Research for developed music video idea

I have been doing some research into some of the design aspects of our music video including lighting, costumes, props and look at inspiration from pre-existing music videos.

Taking into account the fact that we want to create a 1920's jazz club I have been looking at images of what the backgrounds and therefore set designs will look like as well as what the costumes would look like. 

I discovered that 1920's jazz clubs were quite lavish in terms of their decoration and the use of big curtains in the background and quite stylised furniture such as round tables and bent wood chairs. I think that getting a hold of these props from the theatre department wouldn't be an issue. 

Additionally, the costumes that were worn in this era involved flapper dresses for females with wether a hat or a head dress/accessory of some sort with fur or feathers along with small heels (character shoes) and lots of pearled jewellery. Then men wore 3 piece suits with a bow tie and a bowler hat. I think that getting a hold of these costumes won't be too difficult as they would be easy to order online or get from the theatre department at school. 

Another design aspect that I had to do some research into was the old computers as this is going to be slightly more challenging to source. I found out that the first computer was constructed in 1943 and wasn't completed until 1946 therefore this created a bit of an issue in terms of time scales. However, we realised that we could still use the 1920's dance element and the old computer with the mad scientist element because they could be dancing an older style than they are living in. 

I did some research into old computers and what they look like and how much they cost. Unfortunately, they appear to be around £100 on the internet so I am hoping that will be able to borrow one from somewhere or see if the theatre department have one that we can use. The kind of look that we want to reach with this prop is similar to the images below. 

In addition to doing some research into costumes and props I have also been considering another area of mise-en-scene; setting and location. In order to get a better idea of what we want for our setting for the various elements of our music video we decided to sketch them out as we thought that getting a visual idea of what we want would help us to picture it as a group.

We sketched out some set design and this helped us to come up with the idea of using an infinity screen/white background for the dance elements as this will work effectively with the lights and it will also look clean and professional on camera. We are then thinking of having a 3 pieces rostrer at the back of this set which is essentially three different sizes cubes nest to each other which will be for the members of the jazz band to stand on and this will create some levels and dynamics within the dance element. Then the three dancers will be dancing in front of these cubes and this will be similar across both dance elements (from the 1920's to the modern day)

I spoke to the set design guy, Paul and I talked him through our initial ideas and he suggested a 8 by 4 rostrer which would be around 2 or 2.5 ft high as this will work well for the 3 members of the jazz band as well as working nicely in terms of the scale of the studio. One element we had to consider was how hight his rostrer was going to be as this would effect the camera positioning and framing. 

The other setting/set design we have come up with is similar to that of our original idea. We want to create a mad scientist's lab within a shipping container as we believe that the rusty, metallic look of the shipping container will match that of the mad scientist character and the part of the narrative that happens in this setting will work effectively with this set design. The lip sync element to our music video will also take place in the shipping container.

I have also been doing some research into similar music videos to our concept in terms of narrative, design elements and track. I found two videos which are similar to ours. The first is Bang Bang by Will.i.am which involves a jazz band/20's dance which is very similar to what we want to achieve in our video. The other similar video is for the track Dead Don't Dance which involves a group of mad scientists bringing Frankenstein back to life. These videos have elements that are similar to ours and so we have used them as inspiration to see what we like and what we don't like. 

I think that our idea is developing well and hopefully we are on the right track and don't have to make any more changes to our concept!