Pre Production: Final treatment

Treatment

Working title: BΔSTILLE – If you close your eyes

Genre: Music video (pop)

Duration: Approximately 3 minutes

Target audience:  14-21 (both males and females)

Outline: The start of our video will consist of a short piece of narrative showing a young couple engaging in an argument, as a result of the argument the man walks out. He takes his phone out his pocket and puts his earphones in (this is when the music commences). Here the artist will be singing in the background as he makes appearances consistently throughout the song.

After the shots of the man walking away looking depressed (close up), the camera cuts back to the woman walking into her room whilst crying she then wipes the tears away and increases the volume on her radio (the volume of the song is maximised), this suggests that the couple still have feelings for each other despite the fact that he is out of proximity. She then dramatically lies down on the bed (which will be constructed via a birds eye shot).

 Shortly afterwards, the artists will be seen singing the lyrics in the park, whilst the man (boyfriend) sits on a bench and pulls out his phone out of his coat pocket,  he sits and stares at it; he then accidentally drops his phone pulling his earphones (this is where the music pauses). He then looks at his phone which shows an image of his girlfriend at a coffee shop. We then add a transition which goes from the still image to the moving frame of his girlfriend at home.

(From previous shot) it cuts to the woman, in the coffee shop; shows them laughing whilst having a good time. The waiter (who is the singer) serves them so we will see the artist singing the lyrics in the coffee shop. Whilst leaving the coffee shop an extreme longshot is shown whilst the boyfriend and the girlfriend walk into the distance.

This correlates to the man walking in the same location however it fades so it shows him solely on his own. Whilst walking along he notices a couple having a good time (girl is laughing) – correlating with his relationship. The artist is seen singing to the lyrics again. He then shortly receives a text message from his girlfriend, the text message will be displayed on screen as an animated bubble to give the audience information as to what the text said without directly showing the phone.

He continues walking to the house and opens the front door, approaches his girlfriend they embrace. The video then fades to white. The camera then turns shoots out of a window showing another man aggressively walks out (almost recreating the previous scene of the boyfriend and girlfriend shown at the start.

My contribution to the treatment:

Although the treatment was a group contribution, I believe that as an individual I put through some good ideas to make a good final treatment. The ideas that I put through were the target audience and who it would be for (after studying psychographic and demographic trends in alternative rock/pop bands). 

One of my key ideas in which i contributed was the idea of the text message and how it was to be displayed as an 'on-screen' bubble, i believe that this is a smart and clean idea because it means that the audience can get an understanding of what the message says which ultimately will give us a verdict and an update on the relationship without directly looking at the phone. This will also be helpful whilst filming, for example if we film the phone then lighting can be an issue because if we focus on the phone the backdrop will become dark and if we focus on the backdrop then the phone will become out of focus and dark.

As well as this I contributed the idea at the end where we see another couple engaging in an argument/dispute which correlates to the main relationship in the music video, the reason why I wanted to do this is because life is a repetitive circle with unforeseen circumstances; many things in life will happen which we do not necessarily want to happened and this video represents that.

I also contributed the idea of having a performance based segement in the video in a studio with a black background as this sets the mood for the production and the audience can solely focus on the singer as the audience can almost 'feel' the performer.