Sunday, 1 July 2012

Holocene Music Video

Below is the finished music video for the group I am in with Amy Wootten, for Bon Iver's Holocene. As this project is not being marked — it was for the purpose of practising our video production skills before A2 — we wanted to try experimenting with things we did not get opportunity to in the videos we made at AS. 

As both of us study English and Media, we are both particularly interested in narrative techniques in different forms, and how narrative structure can affect an audience in different ways. Consequently, we derived a narrative structure that incorporated a large number of shots played in reverse. We also wanted to see how effective a narrative could be without incorporating a single line of dialogue.

We framed the narrative so the viewer instantly sees an (unnamed) girl in a bath, possibly in an attempt to drown herself. The narrative then begins playing backwards, showing the viewer the girl's day leading up to what is happening in the bathroom. She is shown having been crying, and beforehand she had spent some time alone at a spring. The video seems to end with her waking up at the beginning of the day. However, subsequently we come back to the girl in the bath and shows her receiving a text, emerging from the bath, reading her text, and smiling. Her fate is ultimately left uncertain with the use of a smash cut, but it is assumed the text stops her suicide attempt. We depicted the character as completely alone throughout the video to stress the emphasis this message from someone has on her, but decided to leave the content of the message ambiguous.