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.

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.

Website Inspiration

Above are websites that our group have said are inspiring and we should take aspects of these websites. As you can see they are all simple and do not have a lot on the home page causing it to be busy. A busy website is the easiest way to prevent someone looking at the website as too much information will prevent someone actually looking through it and reading bits they like. By having a simple website information would be found easily meaning it has good user usability.

Some of the aspects we liked from these websites are:

Video,

Scroll Box,

Members sign in,

Interesting Menu,

Links to external sites,

Clear information

Mood Board

The mood board above shows our main themes for our music video in a clear simple form. By creating a mood board it was easy for us (each group member) to see how we each envisioned the themes of the video and then got to discuss them. Closet homosexuality and regret are the clear influences taken from our narrative and the other themes shall be used in our video although not directly tied in to our narrative. With these basic images clearly established our group now has a clear path to follow to get to our final completed video.