Final Cut Of Music Video

Final Cut Of Our Music Video

Narrative: Two friends, called Jessica & Katy. Katy has passed away and Jess is attending her funeral. 

We began with an opening shot of the church which slowly panned upwards towards the sky. Immediately you recognise that it's a church from the cross symbol that appears at the top of the building. In this shot you can hear wind and rain which works well with the shot as you can see a grey sky above the church, this is when the music begins. It is slow and calming.

The next shot is Jess sitting in the back of a funeral car staring out the window, emotionless. The title 'Jessica Hall' appears on the screen in bold white letters. We decided to use this colour and font after watching Taylor Swifts music video 'Wildest Dreams' where the font is similar. This follows onto a time-lapse of the sky where in the same font the words 'Heaven' appear, we used the time-lapse effect on the iPhone in order to create this clip. We did this by holding the phone up towards the sky whilst being in a moving car with the window down. We decided to put this title over this particular shot because we felt like many people refer to 'heaven' as in the sky. The singing begins in this shot too. We picked plain titles as we didn't want anything complicated or too extravagant as we wanted to keep it simple.

Next we see the back of Jess, walking through a gate into a church. She is wearing a black hat and a grey jacket with black heels, we dressed her in a black hat as this is her signature style. This shot quickly changes to a medium shot of Jess sitting in a dark studio which is our performance element, this will be seen throughout the music video. We decided to have to room dark as we felt as she was singing this would reflect the dark time she was going through in her life and would enhance the feelings she was portraying whilst singing. Throughout the video we kept her clothing dark and simple as we didn't want many bright colours that would stand out as this didn't work with our theme. We decided to also have this quite plain and simple as there are many shots that are full of nature and colour therefore to contrast this we wanted a dark background.

30 seconds into the music video we see a black and white clip of two girls, one brunette and one blonde. They are having a pillow fight and laughing and giggling together. The black and white clips are flash backs of their friendship and the good times that they shared. Many of the shots have been slightly slowed down to go with the pace and beat of the song as when we used them at normal speed they didn't fit with the song. We didn't reveal immediately who the blonde girl was as we didn't want the narrative to be given straight away as we wanted the audience to think about it first.

At around 50 seconds into the music video we see the first shot of Jess actually in the church graveyard. She is sitting on a bench looking down at a piece of paper in her hands. However it is hard to work out what is written on it at the moment. About 20 seconds later we see a close up shot of the piece of paper which is revealed to be a funeral programme for her friend, Katy. This makes it more clear who the girl is in the black and white shots.

After this we wanted to slightly lift the mood of the music video so we had a point of view shot of Jess from Katy's point of a adventure they'd taken through a forest. These are my favourite shots in the music video as they are very natural and life-like which we felt worked really well contrasting the good and the bad times. Jess is walking in front of Katy, she is laughing and being silly. I love the shot of Katy holding her hand out and Jess running back to get her as we felt it was very symbolic of there friendship and that Jess would never leave Katy behind which is quite sad as it could be argued that Katy left Jess. These shots are sandwiched between more black and white flashbacks to emphasise their friendship even more. I think this allows the audience to empathise as they are just two ordinary girls just having fun and could represent that this could happen to anybody therefore we must cherish the time we have with our friends.

We also have many shots of Jess in a country lane which is very scenic and pretty. This works well as it's just Jess and an open background which allows Jess to almost communicate with the camera as the shots are medium in order to see her facial expressions. Many of these shots show Jess distressed about losing her friend which contrasts with the flashbacks.

We tried to match clips to the appropriate lyrics in order to portray a realistic narrative. At the end of the song at around 2.55 the lyrics say 'so go on, go home'. We placed a clip of Jess leaving the church and closing the gate to represent her going home, however not forgetting about her friend as she is still holding the funeral programme. To finish the music video we decided to play one more black and white flash back of the two girls together in order to remind the audience of the narrative one last time. This shot is a still close up and shows the two girls play fighting. Katy gives Jess a kiss on the cheek and they are both smiling. Finally we see Jesses legs walking off slowly down the road, as the final lyrics of the song plays we see Jess drop the funeral programme on the floor.  The camera then pans into the final shot of the programme which focuses on the words written 'heaven couldn't wait for you' which is also lyrics in the song. Originally we didn't have this clip however we felt like this ended the music video well and bookended it.