The Pitch

The track we have chosen is Control by Halsey which is in the indie pop genre. We knew we wanted to pick from this genre because it is something that we both listen to anyway and are familiar with, making it easier for us to find inspiration and conventions to use in our music video etc. When we found the artist Halsey we knew we wanted to use one of her songs because we liked the sound of her voice and we then found the song Control. We picked this particular song because we liked the beat it has to it and the lyrics of the song/the meaning of the song (fighting your personal demons) would be interesting to convey in a music video. We also liked that we could go darker with this song than other songs in this genre and that the track lends itself to a more experimental music video and narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8V5dAli-Q

Lorde and Lana Del Rey are the artists that have most inspired our artist and music video. We found that the Born To Die music video was a big inspiration when choosing where we would like to film and it first gave us the idea of filming in a big house. It also mixes contrasting locations really well and showed us that we could use contrasting locations mixed with a darker narrative and still make it work within the genre. The Royals video was an inspiration because of the way they use the performance of the artist and from watching this video we then decided to have all of the performance elements of the video in a studio setting with just our artist in the frame. We wanted to make a clear cut between the narrative and performance in our video and this video does that really clearly.

We have decided to name our artist ‘Onyx’. We thought having one word as the artist name would work for our genre as multiple artists we have been influenced by also do this e.g. Lorde and Halsey. Onyx is a dark black gem stone and we thought the name could also reflect the tone of the song and what we want our artist to represent in the genre. We have named our track ‘Demons’ as that is what we want to focus on in our music video, the struggle of getting over personal demons, as that is what the lyrics also focus on.

We think that our artist will be most recognisable from her voice as the artist we have chosen has quite a unique voice and sound that is easily recognisable to her. We also wanted to create a visual icon for her so we decided that she will always wear a dark plum lipstick. This will work with her brand image and the track which is dark and mysterious and will also look good in our music video/promotion which will be filmed with low key lighting and with shadows and dark spots. This branding has worked for other artist like Taylor Swift who is often seen wearing a red lip which has become iconic to her.

To link our products together we will mainly be using colour and logo to create that link. We have found through research that promotion campaigns like the Marina and the Diamonds, Electra Heart one that products are often linked through the colour scheme that’s used, in this case a blueish grey, this is also carried through the music videos for this album like the one for Primadonna. We also found that most artists have a recognisable logo that is included on all products. For the indie pop genre these are quite simple and often are just made up of one font, but that the name is usually always written in capital letters to help it stand out.

We have already had to face the problem of the location we wanted to film at being unavailable to us. We originally had the thought of filming at Barrington Court but we found we couldn’t so we are now hoping to film at Montecute House and we are thinking of more locations that would also work for our music video.We are also finding it difficult to think about who we want to act in our music video and someone who will fit with the look of our artist.We also feel like the projections and use of shadows could be difficult to produce and control and we might have some trouble with it especially at the scenes filmed at the house.