New Narrative

Our new music video focuses around the theme of heartbreak and a sense of lost love. Therefore the meaning in our product will be displayed in a less abstract way compared with our old narrative which predominantly focused on ideas of childhood and essences of postmodernity. Our new narrative is also a lot more relatable to our target audience than the previous idea as many people have experienced heartbreak. However, if our audience haven’t experienced it they would understand the emotions and feelings associated with this situation.

Our narrative opens with a flashback with two characters, a boy and a girl, who are in a relationship. The scene will show them hugging and holding hands in a field. The use of a flashback helps to establish and depict the happy times of the relationship. This scene in particular is fairly clichéd in how we wanted to express the love between the two characters, but we knew that it would allow the audience to clearly establish that they are in a relationship. We thought that a voiceover would also be effective over this scene to give a retrospective view from the girl after the break up. This establishes the emotion of the song and video from the onset.

We also decided to use a voiceover over the top of piano rendition of ‘Jar of Hearts’ during this flashback scene. We got the idea to do a voiceover from Rihanna's song 'We Found Love' as her video begins with a voiceover which our group thought was very effective and added to the music video as whole. We thought about what could be said in the voiceover and after some research, we found a quote from Marilyn Monroe which we decided to use:
"I believe that everything happens for a reason.
People change so that you can learn to let go.
Things go wrong so that you can appreciate them when they're right.
You believe lies so that you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself.
Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can all fall together."

We thought that this quote would be ideal to use in our music video as it highlighted the girl character’s feelings at that stage of the relationship. We also believed that it was emotive and that is also begun to pinpoint the beginnings of a break up. This would allow the audience to recognise that the relationship won’t remain happy during the music video. This would hopefully be seen through the synchronous music and visual aspect. These techniques of a voiceover and a flashback were combined to hopefully notify the audience on the initiation of the break up between the two characters. The background music we chose would also add to the emotion displayed in the flashback and the piano adds to the unhappiness as pianos are typically associated with feelings of sadness.

As the song begins, we see the boy writing a love letter to the girl. After a failed attempt, he screws up the piece of paper and throws it on the desk and texts her saying 'I love you.' We then see the letter opens up by itself and crawls down the side of the desk. The letter travels down a set of stairs and into a kitchen and climbs up a fridge. The fridge has a photograph of the girl who is standing and smiling in the park. We intend to get the letter to climb into the picture using stop motion and then the letter will follow her as she walks away. We would then see a graphic match to the next shot of the letter travelling through the woods as it attempts to find the girl.

Throughout the music video the letter will carry on following the girl through a variety of different locations, such as parks and streets where it will gradually dirtier and rugged. We will also see shots of the girl walking alone in a quiet area and we will integrate the scenes of the letter and the girl together. This will highlight the isolation that the girl feels which will then suggest the tension between the two characters.  Towards the end of our music video, we will see the letter travel in a car away to some cliffs. The girl will be seen sitting on a rock near the edge of a cliff, looking out into the distance as the letter crawls up to her. She looks towards the letter and picks it up to read it. She then proceeds to the edge of a rock edge before scrunching up the letter and throwing it off the edge. The girl will then walk higher up the cliffs towards the edge and stops with a fade to black. The video will then end on a cliff-hanger, leaving the audience unclear as to what happened to the girl.

The main goal of our music video is to create emotion that could be relatable to our target audience. The idea of the travelling letter humanises it which creates sympathy for the letter as it gets battered and bruised on its journey to find the girl. We will then interject the clips of the girl to create more sympathy for the situation. The song itself also adds to the emotion that we were trying to create and highlights meaning and a message to the audience.