Music Video Influences and Genre

This blog post is about the music videos and films that have had an influence over the idea to our music video. We have looked at music videos in a similar genre to ours, the indie pop genre but also at successful female pop artists since this is similar to our band identity. As well as this post we've conducted individual genre and influence research.


We based our initial idea in the lyrics in the song, and themes that relate to the lyrics in the song, but following our initial idea we started to look at other music videos, films and artists related to our vision for our music video.


After we had thought through and come up with our main idea, our friend Anjana showed us a video we could use for influence called This is Gospel, by Panic! at the Disco an indie band. The video for this song is also based around the idea of someone in the band going crazy and needing to be strapped to a hospital bed, whilst he is singing, and resisting being controlled. 

Another big influence to our music video idea, was the music video for Rihanna's song, We found love. The theme of this song is about a relationship based heavily on the reckless lives of a young couple, and their association with drugs. Our initial idea was going to based around the downfall of a girl due to drugs, so this video had a heavy influence on the development of our idea, and affected our decision to incorporate a boy and girl in our video and how it can be a relationship that causes a person to go mad. 

As our idea developed, our group agreed on the idea of a straight jacket or being strapped to a hospital bed in order to represent that the girl needs to be controlled and not let her passion and feelings make her crazy. This idea came from watching Lady Gaga's, Bad Romance music video in which there are shots of coffins, and people climbing out of coffins. We imagined our shots of the girl in the hospital bed or straight jacket being very hospital like; in very white, clinical colours to represent where she is and create a contrast between her in her scenes of madness and the flashbacks of her as she watches the busker in areas around Brick Lane. The ideas for the contrast in colour and the use of clinical white came was inspiration from the Bad Romance music video. 

A couple of films also influenced our idea, and helped us to develop. The film 'Girl, Interrupted'; the story of a girl who is depressed and direction-less and therefore after a suicide attempt, ends up in a mental institution, but under the influence of another patient, ignores the rules of the institution and begins to cause trouble. The second film that influenced our music video idea is 'Candy'; which is about a man, Dan, who falls in love with a girl named Candy, who infatuated with Dan gravitates towards his love of heroin and bohemian lifestyle. Hooked on each other, and the drug, their relationship alternates between self-destruction, love and despair. Both these films have similar themes to the ones we intend to incorporate in our video, such as despair, madness and self-destruction, due to the relationship with another that causes their spiral out of control, so we can reference these films to influence our music video with the representation of characters, relationships and emotions felt by characters.