Blog Four. Or how to fail at musical video making.

So this was the weekend that 'We' the people of our group of three sought out to make an amazing video, the best video in fact, in the whole world even. Sound arrogant?, well we were. We thought we were like the gods of making videos. But don't take my word for it, just read ahead and see how wrong we would become; read on traveller.
My original idea was a cutesy pop-up book that would have an animated feature for each line of duologue, the reasoning being that the amazing spectacle would be a hot seller on the web. As soon as the idea had surfaced you can bet I was down Totnes craft shop (this being last Friday afternoon) buying card and colouring in pens to realise the endeavour. As Stephen Sondheim says; It's not enough to have the vision, it's all about the execution. By which I mean it took AGES to make the first page which would represent just four lines of a song of six verses, and I mean from getting home after going to the shop to going to bed that night ages. Phewey.

I'll admit it, I was flying too close to the sun that evening and I feel, I feel fast and hit the ground hard. More that that we couldn't get a camera out that weekend so not only did we have to do another idea, we couldn't do anything about it until we got a camera on Monday. Days away.
My next idea was getting Matt and Jade, dressing them up as robots and then filming them at dusk, romantically (in Robot form) interpreting literally the narrative in the lyrics of the song. We hit a wall; unfortunately we could only get a camera out until five and Jade could not get to my house until three. This meant that for one we could not film at night and whatever we did, we had Jade for no time once we had dressed her up in tin foil and then loaded our work onto my computer and getting the camera back to college by five. Instead we told Jade not to bother and just filmed Matt in his cardboard robot costume, skateboarding and such. It was rubbish. Absolute dung. We went to class the next day with nothing to show, heads bowed, egos tarnished. Especially Jade.
At class, or support group in our case, we explained our predicament and that our Robot idea bore no fruit at all to which I identified a weak idea that was not planned and limited by time. Matt to my surprise produced my pop-up book and showed it off. Everyone liked the idea and it gave me (and Matt and Jade) a renewed energy to improve it. I already have some more brilliant ideas about how to improve it more. In case I forget after writing this blog I will jot them down now...
Drawing the pop-up book as it it opened!
Colouring in the book as it goes!
(Yorkshire Tea is amazing! I used to like Twinnings but not anymore!)
Involving lights and colour and other, extra-pop-up-ial stuff!
Adding some stop-motion animation!
Letting the camera see the strings (or more accurately seeing the hands)!


To understand what I mean by seeing the hands I am taking inspiration from the opening of Napoleon Dynamite and the really cute stop motion from an artist called erm... Oh I forget but maybe the below link will mention her.
Here is the Napoleon Dynamite opening scene...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjAK-o9W73Q

Here are some amazing if short examples of cute stop-motion art that I would like to use in the music video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8G5AkXdNi4

and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhdKCQfYptg