Initial Song Ideas

As a group we had to decide which song we wanted to produce a music video for. It must be something which we all felt right for a music video in terms of the genre of the song, it's lyrics being suitable to use (e.g little if any swearing) as well as the ideas which we could derive from the lyrics for a strong narrative. The reason being that we feel the video wont be as strong if
we choose a song and create a narrative unrelated to the song lyrics rather than using the song's themes to our advantage. Therefore we carefully compiled a list of songs which we could work with and create an impressive video. Here are a few of the songs we suggested.

The Specials - Ghost Town

So our first suggestion was for this song in which the lyrics are quite powerful as it talks about how a town is becoming 'like a ghost town' which would have worked extremely well if we were to have filmed in Whitley Bay as the majority of the town is quite run down and would have given us an ample amount of shots and filming sites to use.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the song already had a very good music video and so we had to discount this suggestion because of that which is a shame as it could have worked quite nicely.

Milburn - Send in the boys

Our second suggestion was 'Send in the boys' which featured a good tune that we all agreed we liked. The narrative could have been quite a fun and entertaining one as we had a couple of  ideas as to what we could have done using the lyrics,

Also, by being a fairly small band, the song had no video whatsoever unlike 'ghost town' and so seemed more like a possibility. Unfortunately, this song is only 2:45 and so fitting in a good narrative in such as short space of time would only compromise the video and so we eventually decided against this one.

Catfish and the Bottlemen - Various tracks

One person in our group suggested that we should look through songs by Catfish and the Bottlemen. After searching through their tracks for a while, we found the songs 'Cocoon', 'Kathleen', 'Pacifier', 'Hourglass', '26' and '7'.

It eventually turned out that the latter three tracks were the only ones without music videos and so the remaining tracks proved to be not good enough to make the video with and so we moved on to looking for other songs.

The Wombats - Let's dance to Joy Division

At first listen we all enjoyed this song however the idea was extremely short-lived as it was suggested, only to immediately find out that there was already a music video made for it and ruled this song out for us and so we switched our attentions to other songs instead.

Arctic Monkeys - Mardy Bum

This song is one of only a few by the Arctic Monkeys which we found didn't have a music video for it which was surprising given how popular the song has been over the last decade. We thought that the storyline could be something to do with a problematic relationship between two people who go between arguing and getting along well with one another.

Unfortunately, this was one of the longest songs which we found as it lasts 4:54 which was too long for what we were looking for and so we had to discount this song.

Imagine Dragons - Various tracks

Initially we listened to the song  'On top of the world' by imagine dragons and agreed it had the right sound for what we were looking for. We later discovered this song already had a music video and decided to focus on this band and see what tracks we could find in one of their latest albums.

Looking through the album Smoke + Mirrors. We listened to the songs 'I bet your life', 'Gold', 'Shots' and 'Warriors'. After much discussion, we decided that 'Warriors' had the greatest potential to be made into a music video, and started to come up with the basis of a narrative. Our idea was to centre the story around two sportsmen (a dancer and a runner) who dedicated their lives to their sport. We would show them missing out on a lot of their childhood and teen years because of them constantly being at practice or rehearsal which linked to the lyrics "As a child you would wait and watch from far away. But you always knew that you'd be the one that work while they all play." We would then show them achieving great success as they grew older and achieved their dreams of doing what thy loved professionally which we thought fitted with the chorus "Here we are, don't turn away now,
We are the warriors that built this town" 

This song is a possibility of being our chosen song however it only lasts 2:50 and their isn't many lyrics that we could work with, it could well be our song if we thing we have enough time to fit in the narrative.

Fallout Boy - The Kids Aren't Alright - Our Chosen Song

So as a group, we unanimously decided that this song could be a good choice and have already come up with several possible narratives which we could use. A few being -

• Using a relationship as a metaphor for the relationship someone has with drugs.
• A man who struggles/has struggled with an addiction to narcotics and abuses drug substances giving him strong hallucinations.  

• Someone suffering a psychological issue such as Bipolar, Schizophrenia or Dissociative identity disorder

We all feel like we have at least one strong narrative amongst our ideas with this and so as it stands, 'The kids aren't alright' will be our song which we will make a music video for.

The song has no music video  lasts 4:21 which is under our maximum song duration as well as allowing us enough time to fit in a strong narrative. It also seemed the best song out of all our other potential ideas to use so it is likely that we may use this.

This concludes our initial ideas for our music video.