30 seconds to mars – ‘Closer to the edge’ By Josh Grazier and Jack young

Background on the song

‘Closer to the edge’ is a song written by Jared Leto, the lead singer from the American rock band 30 seconds to mars. The song is produced by the band and co produced by a company named ‘Flood’. The track is the seventh track and the third single from their third studio album ‘This Is War’. The track was released in the United States in August 2010; it was performed for the first time live at Nottingham on the 19th February 2010. Jared Leto tried to create a song, which was very accessible to everyone but not spoon-fed to the audience.

Music Video

The music video premiered on June 9, 2010, the bands Youtube account. Bartholomew Cubbins, Jared Leto’s director name, directed the video. The video contains concert footage from around 30 performances during their ‘into the wild’ world tour. The tour commenced on February 19. 2010 and ran till December 18, 2010. The six-minute long video shows each location played at until a certain date, fan commentary and some backstage footage. ‘Closer to the edge’ is not the bands first live video, being preceded by ‘Edge of the Earth’.

Our video is going to be performance and narrative based. We think that the track needs a narrative behind it as well as a performance. We will focus on creating lots of stories inside a short period of time; at the end of the video the stories will all come together and a overall message will be given out to the audience. We will introduce other actors and possibly musicians to the video in order to get the most professional scenes. Our shots will range from close ups to long shots and the editing will be very fast due to the actual track being fast tempo.

Our music video’s overall style is edgy and strong, bold colours will attract attention to the actors and musicians in the music video. Make up may be added to create a even more ‘over the top’ feel just like Jared Leto. Although the band should be in similar clothing to

stick to their style we will have other actors in different costumes. Punk/rock fashion from the present time will be our inspiration for the costumes and the basis for our aesthetics.

We are also going to include some illustrative shots playing on the lyrics of the song, some of the ideas we have finalised include:

‘NO! NO! NO! NO!’ – we will have four different people on the video each saying the lyrics but shouting them at the camera, the lyrics will also appear faded over them in large bold text.

‘One day we’ll meet again’ – A couple seeing each other after years of being apart.

‘Now I’m closer to the edge’ – The main lyric in the song, we will focus purely on the band.

A group of shots we have thought about the most is when the lyric ‘NO! NO! NO! NO!’ is said in the track. We will have 4 close ups of different people saying the lyrics. The background will be dark so the audience focus on the faces of the actors. The last ‘NO!’ will be said from the main singer in our music video. We will overlay large bold text which is faded over the actors, the text will read ‘no’. This is the same idea, which Jared had when directing his video. We think that keeping this in the video will show some reference back to the band whilst also looking good.

We will need to film the video in lots of different places as shooting in just one place will make the audience less interested in the video. We will try and shoot the video inside and outside, we have a few ideas listed:

Media room (Hartlepool sixth form college) Seaton Beach Back alleys Crowded areas (Newcastle o2 Academy)