Narrative Planning

We only had a short time to come up with an idea for the narrative and Max firstly started with the idea of the music video being watched on a TV by a group of people who are excited at the song, the band and wish for it to be turned up, this creates the idea of The Harmonettes being a hugely successful and popular band.

The inspiration for this idea came from Outkast - Hey ya, we had knowledge of this video previously from researching Motown conventions. The film Hairspray was included in researching our narrative idea as there is frequent shots that show the dancers in the film studio being watched on TV by an audience. 'The Nicest Kids in Town' seen below is a specific section taken from the film which shows the cheesy happy reactions which we would like to emulate.





These examples are effective and I like that the attention to detail mise-en-scene is detailed and iconic which is something I would like to have in our narrative however realistically with the time frame and budget, it is unfeasible. Both videos have the elements of being watched where a TV is used showing part of the production process in the Outkast video and the audience is then brought into it by cutting to the actual performance. This is again seen in Hairspray where the Corny Collins show is being watched by two fans who are excited to watch it and frequent cutting to their reaction and the dancing performance is seen.

Max and I set ourselves to trying to source iconic props which included an old style TV, costumes, magazines or posters etc. It was difficult to find a TV and so we developed our idea to a group of girls in their bedroom, listening to music, trying to find a vinyl record to play but The Shoop Shoop song comes on the radio to which they get excited and turn it up. The theme of this narrative is a 'girls night in' and we will portray this by having the girls dressed in PJ's whilst doing each others hair and having a good time. We plan to use the narrative as an introduction to the song and video.
Max was able to borrow a real 60's radio from the era and so this was a vintage real prop, I was also able to get some vinyl records to which we put them in an old box. Max also was able to find some books and magazines which were also from the times and so we had enough props that would suggest the 60's.
We then chose the people who would appear in the video to seemingly portray the younger selves of the three lead singers in the band, this was due to choosing actors that had the same colour hair as the singers which worked effectively in portraying this.
With this idea it then suggests that as the younger selves have grown up, they have grown to love the song that much that they decide to perform it and make it their own which is positive for the audience to see as they too may have grown with the song and can empathise with this.