Treatment Presentation

//Track - Youth //Artist - DaughterThe song is quite slow, with moody tones possibly connoting teenage development.

The existing music video is basic, black and white and is completely performance based so there is a lot of space for our own interpretation.

The song was used for a moving advert for the Syria Campaign called ‘In Reverse’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNw-ikgLhS8

In the video, the song is used to describe the fact that the children are losing their youth and therefore, we are going to be modifying the meaning of the song from this sombre, emotional performance to a moody and rebellious tone.

GenreThe genre of the song is alternative/ indie folk with ‘hushed electronics’.

Other examples of artist/bands who feature in the indie folk genre: Noah and the Whale, Bombay Bicycle Club, Fleet Foxes, Dog is Dead, etc.

Consumption of the genre: usually accessed on YouTube, Spotify and also through traditional methods such as CDs

Typical conventions of this genre include: live-performance based videos to focus on only the music and nothing else, the artist is in the video (not an actor), retro/ faded mis-en-scene, casual clothes as costume (nothing extravagant unlike genres like pop)

Our video is going to challenge the typical conventions of this genre. We will discuss aspects of this later on in the presentation.

About the artist‘Daughter’ is a band of three members, with a female lead singer (Elena Tonra) and two male musicians who accompany her.

The band has released two albums that have had good success.

The band is highly popular, with 520,309 followers on Spotify. The song that we are using, Youth, has 81,991,837 listens and most of their other popular songs amounting to over 10 million listens.

Daughter have toured as a supporting act for Ben Howard, travelling around North America, Europe and Australia. Furthermore, in 2016, they performed at Glastonbury Festival.

Concept Look/ style of the video (link to influences & concept)

We are going to create a video which is narrative based because the song itself is very repetitive so if it was performance the video would be quite boring. However, we are going to include a few lines of performance as it follows conventions and we want to showcase the performer. As well as following a narrative we want to include shots that do not directly link to the narrative but carry a representation linked to the song. For example, a shot of a flower blooming in reverse. A flower blooming connotes youth and and self-improvement.

We want our video to explore the themes of the song and symbolises what people feel when they listen to it. When a video has an emotive element the audience tends to relate it to a personal memory which then gives our video more impact on the audience.

Furthermore, we want there to be a certain aspect of our video that makes it memorable, so we have come up with the theme of colour. We aim to juxtapose a visually dull series of shots that start the narrative (low lighting and dark coloured mis-en-scene) with an ending that is highly lit and filled with bright colours. This is because the colour will contrast with the ‘depressing’ tone of the music creating a whole new tone to the video, which we hope will be happier and more uplifting than the tone that exists now.

All characters with masks on other than the main character to represent her isolation.

Narrative The idea that we have developed for the narrative of the video begins with a teenage girl

in her home having an argument with her mother in the kitchen. The track will be playing over this, so the audience will not be able to hear the conversation. We will use slow-motion for this scene so that the next scene is more impactful.

The next scene will consist of her frantically gathering some belongings in a backpack and leaving the house looking angry yet upset.

She will make her way through a town and end up in a black room alone. In this room the people dressed in black with masks on (her feelings) will appear and begin to throw powder paint (representing her mental state). This will be in time with the fast pace of this section building to the ending.

Throughout the video the main character will never be seen in the centre of the frame. In the final shot she will be seen centre frame in a mid-shot with her looking directly at the camera. She will then mime the last line of the song. The purpose of this framing is to make the last line of the song as impactful as possible (And you caused it’). The reason we want the last line to be mimed is so that we can follow a stereotypical convention of this genre (performance based).

Character Inspiration Skins is one of our main inspirations as we want our music video be grungy and moody. The rebellious nature of the teenagers is something that was at the forefront of our brainstorm. Our main character inspiration is Effy Stonem from Skins because she is the ring leader in all of the rebellion and represents the character we intend to portray.

Another inspiration is Beyonce’s video for ‘Hold Up’. In the video she is shown smashing cars, setting fire to things and being really violent. At the same time, however, she is really happy and the video has been kept colourful. The video was created based on revenge which is an underlying theme that we could incorporate throughout our own video.

Our video will include the idea of masks to make the other individuals in the video not appear as people. The masks will be black. We are looking at dressing the people wearing masks in all black to further make the people appear as her feelings. They are visual presentation of her feelings.

Concept InspirationOne of our inspirations for our video was initially the film Inside Out as the masks connoted different feelings . However, now we want the masked people to wear all black and have no colour to them. Saying this, though, we still really like the idea of different colours meaning different feelings, so we want to incorporate powder paint instead of masks to portray different feelings. The powder paint allows us to imply destruction with the result being beautiful and artistic. It also implies the fact that the pain of teens in their want to rebel is only temporary and will wear off over time.

Audience Research & Target Audience The age of audience we are aiming this video at is approximately 16 to 24 as there are references to teenage rebellion in the song that people in this age range can relate to. Furthermore, the genre itself is very relatable to 16 to 24 year-olds as a lot of the music is based on the idea of developing one’s own identity and discovering likes and dislikes.

Our target gender is more aimed at females due to the fact that the song itself is sung by a female and the lyrics relate more to the female pains of break-ups. Saying this, though, the genre attracts both genders so our target audience involves both females and males.

On Spotify, the most popular indie folk playlist has 116,469 followers. This shows that even though the genre isn’t the most popular, there is still a large following for it. This means that we need to target a more niche audience.

Equipment Tripod & artificial lights (sourced from school)

Camera: Canon EOS 1200D

Locations: Tithe Barn?, a family home in Caversham, Reading High Street

Costume: Main character in white casual clothes to represent isolation. All other characters in pure black and black hockey style masks so that when shooting the powder paint shots they blend into the background of the set. Moreover, if the other characters are in pure black it helps to portray the idea that they are not characters but are props that throw the paint to represent feelings and the mental state of the main character.

Props: black masks, powder paint, black sheeting

Secondary Research Existing audience interpretation of the lyrics:

“Generally, I think this song is about growing up and the pain this brings along. It's a scream of pain directed to all those adults who think that young people have nothing to worry about and don't take youngsters seriously. She is opposing strongly to this general illusion of a carefree youth.”

“It shows the journey of growing from child to adolescence, along with other habits associated with a person's youthful day; smoking, drinking, drugs maybe.”

The band has many fan accounts and here is one found on Tumblr:

Actors/ ActressMain character: Chelsea Holliday (school friend).

Rest of the cast: at least 6 extras - probably friends from in and out of school (between ages of 17 and 20).

Other ideas:

Big crowd of people from a festival/pride of some kind: we are looking into when the next Reading Gay Pride or other festivals are and then we could ask permission to film there and gain some colourful shots of crowds of people looking really positive.

‘Wild youth’: the idea of escaping adulthood.

Digipak and Advert Designs We wanted to incorporate masks into our music video and as we were developing our ideas we realised that they would also be effective for the digipak and adverts as it links the music video and the song together with them.

Due to the fact that there is a lot of focus on powder paint representing the characters feelings in the video, we definitely want to incorporate this into the digipack so that there is an aspect of continuity. In our opinion, continuity between music videos and digipaks add a touch of professionalism. Another idea we have had is to take a clear close-up picture of the artist's face and merge it into an image of the powder paint for the front cover of the digipack. This would be on a black background, then the inside of the digipack could be a bright coloured background to contrast this.

Ways to keep the audience interested

Due to the fact that this song was used in the Syria Campaign, in which the whole video is reversed, we thought we could incorporate some reverse shots to add a distorted feel to the video.

Colour is something that many videos focusing on teenage development and unhappy themes don’t have as they are very moody and want to portray this through the lack of colour. We aim to incorporate lots of colour using brightly coloured powder paints with each colour representing different moods, thoughts and feelings. The use of bright colour is unconventional of the indie folk genre and this will keep the audience interested because it will be more visually pleasing, and will be different to videos they have seen before.