A2 Media
Jamie Robinson
Mental Health Research
Throughout the planning process of the music video from initially hearing “Seaftret” to putting our final narrative ideas together, there has been an ongoing thought process of having the narrative revolving around the breakdown of a relationship. This has been a consider narrative due to the relation with the lyrics as they start strong and then slowly break down for example “we built this town on shaky ground”. We are researching this narrative theme so we can clearly portray it clearly using mise en scene, camerawork and editing however making sure we treat this topic with care as it can be a very sensitive topic for some people. I have decided to look at a few different videos which there narrative centre around a mental health and come up with the stereotypical conventions for portraying this theme.
One of the videos in which I looked at is Warrior by Demi Lovato, it is said that she wrote this to show the struggle of mental health issues as it is a well-known fact she was in recovery from an eating disorder and bipolar depression when righting this song. The conventions for portraying the narrative of this video is black and white filters across everything to make it look cold and unhappy, we also have the use of cross fades/overlaying to match the lyrics of confusion and symptoms of mental health. We also have lots of use of close up and mid shot to highlight the emotion of her facial expressions.
The second song which I looked at is “save your goodbye” by Mike Posner, upon listening to song some people thought the lyrics were describing the break down in a relationship however Mike Posner told Dose.ca in an interview that the song was actually written about the struggles he had with depression. The technical elements also suggest that the video is about the break down in relationship as we have a very dull red background which as it progress across the screen fades into black however this also represents the struggle of depressions as it can show the change in emotions from once being happy and in love possibly and slipping into black and cold state of mind. This is a clever manipulation of basic colour fading however is effective with bring this narrative across genteelly.
Lastly the third video I looked at is wake me up when September ends by greenday the video is based on the depression of the band member Billie Jo Armstrong as when he wa 10 is dad passed away on the 1st September and he just wanted the month to end. The video shows this through the use of narrative as we follow the relationship of couple and we start with happy memories and then we have a hard hitting moment where everything changes and the narrative starts to break down. We see this through changes is technical elements with saturated, glossy, high key lighting in the first part and then black and white, low key lighting shots in the second part to show the break down in the mental state of the couple. We also have location changes from happy outdoor landscape shots to war scenes. We also have a lot of speed manipulation used in the happy memories to highlight the fact they are happy.
Overall we are going to use a combination of all these different technical elements to show the breakdown of the relationship in our video.