Pitch

Sapient is a Hip-Hop artist/producer from Portland, Oregon. His music is underground and cerebral, with thoughtful lyrics. In the song I have chosen, Sapient creates a tumbling chaotic backing over which he lays down bars about the reality of a polluted world sprinting towards destruction, and the feelings that go with the realisation that “she” (the world) does not care what happens to it or the people in it. To articulate this I want to make a narrative/performance music video. The narrative is going to follow a guy truly troubled by the pollution and slow deterioration of the world he lives in. I am going to have scenes of him moping around and grieving juxtaposed with images of urban environments. A film that has given me some inspiration is Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of Balance)- a movie that has no conventional plot, it is a collection of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes (see trailer below). I am going to film different parts of London sticking to the theme of pollution. For the performance part of the video I was thinking of having someone saying the lyrics, I don't want their identity to be visible maybe just a shot of their lips. The person would act as a narrator, the one expressing these negative feelings about the world.

Mood board

Here I have collected a bunch of images that came to mind when listening to "She Doesn't Love me". I'm going to use this mood board when drawing up my story board to help with the development of my ideas.

Analysis of a similar media products -Trumpalump by Dels & Drop by The Pharcyde.

Here is the music video for the song "Trumpalump" by Dels. I have chosen to analyse it because it is an interesting idea and the genre of the music is similar to mine.

The palette of the video very much drives the narrative. It consists of the binary opposites of two worlds: the black and white world and the coloured one. Hence the lyrics "Am I dreaming in colour or the black with the white?". These two worlds mise-en-scene are simple: a checkered floor and blank wall. One's palette is black and white the other's is coloured. Throughout the video the worlds are filled with inanimate objects such as a phone and an apple. They are used to show the difference between the two worlds. There are also identical twins, one in each of the worlds. This further shows the difference between the two. There is no post-production used to create the different colours and Dels, the identical girls, the room and the objects are all coloured using paint.This creates an interesting texture to the video. The aesthetics of the video, combined with the weird multi-coloured objects and robotic looking identical twins create a very dreamy, surreal atmosphere. The video is a performance music video and shows Dels, the rapper, rapping in both the worlds. This creates the impression that he has a split personality and is not sure which world he belongs to. The video has loads of quick cuts between different camera angles and between the two different worlds, juxtaposing the two. This creates a confusion between which world is real, or if any are. The representation of women in the video could be questioned. Two identical women (twins, however, this is not clarified in the video) are shown blank faced and robotic. one is black and white the other is coloured. This could be seen as putting them in the same category as the objects included in the video that serve the same purpose merely adding to the aesthetics. Here is the music video for the song "Drop" by The Pharcyde. It has a really interesting idea of the whole video being in reverse. It has inspired me, so I thought it would be a good music video to analyse. The mise-en-scene of the video consists of the areas in the city. There is a very urban feel to the video. The palette of the city is grey and dreary, which contrasts well with the clothes of the rappers. The video is a performance music video with the performance put in reverse in post-production. They walk through different parts of the city doing things that look aesthetically pleasing in reverse such as pouring water on the selves, jumping around throwing bouncy balls down stairs. The whole idea of everything being in reverse pretty much drives the video.