In class this Thursday the time had come to pitch our music videos. As well as having Rohan and our classmates there to provided feedback on our ideas, we were also very fortunate to have musician, Georgia Fields, present to provide a fresh set of eyes and comments from an artist perspective.

Although, as a group we all had a clear idea of what we were aiming to achieve and the ideas that we would be working with, we discovered in preparation for the pitch that articulating our plans would be more difficult than we expected. Having quite an abstract idea, it anticipated it would be hard for an audience to fully visualise how our material would come together during production and with a lot of our work to be done in post there wasn’t as much to plan for before this stage. Having played around with the green screen and already successfully captured several visually effective science like experiment, we quickly learnt that our ideas would be best presented visually. We showed the music video from Tame Impala “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” as this was a huge source of initial inspiration and a lot of our plans corresponded with things presented in the clip (you can view the video below). For example the video uses bright psychedelic colours and movements and also incorporates a profile head and different patterns and movement happening inside the head and in the background. This video was a really useful tool to explain the sort of path we intended to go down, as we were clearly able to identify to the audience aspects that we planned to incorporate as well as areas where we wanted to do things differently. We also showed shot clips of some of the experiments we had already completed and screenshots of some of the material we had played around with briefly after our green screen practice shoot earlier in the week.

Overall, I feel our pitch was a success. We were able to effectively explain our concept and reinforce our decisions with reasons and examples. Some of the feedback from Rohan, Georgia and the class included:

• Good work on incorporating the brand of the artists and developing a concept that fits with the image they want to portray
• Make sure you have a lot of material to use as backgrounds/visuals to go inside the profile heads
• Think about what you can do in the intro section of the song before the lyrics begin (quite a bit of time to work with here)
• If using props in the green screen shoot maybe pre-warn the artist to ensure thy feel comfortable with the things you want them to work with (we plan to mix up profile head shots by having our artists wear hats and other things that you might bring to your face/head to make shots more interesting and also tie in the idea behind the song referring to the multiple sides/”names” that people can have)
• Ensure you have everything worked out and ready to go with the green screen before the artists arrive
• Think about what you can do to give yourself less work to do in post, eg. Making sure the artists are wearing appropriate clothes so that the green can be easily keyed out, maybe get them to gel their hair/trim beards if necessary and possible
• Consider effect you could create using tools like stop motion – these could work really effectively as background even though they step a little outside the “experiment theme”

For those interested in our initial inspiration see video here: