Intertextuality

The definition of intertextuality is the relation between texts, especially literary ones. One example of intertextuality within a music video is Robbie Williams' music video for 'You Know Me'. The video features the artist being taken to an 'Alice in Wonderland' style setting, in which he is later dressed up as the rabbit from the film, therefore creating intertextuality between the original film and Robbie William's music video.

We will also be using intertextuality within our music video, as we are using the narrative of Virginia Wolfe's suicide attempt, which is documented throughout literature. Therefore, by incorporating this we will be using intertextuality. This could also possibly attract a wider audience to our music video, as people interested in the literature of Virginia Wolfe may also be interested in watching the music video. 

Fish Eye Lens Shot

When filming the narrative to complete our music video, we decided to film the main protagonist from behind and from her point of view to gain a better sense of perspective of the story. This looked very effective and came in very handy, as the camera set up to film the scene from the front was out of focus, so we couldn't use the footage. We really like the sense of perspective this has added to our narrative.

Filming the Narrative

We came up with a shooting schedule in order to film our narrative scenes in our music video before we went out to film, so that we could manage our time efficiently whilst on location and to make sure we got all the shots we needed, as this was the last time we could film.

Tara, Stef and I managed to stick to our plan and get all of the shots we needed when on location, which made it easy to get straight back to school to upload our footage and begin editing again. We were amazed at how adding the narrative scenes into our music video enhanced it, and we are all a lot happier! Now we plan to spend all of our free time editing until the deadline... 

Mood Board

We will soon be filming our narrative to bring our video all together, so I have made a mood board to ensure when we are our on location filming, we stick to our theme and plan.

Props, Mise en Scene and Location for Narrative

For the narrative, we will need some props to ensure the message we are aiming to portray will play out and be clear to the audience. For example, we are following the story of Virginia Wolfe's suicide, so we will need pebbles for Stef to pick up and put in her pockets before she jumps into the lake. Emily has some pebbles that she has been using for photography, so we will be using those! In terms of further props, there are no main things we need. However we will be making sure Stef is wearing boots so that we can film her taking them off next to the lake, inspired by the close up shot of the feet in The Kook's video for 'Bad Habit'.


However, the mise en scene in which we will be filming our narrative is extremely important. We need to ensure we keep to a woodland setting to conform to this convention of the indie pop/rock genre, but we also need to find the right lake and to make sure its safe for Stef to jump into. Therefore, we will be using a pond/lake at Forty Hall, which is deep enough to look effective, however still shallow enough so that we can convince Stef to jump in! We also need to make sure the lake is surrounded by trees for any point of view shots, not only to keep to the rural settings that we have already used, but also to create the feel that the protagonist is trapped and "suffocating".

Narrative

We recently came up with a narrative to make our music video a little bit more interesting and to add to the shots we had of Stefani lip syncing. We already have a natural based theme because this is typical of our genre, so we wanted to add to that. The idea of the narrative is to create the feel that the main protagonist feels trapped within her own life, and to show her committing suicide. We decided to portray this through a story we heard in English Literature, of how Virginia Wolf attempted to commit suicide by filling her pockets with stones and walking into a lake.

Therefore, the plan is to film a collective of shots of Stefani filling her pockets with stones and stepping into a lake in Forty Hall!

Audience Feedback

We are currently editing our music video with the footage we previously filmed, however, we still feel as though we need a narrative incorporated into it. Because we were stuck for ideas on what this could be, we asked our class to watch what we had already, and give us some feedback to what we could improve on and what the narrative could be.

Most of our feedback said that our editing so far was really effective, but the shots were very repetitive, so a narrative was definitely needed. So, we came up with a narrative as a group which we will film soon. This is the list of adjustments we need to make and a blog of me and Emily explaining what feedback we received: