The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up

Smack my bitch up from dwayne koh on Vimeo.

The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up is clearly a huge influence on us for our video. This is due to the narrative and hidden themes within the video. This is achieved by being highly controversial and causing the video to be banned from TV. It has a high drug abuse, violence, nudity and sex content, and when revealed that the point of view is of a women, it truly shocks people.

The success of the video is from the tight camera work. Its continuity editing also leads the audience to believe it is a lads night out which works well considering it has been achieved in under 4 minutes. The point of view shot keeps the character hidden with us seeing hands and feet it is still unnoticeable that the character is female. We are aiming to use some shots like this but will not use a point of view angle.

Watching this video it is clear to see it will take us a lot of skill to pull off the effect that this video carries and I am unsure we shall be able to do that. However, by establishing what we are good at we can get around the issues and produce a video as equally as effective as Smack My Bitch Up.

Animatic

Animatic from WGSB on Vimeo.

Here is an animated storyboard of how we wish to shoot the video

Inspiration

A huge inspiration for our video will be the sense of voyeurism. I believe this as most music videos have voyeurism as their theme. This can be seen from the screenshots below of 4 different music videos from 4 different genres of music. With this is in mind I believe it would be a great idea for us to portray voyeurism in our music video. This is because it would be following the conventions of music videos and therefore tie it in with existing music videos by following their themes. The sense of voyeurism would work great in our music video due to the narrative we wish to use. If pulled off convincingly it will add to the effect of our narrative and shock viewers with the twist at the end.

As you can see from the screenshots voyeurism can be portrayed in many ways. This is due to the use of the long shot. However, these are used in different ways. For example, in the Nirvana video the voyeuristic view is created by having the band out of focus in the long shot whereas the Lady Gaga video uses a high angle to create a voyeuristic feel.

Ideas before chosen song

The video above is for the song "Take me to the hospital" by The Prodigy. This is a song we had considered to use for our coursework. Our idea for the song was to have a drug addict walking through different situations seeing different points in a drug trip. With the lyrics heavily influencing the video and the title being take me to the hospital the video would build up to the character being found and put into a ambulance.

The next video is for a song called Schism by Tool which was a possibility chosen by me. The video idea was similar to the idea for The Prodigy. It would again involve a drug user, however, due to the different style of the song a performance would have also been needed. This would have helped the video appeal to that target audience. Unfortunately my idea is very similar to the existing video for the song and we did not believe the idea was strong enough to stand out from other existing videos.

The idea for this song was a narrative video. The video would simply consist of a man walking to meet a woman at "505". This video would have followed the lyrics of the song very closely and been a slow pace picking up when the song drops. We did not choose this idea as a group because we did not think we could develop upon this idea well enough to make it interesting for a music video.