Dry the River task

For this task we had to again listen to the song alone, without the visuals to go along with it. We had to interpret in our groups what we thought the genre of the song was, whether the artist was a solo or band, who the audience might be, what the lyrics of the song meant and the pace of the song.

We then discussed this as a class and we more or less all said the same things;
Genre; Indie rock
Artist: Band
Target Audience: A more mature audience with unique/ different taste
Lyrics: Portrayed an angry love song
Pace:
The pace started off slow but began to pick up pace as the emotion of the song changed.


In our group's we then had to form a potential music video to go with the song including narrative, setting, costume, shots and visuals to match the lyrics. I was in a group with Olivia and Liv, we came up with the following ideas to promote the song through a video.

Potential Narrative: 
We thought there would be more narrative than performance as the lyrics are telling a love story. We decided against performance as we didn't imagine it to be filmed as a gig or concert, we imagined it to be in a more isolated space.

Potential Setting:
We pictured a white background and a very minimalistic video. Only the band would be seen with the occasional jump cut to the narrative. The main focus would be on the lead singer of the band

Potential Costumes:
-Dark colours
-Scruffy, relatively normal clothes- they care more about their music than their perceived image.

Camera Shots:
Lots of close ups of the lead singer to support Goodwins 'Star Image' theory. This would be broken up by establishing shots of the band including birds eye and low and high angle shots.

Visuals to match lyrics:
As the lyrics portray that the man has lost the women he is in love with we would break the video up with jump cuts to a story of two people who aren't in the band, they start out very much in love but as the lyrics and pace of the song change, so would their story. One lyric says 'like so many birds' to amplify this lyric we would have doves as there have connotations of love and peace.

What the video was really like;
First watching the video it seems very weird and doesn't seem to match the lyrics or have any relevance. However at a deeper look I identified that the video was portraying the four elements; earth, wind, fire and water. Throughout the video there was only one setting, with equal amounts of camera time for each band member. The pace began reasonably slow (which matched the pace of the song) as the pace picks up the facial expressions, pace and amount of transitions and cuts speeds up and become more frequent. The band seem to become more in pain and desperate in the final seconds of the video. The narrative is very random however the lyric 'like so many birds' is referenced through the use of dead birds.