Key Influential Music Videos

Having considered the variety of music videos and their codes and conventions, we decided that the song we would be creating our music video for would be Natalia Kills' "Wonderland". This is the current music video for the song, with a rocky edge to the Alice in Wonderland concept. We really liked how the artist twisted the story of Alice in Wonderland, which clearly links to the lyrics, and we felt that we could be inspired by this in our own music video. Having decided that Alice in Wonderland would be a theme within our video, we began to consider what other videos would be influential for our project. We noted down the main elements that we thought were successful in the original artist's video, as we felt that maybe we could incorporate some aspects of the original into our own. However, we were very keen to create our identity within our music video, and so we didn't want to copy what was already in this music video, we used this as a starting point for planning our own ideas.

Listening to the song, we decided that we wanted out video to be a concept based music video, with a fairytale theme to accompany the lyrics, although telling a slight story of Alice in Wonderland, and having aspects of narrative in it. A key influential video that I felt would be useful to study is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland film, as it has an unusual and slightly mad style, something we would like to achieve in our own music video. We researched the key elements within this film, and noted down what we felt was important in identifying this story, to help us later when producing our own music video.

This film is full of unusual perspectives and interpretations of Alice in Wonderland, and we could reflect on Tim Burton's style of interpreting the Wonderland theme when creating our own video. There are particular aspects of the story that we could take the concept from when creating our own video. There are many famous scenes from Alice in Wonderland, and we are interested in is the Tea Party scene as something we could develop into our music video. This is partly because it is easily recognizable as a scene from Alice in Wonderland, and therefore effectively fits with the lyrics, but also because it is quite flexible in the way we can interpret it. The lyrics in the song we have chosen are quite rocky, so we could create a quite rocky edge to the Tea Party scene, and as the Mad Hatter is involved in this scene, we can use this to create a fairly mad and crazy atmosphere, which would also make it less narrative, as you don't quite not know what is going on, and express the slight insanity of Wonderland, showing that fairytales don't always have a happy ending.

We next looked at the horror film genre as we felt that it would be a central theme in our video, as we wanted our video to have a creepy atmosphere to emphasise the message of how good things that happen to you don't always have a happy ending. We looked at a variety of horror genre films to gain and understanding of what creates the eerie atmosphere, and began looking at lighting and perspective as we felt that these were particularly important. In many horror films, darkness creates a fear of the unknown as the audience don't know what is around the character, so I think minimal lighting will be key within our music video. A good example of a horror film which uses lighting effectively in this way is 'The Possession'. It uses a mixture of both dark lighting and dark coloured lighting to create the mood of fear, which is what we would like to portray when creating a video for the song 'Wonderland' by Natalia Kills. The use of dark red and blue lighting exaggerates the horror genre and creates a creepy and mysterious atmosphere.  The trailer for 'The Possession' demonstrates their use of lighting well as most of the colours are quite dark and they aren't very colourful, which is what we will consider when making our own video.