Treatment Sheet – Monster – The Automatic

Background of the song“Monster” is an indie style song sung by Cardiff based band The Automatic taken

from their first album “Not Accepted Anywhere”. It was released 6th June 2006 and reached number 4 in the UK singles chart. In the US they are known as The

Automatic Automatic and “Monster” was released the 7th May 2007 in the states. James Frost and Robin Hawkins composed most of the song, whilst the

keyboardist and vocalist Alex Pennie came up with the well-known chorus “What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster?” as the song was intended to

be fairy-tale-esq.

The Music Video Our music video is going to be a combination between performance and

narrative. We already have 3 members of the group so we will have to gain an extra member to act in the music video. In our version of the music video we are

going to stick to the conventions of the indie style genre. We will be dressed similar to show we are a band and we are within the indie style genre and similar

costumes and cutting between each member shows the audience this.. Our narrative is fairly straight forward as the lyrics tell us what the narrative is.

Basically we will have someone dress up as the cookie monster and the band members will go round the neighbourhood asking civilians if they’ve seen the

monster on a wanted poster, we then chase the monster after finding out where abouts he is. The video will be quite funny as the song is fast and upbeat and

doesn’t sound to serious.

The style of our vide will be quick and jumpy with lots of cuts, cut zoom-ins and outs etc. although the band are dressed similar the towns people will be little old ladies and such as a monster would be more threatening to the elderly we would expect. Also we will make some parts of our video in black and white whilst the

monster is sneaking about to create an atmosphere and the band will be dressed up as old fashioned detectives like in the Sherlock Holmes novels and maybe as a

starter idea we could begin the video with one of us smoking a pipe.

Our video will also use some of Andrew Goodwin’s ideas for example:

- We will have a relationship between the lyrics and the narrative (E.G. we will show the monster coming when the lyrics say “What’s that coming

over the hill? Is it a monster?”)

- We will edit the video so they fit in with the music – so at the start of the song the video will have cuts at each drumbeat.

- We will have the whole band playing together in one place whilst the narrative is not on show in the video.