During the fine cut presentations in class there was discussion around one particular groups music video, which had taken a more strictly narrative approach to their project. They had a loose storyline, sequential scenes and a plot. There was another video that had a rough plot, but also enough stylistic footage to break it up and make it less of a strict narrative. This group though, they had a story.

The singer is looking for her ‘Elvis Hair’, a guy who she’s in love with or something. He goes around helping a whole bunch of people and giving them balloons, she then runs into those people and they help her find him. The discussion came about because the first character that Elvis Hair runs into is wearing a wig, and the production quality wasn’t quite up to scratch with the rest of the (fantastically well made) video. We were talking about ways it could be fixed and whether the shot could be removed, but because she’s the first character, she sets up the idea for the rest of the video and is in the rest of the shots, so it’d be weird for her to just appear.

This I think is why narrative filming scares me a bit. I mean, we discarded a lot of the footage we made for our shoot, and that was fine because we were concentrating on the stylistic elements so anything that turned out a bit wonky we just didn’t use. But when you’re filming a narrative, everything is necessary. You have to cover the scene from all angles because if you only have the one angle it looks weird and if you make a mistake and you don’t have enough footage you have to go back and shoot it all again to keep it consistent. Scary stuff.

I guess thats why when we were plotting out what we wanted for our music video we leaned away from the narrative stuff. We originally had a much more cohesive narrative thread, and I can’t pinpoint the exact moment we abandoned it. I think it might have been when we got out to the woods to film and realised it just wouldn’t work.