Costume plan

Costumes Plan: Written by Matt Moran.

Clown:

One important aspect of our music video is the appearance of the actors that appear in it, as our music video is heavily reliant on symbolism, the costumes are chosen to represent different feelings and changes within the narrative. One character will be dressed as a clown, as clowns have symbolic origins of death and new life, the clowns white face is said to represent death, and the bright colours painted on top connote new life. The storyline our narrative will be loosely linked to is that of a woman trying to cope with her grief, and as she is running away from the clown, she is running away from her grief. The clown costume will also be in shocking contrast to the bleak background colours of the video, this creates an attention-grabbing effect and will also help to get our music video get noticed.

We researched different clown-looks to choose one that we could model our character on. We did this mainly through the internet search engine ‘Google Images’. A few potential choices that stood out for us were:

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This is the clown in the horror movie ‘It’, we liked this choice as it has strong elements of fear, and we think the clown needs to be scary to fit our ideas for the video.

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This child-clown really stood out to us, due to its

Controversial aspects, we also liked that the child was crying, as it suggests grief and sadness, both of which are elements of our narrative. The fact that the clown is a child has connotations of innocence and purity.

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The idea of a black clown appeals to us as it is unusual, clowns are stereotypically white Europeans. Therefore, a black clown would break this stereotype and make our video more noticeable.

We decided to incorporate elements of all three of these clowns, the clown chasing the woman throughout the video will be of black ethnicity, however the costume and face painting will more closely represent that of the clown in it, as the white face, red wig, lips, and nose will be in harsh contrast to the characters skin-colour. We will rent the clown costume from a costume-shop in Manchester Arndale center; a professional who is a friend of one of our group will do the face painting. The wig will also be bought from a costume or wig shop.

The child clown also provided inspiration for a section of our video, in which a sad child clown will appear to be crying, the face paint will run onto the main actress’s white dress, symbolizing her finally feeling her grief.

Main female character:

<!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->The main female actress will be wearing a dirtied white dress throughout the video, this was chosen as white is symbolic of purity and innocence, and also emptiness and simplicity. The dress will be borrowed from a member of our group. Her hair and makeup will be simply done, preferably she will be petite, blonde and white-skinned, to further the image of innocence, however we are unsure if we will be able to find a suitable actress, so this may be different. She will also be barefoot.

ß This is a good example of how we would like our main character to look, there will be certain differences but this is a good model to loosely base our character on.

Adult Male character:

<!--[if !vml]-->The male character in our video will not get much face-time, as he will often be in the shadows and only vaguely and briefly shown, however is costume still has to be relevant, therefore we have decided to show him in ordinary clothing, the colour of which will be black to represent his death and to be juxtaposed with the woman’s white clothing. He will be a young (18-25 year old) white male, quite attractive, with black hair.

ß This image of Leonardo dicaprio is a good image to loosely base the character on