Beginning Concepts

As previously stated in my last blog, there is a definite gritty theme to our song and my group and i really want to convey this in our video. Before we could start planning our video, obviously we needed to come up with a powerful concept. We read through the song lyrics and tried to pick out some key phrases and expand on some more concrete ideas. Whilst reading through, we got a clear image of what the lyrics meant, it seemed there was a big drug influence connected with teenagers. Proceeding with this idea, we started to come up with a few ideas about drugs. We realised that many teenagers feel under pressure from their peers to take drugs because of the persona it gives them however we wanted to portray a story of where someone holds back and watches what happens to their friends around them.

Our first idea was a house party, this was a good idea because drugs and teenagers are commonly associated with house parties. We imagined a girl walking through the party, observing the effects of drugs on her friends. However there was a twist to this story, The girl would actually just be a kind of spirit, she would also be watching herself take drugs and feel the effects. The point we wanted to portray was that the girl was disgusted with her behaviour and realised she needed to help herself and stay away from drugs.

In addition, we also thought of the girl being in a classroom, at the back, and watching a promotional video about drug abuse. After discussing this idea further, we came to the conclusion that this idea would not suit a whole video but would in fact make a strong introduction. We imagined that this classroom scene would then go on to merge into another scene where the story really begins.

However, after some long discussions with my group, we realised that perhaps the house party idea would not be practical for our video. We realised we would have to involve a lot of people and we decided we were not going to be able to control them all. We did really like the idea of the house party, but we wanted the 'making video process' to be as stress free as possible.

My group and I then had to get back to the drawing board and come up with another idea where we represent the same type of theme as the video. We then thought of recording the video on the town/city streets. This concept gave the gritty, urban and grimy atmosphere we were trying to put across.

We concluded on the idea of the girl walking down the streets, singing the lyrics of 'Everyone's at it.' There will be other people featured in the video but their appearance would not be as dominating as it would in the house party. We then progressed to imagine the girl being recorded in many different looking streets which then we could edit together to create a sense of time, change and confusion.

Our group had a strong attachment to the classroom idea and therefore we decided to use it at the beginning and end of the video as if the girl is watching herself through the television.

My group asked me if i would like to star in the video, as the troubled girl. At first i was hesitant, but then i agreed believing that this would be a good opportunity to experience both working behind the scenes of the video and actually performing in it.