Music Video Treatment

The song I will be doing as my music video is X You by Avicii, this could be seen as a fairly difficult song to create a music video without any lyrics it is totally down to the interpretation of the music to make the narrative of the music video and to create a affective piece. It allows me to use all my imagination in creating an exciting music video as I am not bound to the lyrics of the song like most songs are.

I want to create a narrative for the song and this means I will be following the narrative structure as said by Todorov in his theory on narrative structure. The problem I may find is creating something unique in that the music video is so open the only images I get is from pass experience as a an audience watching each music video.

First impressions in the form of a mood board:

1st Rough Plan 

I wrote this after first listening to the song just to get an idea of where my narrative would take me. This may not be the best portrayed treatment and yet it was just first impressions.

Scene 1: Guy stands looking out over water at a sea shore. Next to a bike. Then grabs bike and begins to peddle away fast and along the beach front.

Scene 2: Jumps off bike and into car. Speeds away and is listening to a track on the radio whilst tapping fingers on steering wheel as though listening to the track in the background.

Scene 3: Gets home where awaits him recoding dj equipment which he begins to use such as a keyboard, whilst scribbling down nots and creating notes on a mac laptop, whilst headphones on the whole time he moves to the beat of the music. Then switches to guitar and then bass using an amp.

Scene 4: Him travelling in a car on a laptop still making music on the journey to somewhere and he seems real happy with himself. Pulls up outside concert..

Scene 5: Inside concert with live music everyone dancing etc. Think he is the DJ at the front instead he is staring from the crowd looking up. This creates a twist in the story, the video then overlaps the previous story to show what built up to this moment.

I wanted to then look at other music videos to get an idea of any other interpretations I could use to alter my original rough plan and even to change my view completely on what i was going to do.

This is another song by Avicii as I wanted to see what his style was and allow me to incorporate some of that into my music video to make sure I kept within the House/Dance music genre.

From what I have seen from many of his music videos he uses a narrative in which it builds to a final live performance such as in Wake Me Up, where he uses the main character as the common feature throughout the video and this leads to her being at the final performance before that dies off and the narrative returns to its original equilibrium. Also the use of the two alternative lives is very affective and the the use of almost a movie type of action breaking up the song itself to highlight the importance of the video to the song as the the song plays of the video.

I used a mind map to get down some ideas of the genre, audience and the narrative just to get an idea of what I wanted or needed to include.

From looking at this I can create a final treatment of what I want to include in my video whilst staying in the genre and a strong narrative is important to the video and also a live performance will be important and yet this may be the most difficult section to film to get good quality and also to get the right shots. I wouldn't be able to control the live performance very well and could lead to me having to find an alternative to this section of the video, maybe create a plot twist where you think he's going to go to a live performance and instead he wakes up and realises it was what he wanted not what he had.

This treatment represents the narrative structure I wanted to give to the video, it is a very fast equilibrium with the boy stood at the start, yet this is always building to the creation of the music and this in turn creates the new equilibrium.