Inspiration

Inspiration

 

Once settled on the song, Florence and the Machine was a big influence for the initial thoughts of the music video. In terms of themes and ideas we were, of course, influenced by Oh Land and by the song lyrics of Numb. However, Florence’s music videos also inspired us in terms of Craig Davis’ theory. Florence usually has music videos that fit into the amplification category and we liked this idea for the surrealism involved and the creative interpretation possible.

   We took some general themes from Florence such as the idea of nature and the natural, and the idea of the surreal, which we were certain of from the start.

   Costume-wise, I wanted something shocking and unusual as to uphold the surrealism that the video involves; also something to represent the metaphors and connotations in the video. The costume of the clown for example, the clown primarily, has been used to represent a sign of death. The white make up represents loss of life and the colored make up over the top represents the emotion. Therefore the clown is a combination of both the deceased male in the video and the emotional, deluded female protagonist. Another thing that the clown could denote is society, society looking down upon mentally ill women (big political statement, however, this connotation would be for the past eg. The Rest Cure ect.)

In the first, second and third scenes our female lead is wearing a black formal dress. The black here connotes loss and is associated with death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown. It usually has a negative connotation (blacklist, black humor, 'black death').  In heraldry, black is the symbol of grief, which could possibly insinuate (as well as the mysterious white glow of the male) that her assumed husband is dead.

In the second section of the video she wears a white wedding dress. White is associated with light, goodness, purity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. White means safety. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. Therefore the sudden wardrobe change is to highlight the fact that she is closer to ‘him’ and finally she reaches ‘him’ and is euphoric.

Another inspiration for us was the film Alice In Wonderland, we liked the strange, eccentric vibe to the film and the innocence and naivety of Alice and so we wanted to create this for our female protagonist. Also the theme of confusion and being lost in our video is taken from Alice being lost down the rabbit hole.