Initial Ideas:

 We have chosen the song, "Girls and Boys in Love" by The Rumble Strips. This song belongs to the Indie-Pop genre. At the moment we are trying to get in contact with the record company who owns the rights to the song, to ask their permision to use their song. We are still waiting for a reply. This is a print screen shot of the e-mail we sent to Fallout Records and Island Records. We have also sent several e-mails to the band and Univeral Music.

 We want to create a unique music video that uses the codes and conventions of the Indie-pop genre. We think this is a good idea because it will keep the audience interested and the creative narrative will hopefully be something that isn't normally seen. When we get to the editing stage, we would like to use different effects in our video. Some ideas we wouldn't mind trying are;

  Green Screen: Not only would it test our editing skills, it's effective and creative because you can place the artist/band into different settings by placing an image/video in the background. An example of the use of green screen in a music video is: Madonna's "Ray of Light".

 Colour Grading: This can help us set different atmospheres to our video by darkening or lightening the colours of the shot. For example, if we made it overly dark, the audience would feel the tense/sad mood etc. We could also totally change the colours to make the images look more visually interesting for the audience, and attract them to the video. An extreme example of the use of colour grading is of Fun's "Walking the dog".

  Mise-en-scene: It's not only effects that can help us create a creative video. The use of mise-en-scene is important in a music video, as it is one of the main things that attracts the audience. For example, the body language, costume, dance sequences, colour etc all give off different ideas and emotions to the audience. Using mise-en-scene effectivly gives you a creative and unique video. An example of a music video that has good use of mise-en-scene is Bruno Mars'  "The Lazy Song". The cinematography is extremely basic in this video, as the camera doesn't move, yet the movement of the people on screen, the monkey masks and the dancing, make the video seem much more interesting and unique.

 Picture-in-picture: Another thing we could try to make our video more interesting is putting a picture within a picture. Using this is a good idea as you could show the band/artist playing on screen whilst the story is going on. This make the visuals more interesting and offers something different to an audience because it's not normally seen in music videos. One example of this is Kanye West's "Homecoming."

 In our group we have attempted using green screen. We filmed using an HD camera in the college studio and edited on Final Cut Express. The example below is done by Phoebe and Rebekah. To do this we:

• Filmed a short sequence in the college studio in front of a greenscreen
• Then we imported it into Final Cut Express and, using chroma key, we were able to remove the background and insert a more appropriate background image
• We edited the colours and resized the images.

We think that we will use green screen in our video because it's effective and enables you to show two images (like performance and narrative) rather than switching between the two. Also, if offers us the chance to have an interesting background- or have something that we couldn't have had there without using greenscreen. If were are to use greenscreen, ways of improving ourselves are:

• The colouring, we could take more time getting the colouring right and appropriate for our video
• Instead of a still image, we could add a video as the background.