For mostly everything in the modern media, you don’t have to delve to deep to find where a creative has taken inspiration from older pieces of work. Whether it be through plot line (e.g. The Lion King and Black Panther) or genre tropes (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), similarities can be found everywhere in the media. Some might argue that it is in fact idea-stealing, but unless it’s an exact replica, or practically the same, everything has it’s own differences.
That’s being said, it is clear where I have taken inspiration for my final project. Considering I chose to create a music video, there is endless possibilities of what I could have done. I could’ve stuck with a purely narrative video, or an entirely performance based video, or even a mixture of the two.
As previously stated in my proposal, I intended on keeping a relatively creepy feel to my video and what better place to look for creepy inspiration than from the artist of the song I’ve chosen: Billie Eilish. Her videos are laden with creepy aesthetic, a lot of her videos carry a darker colour palette (with the exception of her “bad guy” video which subverts the tone of the song), as well as having some quite gruesome themes throughout all her videos, including one shot where she is seen to be crying out a black liquid, and another where a tarantula crawls out of her mouth.
The main sort of aesthetic I’m looking for it dark and ominous, and the best example of this in Eilish’s videos is “bury a friend”, arguably her scariest video to date.
Throughout the entire video, it is pretty dark; there aren’t many moments of lightness, if any at all. This helps to keep the vibe pretty macabre, not to mention all the use of horror film tropes such as black eyes, creepy walks and flickering lights. The director, Michael Chaves, also uses a lot of strobe lighting within the video, as well as keeping the editing pretty choppy, which is what I intend to do with my own video.
It’s basically a horror story set to music, it’s designed and produced to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and scared. Considering my song choice, I want to do a similar sort of thing for my FMP. I don’t want to copy this style exactly, plus I always had it in mind that I wanted to keep the colour themed around reds and blacks, but this is certainly one of my main influences for my FMP. I’ve always admired the style of Billie’s music and her videos, and I want to make sure that I do her song justice when I create my version of the “bad guy” video.
“Stressed out” by Twenty One Pilots is probably one of the best example of what format I want my video to follow. It includes a nice balance of dialogue and performance video. Not to mention, it also uses subtitles (if only once in the video) which is an idea I’ve had to develop during the process of editing my final production. It also has one of the creepiest face shots in any video I’ve seen. From this, I’ve drawn the idea to do a similar thing in my video. I will have my actress in front of a dark backdrop, mouthing the lyrics to “bad guy” in a intimidating sort of way.
If I want to find an example of the exact formatting I want to follow for my FMP, I have to look no further than Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “The Kill”; not only does it have an opening dialogue, but it also follows a similar layout to my idea and the Twenty One Pilot’s video, seeing as though it uses both narrative and performance clips. It also has a sort of creepy “The Shining” story running through the whole thing, so again, my main inspiration that I take from this video is the horror genre and the way it is presented.
The video is a homage to the Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining based on the Stephen King novel. Several scenes are based on the film, such as when Shannon Leto enters Room 6277 and encounters the woman in the bathroom and another when Matt Wachter is served drinks at the bar by a doppelgänger apparition. The video culminates in an elegant ballroom in the same manner as the photo at the end of the film.
En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). The Kill. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill [Accessed 3 Jun. 2019].
This video has taken direct inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, so clearly this was a good example of a horror music video to take my own inspiration from. It, like bury a friend, also uses choppier cutting techniques and strobe lighting in places in order to create an air of mystery and the lack of comfort.
LAST MINUTE INSPIRATION
Due to not having a mic whilst filming, I wasn’t able to record an actual dialogue for my video (to be fair, I don’t think I would have been able to anyway, but that was purely due to the competency of the actors involved). I needed to find a way of conveying the story of the video, so it made sense to the rest of the plot line. Then, it occurred to me that I in fact knew of a video that manages to do this perfectly: Radiohead Turn.
In this video, they use subtitles to show what the characters are actually saying to one and other. It’s clearly used just so you are able to hear the music over the top, but from this I wanted to create my own stylised version in order to convey the thoughts and speech of my characters. It creates a sense of ambiguity to the character’s voices, as well as emphasising the emotion of the music behind it rather than the actual speech.
India's FMP Blog 2019 