Planning

Having researched many music videos, we had decided that we were going to create a music video for the song 'Wonderland' by Natalia Kills. We chose to use this song, as it would allow us to be very creative with the visuals for our video. The lyrics focus on the idea of how fairytales don't exist, and nothing has a happy ending. Therefore, considering the lyrics we found we could recreate the Alice In Wonderland style, with the theme of a fairytale that goes wrong and how happy endings just don't happen. When planning this, we had many things to consider, such as location and setting and how costume and props could convey this chaotic atmosphere we envisioned to create in our music video.

We began by focusing on the overall atmosphere that we were wanting to create, and as a group we started to plan what we felt would look effective in our music video. We considered aspects such as costume and props, lighting, setting and make up, all of which we felt would be very important in order to give us the appearance we most wanted.




We decided that we wanted our video to begin with quite a calm and blissful atmosphere to inforce the idea of the fairytale theme. We looked at images such as these to take inspiration when planning things such as lighting, make up and costume. We felt that the use of pale, neutral colours along with bright lighting gave the image both a clean look but also a slight dreaminess, which is what we want to achieve in our music video. Having looked at this, we then went on to consider how we wanted the costume change to represent a darker side to the characters in our music video, to convey the message that fairytales don't always have their happy ending. We found images such as these which we felt strongly portrayed how we wanted our characters to look, with the use of dark blacks and blues, a creepier and more eerie atmosphere is created, which we felt would be necessary in our video.


We began to plan our characters, and we wanted to include the fairytale princesses who are mentioned within the lyrics. We made notes on how we wanted the costumes to look, and how we could create a clear indication that they are these characters. We sketched out a rough idea of our costumes would look, and used magazines to identify how we wanted out make up to look. We felt that this was very helpful because it allowed us to visualise how we wanted our video to look and gave us clearer inspiration for our costumes and props.



On Friday the 19th of October we went on to present our ideas to our class. We produced a Powerpoint presentation showing all of our images that we had taken inspiration from and we explained our ideas for our music video, mentioning our ideas for simplistic costume and make up, and how we intended to create a darker and more mysterious atmosphere towards the end of the video. Presenting our ideas to the class was useful because it made our ideas clearer and we were able to discuss our options and how we wanted to create both a fantasy and horror theme in one. It also proved to be helpful as we gained feedback from our peers, who liked our ideas so far. However, they warned us that we should be careful as the merging of genres could create scenes that might appear comical rather than scary. We took all of this feedback on board, and began to re-evaluate some of our ideas.