Audience appeal for our music video

As most indie tracks do, the song relies on a captivating music video to sell itself to the audience and create a 'buzz' about the artist and the song. Often the artist does not appear in the accompanying video within this genre of music, as they believe the video should be focused on the music itself rather than the artist.

For this reason, and due to the impractical nature of trying to find an actor to lip sync well to our music video and match the description of the singer, we decided that we would not put the artist within our music video. As mentioned, this is not uncommon, with many indie artists such as Ed Sheeran, never having of appeared in (apart from momentarily) their own music video. By using actors instead of the artist it pushes the audience to put their focus upon the narrative of the story, which suited our music video, as we planned for the video to be centered around a strong narrative as my research concluded that it was a commonly used genre convention.

Our initial idea was to use only shots of feet, as they can reveal a lot about a character and are often a focal point for many directors, and is a technique often used in the thriller genre to as mentioned keep the audience engaged and keep a characters identity concealed whilst allowing the audience to speculate and draw conclusions about that character. An example of a particular director who often uses feet when introducing his character and showing it to reveal emotions is Quentin Tarantino, who during the introduction of Death Proof (skip to 1:09 to see example) shows a shot of a womens feet as the opening shot. By doing this he reveals to the audience the gender of the character, and the audience can speculate her personality by her poised mannerism and body language. It also keeps the audience engaged, as they want to find out more about the character and are captivated by the long lasting shot until it cuts to another similar shot using the same technique again by showing a close up shot of a different woman's feet until it finally pans up and out to show her full body.
 

We were going to adopt this similar technique within our music video, as it is successful in engaging its audience and also gives them the power to interpret and decipher aspects of the character which are not made plain to the audience, which as a result empowers them as it assumes that the producer is not under estimating the audiences intelligence and capabilities. We were going to initially only construct our music video out of only feet shots, as they can effectively tell the story in a different and unconventional way, but after further consideration, we decided that it could be too much repetition for the audience and by using the same 'engaging' technique, we may in fact loose their attention. We therefore chose that we would include cut aways, but keep it at the same low down angle to continue the theme and also allow the audience to explore the setting and environment.

However, when it came to storyboarding, we discovered that we did not have enough time to use cut aways as when we changed the plot, it resulted in having less time to fit in our extended narrative as our song was only 2:30 minutes long. However, we still decided that our video should be made up of a variety of different shots, but that we would maintain the enigmatic sense by opening with the shot of the feet to initially hold their attention, but get a variety of different shots of the body, whilst still not revealing their faces.
By choosing not to reveal the faces of the actors within the video, it again as previously discussed, adds a sense of mystery, as the audience are more and more intrigued as the video progresses to see the entirety of the body of those involved throughout the video, and we plan to slowly feed the demands of the audience by eventually exposing more and more of both of the actors, without however revealing their faces.

We also chose not to reveal their faces as it was symbolic to the fact that our video was making a statement about the deterioration of relationships in general, and by doing so, it gave our music video deeper meaning. By doing this it also meant that the audience can relate to the generic events which result in the end of many relationships as it does not put an actors face in the video so that the audience envisage faces which they have personally constructed, making the video more individualistic and personal to its audience. 

By only showing certain parts of the body, it also conforms to the genre as it is alternative and not typically expected, which is a convention of the indie genre.