Feedback on Pitch & Further Thoughts

I showed my pitch to Annie Redman and Sally Carmody (both 17 and members of my target audience).  They suggested I should think more about areas which I haven't addressed in detail:

• Make-up
• Hannah's Clothes
• Exact locations for shooting 
• Who will i use for the young girl?
• Do i need any more actors/actresses?

After doing my pitch for my music video i discovered different aspects of my ideas that I needed to work on. I recognised that i need to be more specific with my location, costumes, make-up and all aspects of mise en scene. Hannah is willing to do her own make-up as she is good at it - her make-up will be of a natural every-day style, and her outfit(s) will be casual/ everyday clothing because the video is taking place on a normal day for Hannah, where she has flashbacks to her past. This will make it look like the flashbacks she has are a regular occurrence and she very often thinks about her disturbed childhood - this reinforces the strength of the lyrics.

I have decided i am going to go to Aust (by the Severn Bridge) to film parts of my music promotional video. This location is very scenic. I am also going to capture footage in the country side (woods and fields) in Olveston, a small rural village. I think these locations will be suitable to Hannah's song, "Bigger Than Me" because they are very calm, like the song. Hannah lives in Olveston and Aust is only down the road from there. Olveston is only a 15 minute drive from where I live so I will easily be able to get to my locations to meet Hannah.

The colour modes of the video will all be filmed outside - this is Hannah in her present life where she is free from abuse. The black and white modes of the video will be filmed inside the house where Hannah grew up and will show confined spaces - which reinforces the fact that she was trapped as a young girl.

I have realised that it is going to be very hard to find a young girl to be in my video as I don't have any younger siblings and don't know anyone who would be suitable for the role. I am going to abandon this idea and just use Hannah in the black and white flashback modes of the video and make her look very vulnerable and depressed. I am only going to have Hannah herself featuring in the video so it reinforces that she is alone - like how she felt during her childhood.

From looking at past A2 student's promotional music videos, I have concluded that the videos aren't as effective and are obvious that they are amateur when there are a lot of people involved in the shots because it made it hard for the photographer to focus on the singer and the storyline to the video. Also, some people didn't use a variety of different scenes and locations in their video, which I think made it boring because there was only one thing happening in once place. From research using Youtube, I have found that all professional artist's music videos (e.g. Katy Perry's 'Last Friday Night') have a number of scenes in different locations - this is what makes them intriguing and draws their audience in.

Although a sense of voyeurism is used in almost all of the modern female artist's music videos (e.g. Rihanna and Jessie J), I don't think it would be appropriate to use it for this video because it is a very serious and I wouldn't want to distract the audience.

I need to identify exactly what will happen in the video at all points of the song. To help me plan this I am going to make an animatic story board using iMovie and also print the song lyrics out and make notes about the types of shots I can use at certain points of the song.