First Lesson

The first activity that we were given, withheld a lot of information about it from us. We were given a piece of A3 paper each and told to write down the thoughts and feelings that came to mind from listening to a unknown song.

 

(Life is a gun- Jay Malinowski)

 

By listening to this song I thought of the following thoughts and feelings:

• Calming
• Sombre
• Peaceful
• Hope
• A release of tension

 

After this we were then asked to picture what we thought the music video would look like and what we thought would happen in it. My thoughts were that there would be "a rugged looking man walking along a dusty isolated road. The music video would focus on yellow and other such warm colours. It would cut from him walking along playing a guitar to a flashback of someone going through something, perhaps a relationship difficulty, in their life. Then it would cut to a little saloon bar where he would perform on a small spotlighted stage in the corner." Therefore the set up would be simplistic but relatively effective. It would have both narrative based and performance based aspects to it.

 

We then looked at the lyrics to the song and found that there was a large emphasis and repetition of the word 'gun'. This changed some of the people in the classes opinions on what the video may looked like as they then turned to a concept- based video. however I didn't change my idea at all as  had already listened to the lyrics and therefore taken them into consideration when deciding how the video could be done.

 

Snippet from the lyrics:

"Deep in the past

We can trigger to the barrel blast
On the avenue
Where I would crash into you

What's done is done and life is a gun
Life is a gun on the run
Oh my dear, isn't life a gun
A story shotgun that came undone
We came undone"

*Words relating to a gun*

 

In our next session we compared what we came up with to what the official music video looked like. The official video was quite different from my interpretation of the song, especially since it was narrative-based. The narrative did focus largely on a gun like in the lyrics. Similarly to my idea there was some focus on a relationship between a male and a female. The music video was in black and white, this was a typical convention of music videos.