Pre-Production: Set designers

Set Designers, Laura and Jaqueline came in today to discuss with us our thoughts about our ideal designs for our music video. They subtly forced us to appreciate the use of the location, and simply use the location to our advantage. This lead to the meeting consisting of our video including surreal, strange, fun, immense and interesting visual images.

For instance, after numerously functioning between photos of our intended ideas, our location and echoes of the song, suggestions started to appear. Firstly, the girls promptly indicated we should exaggerate the abandoned feel of the house, as my group and I can do anything we wish to the house. For example, they suggested dirtying down the walls, tearing the wallpaper, possibly flooding rooms and chucking paint. Ideas of knocking holes in the wall and cast members climbing through them also arose to cover ideas of surreal visuals. The girls focused on concepts of anything which would engage or equally interest the audience.

Laura and Jaqueline were also drawn to ideas of including basic and minimalistic dance in our video. For instance, they felt our casted girls could be choreographed to dance, both good and bad; this led our group to considering the girls having a humorous dance or skate off. We also thought images of visual success would be created if our casted girls would ‘wreck’ the house during the video, covering ideas of a processed journey. This could also help the video to start slow but energising and increasingly build allowing the video to go somewhere.

Overall, our questions we had in mind got answered, consisting of ‘What can do with the property?’ and also ‘What can the girls do, so our video doesn’t become repetitive?’ We gained huge help and improved ideas from the set designers, making us aware of things we need to consider and risks we could take. For instance, we need to begin planning rigorously completing a literal list of things happening during the video. Jaqueline explained it would be useful to go to the house and geographically imagine what we would do if we found a house abandoned; this will help create relatable visuals for audience members. It was a also great compliment the set designers wanted to potentially come with us on the shoot day as they felt our video was a unique opportunity to witness and be involved with as we were told we have the chance to ‘make a memorable video.’ My group and I understand we need to begin thinking of realistic visuals, and therefore consider equipment we need to bring on the day. For instance, buying good paint.