage girl inside to show how isolating her break up was and how it’s affected her – displaying a deeper message of the mental effects a relationship break-up can have. As for mise en scene, the girl would be dressed in normal teenage clothes, and the males would be dressed in stereotypical clothes such as hoodies, jeans, trainers etc. The lighting would vary throughout to represent the parts where we she was in love and now heartbroken. Thus, natural bright lighting would be used during ‘happier’ scenes where there are flashbacks of her relationship. Harsh strong directional lighting, would be used to create shadows during her breakup to show the darkness of her emotions and how it haunts her. Dark dimmed lighting would also be used to display her feelings post-break up, and the lack of ‘happiness’ she is feeling. Props would be used throughout also, such as letters, phones, cars, to represent the different stages of the break up.

The music genre we struggled to pin point, however we decided it as alternative electronic. We are going to try to include the conventions of dynamic, unique videos, with ‘funky’ editing (such as, in the official music video for Never Be like You, it features an editing technique which makes everything distorted and different). They conventionally use bold colours, and a variation of lighting which we are also going to try and include. We are going to use Goodwin’s linking of the lyrics and visuals – for example, ‘falling on my knees’, we will film the female doing so, so there is a clear direct link which can be easily understood and interpreted by the audience. We will also using Goodwin’s concept of linking the music and visuals by consistently matching the beat of the music to the visuals, and words which have significant connotations to footage which highlight this. By matching the music to the footage, it will create a much more professional and aesthetically pleasing outcome.

We might challenge the conventions of alternative electronic however, as normally if they feature a storyline they don’t highlight both genders emotions, however in our music video we will display both the girls, and the male’s emotions. Thus, challenging the stereotypes and representations of

males with emotion as normally their feelings and struggles aren’t displayed as they’re meant to be ‘strong’ and dominant.

Our representation of gender will be stereotypical, as the boy will have been the dominant figure within the relationship and has chosen to call it off, leaving the girl emotional, heartbroken and helpless wanting him back. This will be clearly portrayed through emotions shown via close ups, and also the stereotypical clothing and props assigned to each.