Initial Ideas 1 - Candyman, Christina Aguilera

This post demonstrates one of our initial ideas for a music video at the beginning of the planning process. 

We started our research and planning by discussing exactly what we had available to us and what type of video we wanted to do. We were quite open with regards to genre and so we started to look at one hit wonders such as the song below. 

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

From this we then realised that we had a preference for Arianna as our lead performer, and decided to narrow down our search to female artists, and female covers of songs. To start with we researched "girly" pop songs. One of the first ideas for a music video we had was for Christina Aguilera's Candyman. 

Christina Aguilera - Candyman

The plan for this video was an for performance and narrative to be intercut. The performance would be based in studio (which we have access to in school) and would be very stylised with a very basic motif of "candy" running throughout. After analysing lyrics and brainstorming this is the narrative we decided on:

• Bride and groom sugar figurines depicted on a wedding cake, zoom in
• Camera zooms out and reveals the two characters in an fantasy candy-esqe world. 
• It is then established that the groom has lost his ring, and so the pair run around exploring the candy world in an attempt to find it
• Throughout this, the characters are very much enjoying themselves and interacting with the world, and at many points they become close to kissing but never quite do
• Resolution occurs when the ring is finally found, and as the pair lean into kiss the shot is cut, and audiences assume they have kissed due to a red smear on the groom figurine on the wedding cake. 

There were many advantages to this idea:

• We had ideal casting from people we knew would be reliable.
• We had access to an appropriate studio.
• We would enjoy the general props, costumes etc. and this would give us great freedom for creativity. 
• There was great synergy achievable due to the overall concept. 

However, we began to realise that there were various disadvantages too:

• The original video, although very dissimilar, is very famous, with nearly 3 million YouTube views. 
• The artist identity is incredibly strong, and it may prove hard to distance ourself from her, and for audiences not to relate to her during the performance. 
• It may prove hard to produce given our limited budget and locations, and it was likely that we would be disappointed if the video was not perfect. 

In the end we decided against this video idea for all of the reasons stated above but also because we felt the general concept was slightly too basic and the narrative was just not strong enough;  there would not be enough to keep the viewer strongly engaged for the duration of the video. 

However this initial idea, although time consuming, was a useful experience to have gone through. It taught us new factors to look out for when researching songs, and new factors to consider as well as how doable ideas were, so we were able to go through songs we researched thereafter much faster.