Choice of Song for Music Video

Before we can go ahead with the music video, we have to decide on a song to realise as a music video. There are several key components to our choice:

• Obviously, we must all like the song we choose to an extent - it will hinder our ambition and desire to work on the video and realise ideas for it if one or more of us cannot stand the song in question.
• The song must have good scope, and by that, I mean it must fire our imaginations to really create a good visual representation, to create a theme and vibe, a 'look' for the video. It is easy enough to like a song, but sometimes it is hard to actually derive a 'feel' from it, which is why some of the song choices below really do have a lot of atmospheric parts and feeling to them.

Slightly minor points to consider include:

• Length of song - it cannot be too short, and a long song would mean more work to do to realise the entire song, which then brings in logistical concerns. A good length would be around 3 to 4 minutes.
• Copyright holders of the song - certain record companies, such as Warner Music Group in particular, are becoming more and more sensitive in how the music of their artists is used, as we have seen in recent months with more and more Youtube videos being censored or deleted for having copyrighted content in them. Other record companies are slightly more relaxed, and although this won't affect our desicion too much, it is worth considering, as we do have to ask permission to use the song that we choose for the video.

With all this in mind, we devised a scoring system for all three members of the group to use, and we all marked the following out of 10 upon listening to them based on the criteria above.

The first shortlist we devised included:

• Marilyn Manson - Disposable Teens
• The Cranberries - Linger
• The Rolling Stones - Miss You
• Jay-Z - 99 Problems
• Rise Against - Paper Wings
• Bloc Party - Hunting for Witches

We unanimously chose Bloc Party's 'Hunting for Witches' as our song, as not only did we all really like the song, but we also thought there was a huge theme we could derive from it and use in the music video - that of misinformation and paranoia in the media. However, upon setting down to work onto it, we soon came into problems, namely with the locations we had in mind, and our representation was just not possible to do in the timescale and with the resources we had. So we went back to the drawing board and devised a new shortlist, which this time included:

• Hard-Fi - Surburban Knights
• The Police - Every Breath You Take
• Jay-Z & Linkin Park - Numb/Encore
• The Pidgeon Detectives - This Is An Emergency
• Marilyn Manson - Spade
• Marilyn Manson - Use Your Fist And Not Your Mouth

However, none of us could decide and settle on a chocie from this list, so with a slight sense of desperation by this stage, I suddenly came up with the idea of 'End Transmission' by AFI.

We chose this song almost unanimously, as it would be easy to create a nice, slightly edgy, strong representation of this song - it has a hugely atmospheric edge to it with the echoey background noises in the intro and outro of the song, and the shimmering guitar leads throughout the song. Also, the lyrics (as I will go onto in a future post) have a great scope for representation and definition.

More to follow...