Pitch

We’re doing the song Lotus by an indie band called Cage The Elephant. We chose the song because we felt it would be easy to work to and is quite upbeat so we can work with the fast tempo to create a flowing, capturing video. We all agreed on having quick cut editing to match the rhythm of song and then we will slow down for the chorus.

We decided to stick to indie video conventions by going for a performance driven video, which has been increasingly popular amongst bigger indie artists such as Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand. We will also include a rough narrative to it to make it standout more as a video and we felt it’d be too boring to work with having just performance, especially due to the fact that the last minute of the song has no words in it. Outdoors settings for both performance and narration parts because it just allows more open shots and gives a lot more natural light to the shot.

The initial ideas we’ve had for the video is:
• For performance part of the video, a abstract view of different situations of the band playing down a street or in a field and we could film from less traditional perspectives e.g. through a car window.
• "...it's gonna stop" line shown from sped up footage from passenger seat of car out the front window and coming to a red light, edited to finish dead on the "stop" beat.
• We had an idea, inspired by the film ‘Donnie Darko’ where we could have part of the narrative involving the main person waking up in different random places.
• We’re also exploring the idea of having different narrative incidents, possibly representing the lyrics, but editing them to be in reverse or different filters.
• One of our main shots that we want to include is somebody falling in to water but we edit it so it plays backwards and it looks like somebody is rising out of the water.

We may have found a possible band to star in our video, to provide a more professional feel to our music video and it will also help having actors who’re experienced singers so hopefully the lip syncing will be more accurate.

As far as the shot colour is concerned, we’re thinking of putting it in a lot darker gradient and possible coloured filter changes because it would add a lot more professional feel and increase the intensity of the video.

Luckily, Antoine in our group has a HD video camera so we have the option of using this to increase quality of the video.