Planning a Narrative

We decided that we would definitely go with the stalking idea, and considered how the narrative could be put into the video, as normally songs and their video's run in a way which means that the narrative will build up at the same rate as the song, and reach a 'conflict', before resolving at the same rate as the song. We found that our song had barely any change, and so could reach this at virtually any point, though between 1: 50 and 2 minutes is likely best, we still had a lot more control over our narrative and it's structure than most video's.

We thought a bit more about how we could use the stalking idea. We realised that we'd have to make it much less serious to get it to work, because if we make it serious it will be cliched and look generally bad. Two video's came to mind when we thought of this, these being 'I'm afraid of Americans' by David Bowie, and 'Monster' by The Automatic. 

'I'm Afraid of Americans' was based on the invasion of homogenised culture, and how it narrows expression of life and strangles indigenous cultures. The video was  inspired by the film Taxi- Driver, and stars David Bowie and the Nine Inch Nails frontman, Trent Reznor, and features Bowie being stalked through New York by Johnny, a hostile American, who is played by Reznor. Bowie gets more and more paranoid as he is being stalked, and imagines he witnesses acts of violence being acted onto citizens by one another. Bowie ducks behind a taxi as Reznor fires at him with an imaginary gun, and awakes to witness Reznor carrying a cross in procession. Even though the idea is cool, its possible that something like this could be way too serious, and not work well for us. 

This video takes a much lighter approach to the idea, and although it is not about stalking it has a hunter and hunted theme to it, which is something we're considering playing on within our own video. The video features the band playing monster hunters, wearing false beards and hiking gear, and travelling in an old van which is draped in camouflage and newspaper articles about monsters, UFO's and Nessie. They encounter Nessie and Big Foot repeatedly, but are oblivious each time, and when they return to their van they are surrounded by the monsters, who are destroyed by a UFO, which then zaps up the band.

We thought that this would make the video much more satirical. From this we also thought about having the whole band stalking the woman, but rather than having them grouped together like in this video, have them appear separately along the same road or something like that. We also thought about maybe basing their costume around hunters, having them in deer-hunter caps and maybe with binoculars and things like that.