MY FIRST PITCH

The main conventions of a pop video often consist of there being shots of a linear story line, while also having shots of the artist playing the song.

Keith Negus, the pop video theorist, says that pop videos have a number of key conventions or ingredients. These include cutting to the beat, hyper reality, high impact, elements of performance and narrative and images etc.


The mood and tempo of the video always complies with the tempo and mood of the song. In my pitch I am trying to imitate the convention of having a linear story line while also having shots of the artist playing the song. The song I chose is Hall & Oates’ ‘You make my dream come true’. The song is an upbeat and kooky tune which has a certain sense of optimism and simplicity which I am trying to portray in my video idea. I want the kookiness to be displayed through the fact that it is strange that people are so drawn towards this song and I want people to be getting towards the window in strange ways which will hopefully imitate conventions of a pop video as I am reflecting some of the characteristics of the song into the video. I wanted to imitate the convention of having the same mood of the song in the video by making the music video optimistic and to ‘not take itself too seriously’ if that makes sense. The song is reasonably simple therefore I thought the video should reflect its simplicity. I wanted to give the band an image of not being too threatening and help them appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The song is quite a retro song (although we are under the illusion that this is a brand new band); therefore there is the potential to appeal to an older audience. The band should be good looking which would help get a female audience and also relatable looking so that boys will relate to them and empathise. They will be teenagers and the bedroom will look like an average boy’s teenage bedroom. This will help gain empathy from teenage boys (an important market).

I pitched my idea to Luke and I believe he was generally positive about it. One of the problems he believed it faced was the trouble of finding the right house to set the video. He believed it may be hard to get permission from certain people to use their house and he encouraged using a Hurtwood owned property as it would be more convenient. He also suggested that it would be hard to get the right amount of people as well as a lot of people would be needed if we wanted a successful crowd scene at the end. That, he claimed, would be a big problem. Both John and Luke thought there could be some kind of message about the pied piper, I thought there could be posters in the bedroom of a band called Pied Piper or a literal picture of the character The Pied Piper. They thought this due to the nature of the character relating to my video; both play hypnotic music which attracts people towards it. I decided I would look into the right building to set the video in as well as finding the right people to play the part of the bystanders in the video.

Both of my teachers, Luke and John, thought my idea was very strong ‘if not charming’ and quite different from the normal. But my group did not like the song or the idea and because of the difficulties of having a big cast and finding the right house, we went with a different song and treatment.