In my last post about the lyrics, I gave a brief description of our intended concept. This post talks about how we developed it. Last year, I made such posts and therefore I was open to the idea of giving someone else a shot. As a result Abdullah wrote the basic post and I am pasting it below in his words. But before that, let's have a look at us discussing the project
"So here’s what we came up with: our music video is about a lonely, socially anxious teenager. This theme is a stretch for us, because not one of us matches that description even a tiny little bit. The video will depict our character carrying out different activities on his phone, and the types of things he does on his phone will help convey a sense of his life and personality. The following is a bunch of things we’ve decided he’ll do:
We want to take a “day-in-the-life” approach, so the video will naturally begin with an iPhone screen with an alarm ringing on it. We will then see our character scrolling through news websites, and we’ll use the types of inane “news” stories he reads as comic relief (but we don’t want to get slapstick, that won’t work well with the song). The news stories and accompanying images, of course, would be original. We’d then see our character searching through YouTube for motivational vlogs and TED Talks about building self-confidence (again, we’d create the videos he’d watch). He’d even look at a WikiHow article for making friends. We’d see him try to take selfies, but not be able to pose authentically, and once he posts the images to his social media, we’d see him “like” his own post. He might share a song on Facebook without listening to it first, because he’s only posting it to seem cool. We’d see him playing online games, but having no one to play with. Once in a while, we’d intersperse footage of him just looking into his phone/laptop camera and looking sad.
This is depressing, we know. Huzaifaa and Basil suggested that we need more comic relief. We then toyed with making the video super meta and surrealist. What if the internet gods are targeting him? We quickly fell in love with this idea. For example, Siri tells him she won’t listen to him. He gets reminders on his phone that simply remind him that he is a garbage person. He scrolls through Netflix and the shows recommended to him are all about his loneliness in oddly specific ways, even featuring his name and face. The news articles and TED Talks and WikiHow articles mentioned before would all directly address him, telling him he has no friends.
We were pretty content with this idea, and convened a few days later for further development.
In meeting number 2, we realized that the video still does not have much of a narrative arc. So we decided to take the meta-ness a step forward. Okay, not a step. A leap. We decided our character decides to become a musician halfway through the video. We see him purchase music software, we see him typing out lyrics in his Notes app, we see him watch music tutorials on YouTube, and eventually he creates a song. Which song? “Retrograde”. YOU HEARD ME.
He then gets some video editing software and creates a video for the song. And what video does he create? THE VERY VIDEO YOU ARE WATCHING.
He then releases the video, and it is rather unrealistically immediately covered by major publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, all of whom universally pan it for being super self-indulgent, unnecessarily postmodern, and for being a trashy A Level Media project that would never secure an A* grade. I’M NOT KIDDING, WE BECOME A PART OF THE VIDEO.
The fourth wall is decimated and the video rapidly devolves into an ultra-self-reflexive mess.
Dare I say, I think we have our concept. And we weren’t expecting to have our finalized idea until at least a month from now. We love it, our teacher loves it, and I haven’t been this excited about a concept since my smash-hit AS project, Insaficiency"
I had my own A1 project, Redacted, and I am happy with how it turned out. I was going to write this post on my own, after all, posts like these are my expertise, but Abdullah had done such a great job that writing one on my own didn't feel necessary, plus I didn't want to be disrespecting. I felt that if i write my own post instead of using the great post that he wrote it would be disrespecting, he won't see it that way but I will surely feel that way.
Anyways, enough about this, so this is our concept and we are all really enthusiastic to see it through. Wish us luck!
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