titles in music videos

Music videos can use titles in varying ways. They can be used to establish the setting of the video, or simply as an introduction to the song. Videos such as Taio Cruz's 'Dynamite' use the titles in order to make the video look more like a film, which enhances the sense of narrative and shows the audience that a story will be told and so they should watch closely. This is a different use of titles to that in a film because the titles in a film are used to give credit to those who made it. We do not intend to use trailers in our video as we feel they would serve no necessary purpose. Videos such as N-Dubz' Girls use titles in an interesting way; the members of the group appear individually in the sequence and so the titles are used to introduce each of them. We can also note the aesthetics of the writing; the titles are in bold gold font, making the video appear more glamorous, but perhaps cheesy. We would not need to use this technique in our video because our artist is solo.

Initial project ideas

We plan to to use the song 'Brainwashed' by Devlin, a grime artist. The track is deep and dramatic and therefore we intend to produce such a video to match. The title itself, 'Brainwashed' suggests that some precarious situation should be created from which a character needs to be saved, which we intend to build on. We think it would be fitting for us to cut between an action narrative to shots of a rapper behind  a blank screen. We took inspiration from videos such as Chase & Status' 'Let You Go' and Devlin's 'Runaway' as they follow a very clear narrative and tell a captivating story, as opposed to the typical pop videos we often see.

In the event of permission to use this record being denied, we have selected several back-up tracks from the copyright-free music website 'jamendo'

In our project we intend to combine two narratives of past and present with use of flashbacks. Hopefully we'll be able to demonstrate the flashbacks with the use of a strobe and slow motion effects. In addition we intend to edit the flashback scenes in negative so the audience can discern between past and present. The video will depict a man's demise into addiction from the viewpoint of his girlfriend, whilst narrated by the rapper in the song. In terms of locations we will use one of our houses for the scenes where the couple's life was better, and then a darker and dingier setting such as a basement to show the character's demise. The couple will argue, possibly fight (in the present) resulting in the man storming from the house and into his car.

In the event of permission not being given for us to use copyrighted music; we intend to use