Something from Nothing seemed like the good choice to pick from the couple choices that we had. We'd figured that despite the overbearing 4:30 of audio this song had, we felt collectively that the overall tone and theme of the song was not only interesting, but would also be a cool basis for the music video.
Before we trot along towards the brainstorming portion of the music video, we need some research! This wasn't too hard, as the audience demographic leaned towards our age, which was convenient when it came to researching. Groups like Green Day, Artic Monkeys, and Kings of Leon are pretty prominent for lil kiddos my age. Not only are these a couple of my favorite bands, but these were the core case studies for our research. So after around a day or two, we had a pretty rough idea of what rock bands were essentially about. And the clock was ticking, so it was time to work on a music video.
This part was definitely tricky. The title, Something from Nothing, is so FRUSTRATINGLY vague, that it left the door wide open for ideas. At first our group was talking about a promo video, but not only has that been done, but we were lacking most of the materials. Next was a storytelling type of video, where we follow a young musician trying to make it big, and having a small upbringing. We all loved this idea, but figured the musician route might stray too close to the original source material. So we wanted to keep the base idea of this, like the portion of an upcoming individual growing up with nothing. This idea would directly correlate to the title, Something from Nothing. So we definitely wanted to keep this rough structure idea.
"What about boxer?"
"Hmm?"
"Yeah, for like the music video."
"Like instead of the guitar thing?"
"Yeah!"
"Uh, sure."
A boxer? Now that actually might not be a bad idea. I mean, I loved it. It could follow the same sort of structure as the guitar story idea, but follow not only a different individual, but fit our resources. We had boxing gloves, which was a good start. We also had a pretty decent camera to follow up. The boxer concept seemed like something that me and my team could get behind. And so began the actual story.
So when it came to the storytelling portion, we really wanted to convey the idea of Something from Nothing. We felt free in terms of setting, characters, and essentially everything else, but the overall theme had to be somewhat related to the title of the song. This is when I pretty much decided to storyboard and write the overall plot of the song. It was important to have the song handy (obviously), and constantly refer back to it in order to form an overall plot from not only lyrics, but also the rhythm.
The song contains some pretty heavy dialogue, and some really awesome sounding beat drops. I decided to format the story along side, in order to complement how the story goes. Like, the beginning of the song is a little slow, so the plot would revolve around the main character doing leisurely actions. Once the songs picks up, then we’ll proceed to bump up the octane.
Below are some of the notes I took while listening to the song and coming up with an idea. No joke, I literally sat outside Starbucks till I had a concrete idea of what the story would be. And after about two or three hours, and a couple of Frappuccinos, I managed to come up with a pretty solid idea. Obviously there are some things that are gonna be scrapped. Like in my notes, I know its hard to read, but towards the end I wanted a fight scene. Sadly, as much as I would want one, I just don’t think for logistical reasons that it’d work. It wouldn’t look as cool as I'd thought, and where would I find a boxing ring??
So following after this would be the recording portion, which is the most logical step. As of right now, we have about fifty seconds, give or take, of footage captured. Once enough footage is captured to span for about a minute and a half, I’ll proceed to move onto editing the video. I can already tell that this one is going to be a doozy. Having to match the audio in line with the visuals is going to be tough, especially around the twenty second mark, where the bass REALLY drops, and the actor in the video is going to have to perform some actions along side the audio.
