Outdoors

Rihanna's 'Only Girl' music video includes a couple of micro elements we are thinking of using for our own music video. Firstly the whole video takes place outside which is one of our main elements as it is very common for indie music videos to take place outside whether it is in a forest or in the street. Rihanna's video is not a typical pop video as there are no dancers and it is a fairly random video with no storyline. However she makes it a pop video through her choice of costume, props and colour grading - all being very girly and pink.

These shots show random objects in the background. The balloons and giant plastic flower are shown to be in the middle of a deserted place - you wouldn't usually find them there. This is something we want to use in our music video. We plan to film in a forest with a sofa and other pieces of furniture as props which is very random however indie music videos are known to be random and original which is definitely an element we will include when planning our own video.

As we will be filming in a forest throughout the day, an idea we are thinking of using for the evening/night scenes is having lanterns or fairy lights in the trees which will hopefully give a dream-like, random feel to the video.

Throughout Rihanna's video the colour grading has a pink tone which helps to portray how girly and pretty Rihanna is. As our genre is indie, we will be changing our colour grading to a more vintage/sepia tone as this is the overall colour tone that most indie artists/bands use.

Stop Motion

An idea we want to use in our own video is the use of stop motion. This is a very effective and different idea to use however as indie music videos tend to be random and original we felt that stop motion would be a good way to portray the genre. One of my favourite stop motion music videos is 'Her Morning Elegance' by Oren Lavie. This video uses stop motion throughout which tells a story of the main characters day. This is shown in a very original way as she is shown to be in bed all day with her daily routine happening around her, however as it takes place in her bed it makes you think that she could actually be dreaming as there are parts in the video where she is swimming in the sea, this allows the audience to interpret the video in different ways. In our video we have the idea of using stop motion in a couple of shots. This includes having slices of a pizza disappear to show what the time is as we film our characters journey through the day. The idea of pizza slices in stop motion has been used before but for a different reason. The 'Game Over' by Pez stop motion video shows Pacman as a pizza and when he gets eaten the slices disappear one by one.

Polaroids

One of our ideas is to use Polaroid pictures or a Polaroid effect in our music video as it gives a vintage look to the video which is a convention of the indie genre. Sara Bareilles's video of 'King of Anything' is a good example of this as she has used a Polaroid effect as well as changing the colour scheme throughout from black and white to colour to give the video a film/vintage feel. It is also quite an original idea which is what we are looking to do in our own music video.




Outcast's 'Hey Ya' video also features a Polaroid camera and lyrics "shake it like a polaroid picture"