Suppose a local band came up to you and 4 other students and asked you to make them a music video for one of their songs for ₤500, and then ran off just as quickly as they came. Well, that’s not exactly how it went, but it’s a pretty good approximation. We had to come up with an idea for a music video for York-based pop band The And Ensemble’s song, ‘Perfect isn’t Enough,’ and make sure it adhered to the bands requirements, some of which were: the band members were only available to film for 2 days and it needed to follow contemporary online trends.
The first thing we did was listen to the song and figure out if anything spoke to us. First-off, the quality of the sound seemed almost like something a band in the 1990s would record in their parent’s garage. We figured the style of the video could reflect that of the sound if we filmed it to look like it was recorded on an VHS camera. Not only would that help with the budget, since we wouldn’t need fancy cameras or good lighting, but it also fell in line with videos produced by other popular artists like Clairo and Rex Orange County. We could use most of the budget on set dressing instead of film equipment. For what would happen in the video, we decided there’d be a small house party in it, in which the band would be performing the song to everyone, but we’d also have shots of the band members hanging out and being themselves to try and convey each of the band member’s personalities to the audience.
In listening to the song, we determined that the lyrics about the singer trying to find a romantic partner who’s more than just perfect looks. To help push that theme in our video, we thought it’d be a good idea to include intercuts of perfectly made objects, such as a perfectly-frosted cake, and have them be smashed to reveal unappealing things inside – the cake is filled with dirt and worms. These inter-cuts would happen though out the scenes of the house party and band hanging out.
I suppose the biggest challenge about this project was working together as a group. It was assigned right before the weekend, so many of our group-members were going to head home for the weekend, which meant that we wouldn’t be able to meet up and put together the PowerPoint as a group. Luckily, none of us had a strong opinion on any visions we had come up with ourselves, so we were able to look at what everyone else had added to the presentation and add on to it. By the day of our presentation, we had a good idea of the video’s vision.
From our feedback on our presentation, one of the points that stood out most to me was that we managed to convey a broad vision of what we wanted the story to be about, but we didn’t have anything specific. Including ideas of how the story would progress or ideas for the scenes of the house party and band members hanging out would have benefited our presentation, as any producers we were pitching to could begin seeing a rough idea of the video in their heads. I feel like that was an important piece of feedback for me and I’ll try to implement it in any future pitches I may have.
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