Music Video Production

Step 1: Choose Your Track

For my music video, I made a shortlist of five songs to choose from and I decided out of these five:
Queen - Killer Queen
The Beatles - Hey Jude
Queen - Radio Gaga
Daft Punk - One More Time
Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know

I have decided to use Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know as it seems the most fit for my idea. It will be a surrealist video which follows a man who goes to work, and is taken hostage but it is all in reverse, whilst all of the time he is singing the lyrics, whilst he bikes to work, and when he is shaving and it ends with him turning the light off and jumping back into bed.

Step 2: Analysing Your Track

I feel like the song fits well with a surrealist music video as the music itself seems to have a surrealistic sound to it with obscure instruments playing in the background, also it seems that a video like that would fit well with the artists image. The idea of the song is finding out that someone who you thought was a perfect person, turns out to be your allusions of what you want them to be from first appearance, and when you get to know them, you find out that they aren't who you thought they were and they were 'Somebody that they used to know', the female singer, Kimbra, says she "think of all the times you screwed me over" connoting that he treated her badly after finding out that she wasn't who she thought he was, which in turn changed her opinion on him, from her perspective he was somebody that she used to know because she thought he was this allusion of a perfect person. As I said before, the artist has a very surreal view in his songs, in the music video, they're painted to blend into the background, connoting that they're slowly fading away from each other. The song plays at 68 BPM (Beats Per Minute) which isn't fast, but it isn't slow, it goes at a steady beat, maintaining this beat for the whole song. The song is 4 minutes and 3 seconds, which is three seconds over the limit, but excluding the pauses at the beggining and the end of the video, it just goes under 4 minutes.

Step 3: Researching The Artist- Image And Representation

in the song, they're not wearing any clothing, as I said before, they're painted to blend into the background. In the video, they are wearing a range of different makeups to look like the painted wall behind them, this gives a good surreal effect because they almost look like a floating air of eyes and teeth. The other existing videos that I could find were all of the same pace. I couldn't find any other music videos made by Gotye.

To do a tracking effect where it is always a closeup on their face, I will need o spend some money making this http://cinematography-howto.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-lightweight-body-mount-rig-for-filming-unique-front-ots-shots-0146700/
another thing I would need to do is get the actor to learn the song backwards so that when it is reversed back, they lip sync perfectly.

Step 4: Planning Your Video

My idea would be a man, turns on his bedroom light, gets out of bed, shaves and then gets on his bike and goes to work, it will all be one take, when he gets to work, his ex is there and she will lip sync the part sang by Kimbra, he will keep walking down the corridors and is goes into a room, where he sits at a computer and starts typing, two people with guns come in and put a bag over his head, he is taken to an abandoned building, the bag is taken off and then put back on again, he gets kicked to the ground out of frame, and the man shoots down on the ground, once I have filmed this in one take, I will reverse the footage and the track.