Music Video Treatment

Music Video Treatment – ‘Castle of Glass’ by A Familiar Picture

The purpose of this writing will be to clarify exactly what I am doing and to make it clear to the audience and to myself. It will outline the basic concepts of my piece and allow me to express my reasoning for said piece.

The Piece itself focuses on the life of a young man who is implied to have recently fallen on hard times; this includes the loss of his wife/girlfriend, although the exact nature of the relationship is irrelevant, the ambiguity helps to connect the target audience to the main character by allowing them to exercise their own interpretation. As the video follows on there is a mood and tone shift from a dark and gloomy set of shots to lighter and more dulcet tones indicating the characters return to happiness in what is intended to be something of an emotional adventure.

The video will begin on a fade in to a moving shot through a high level car park in a slow and smooth forward fashion, Followed by a series of moving shots around the main character before returning to the moving shot through the car park, these shots will take place in succession and they will shift after one another, to the other. These series of shots will last for approximately 1:30, in the sections with the main character there are a series of shots to indicate he is in distress or saddened including a shot of a teardrop falling on his hand, a short section with blurry traffic sound indicating a slip from reality and a scene of the main character visibly gripping a guard rail tightly. Together these first few shots should appropriately express the characters distress and depression.

Following this is the first few lines of the song accompanied by the lead singer standing alone on a stage, hopefully the actor can dictate the lines with little feeling and emotion to begin with as it will help accompany the narrative theme just shown. For now the band will not be present but they will appear in due time. This section will last longer than most and will probably be 3-5 seconds in length.

This returns us to the narrative section where the main character is standing in front of a large fire, the scene is set at night so that the glow of the fire appears ominous on the main character and almost sombre to reflect his mood (5 Second shot), from a POV shot the main character can be seen dropping a photograph of his Partner (Level of Relationship is not highly explained but is not required) into an incinerator fire, the shot is continued with the photograph being seen to be dropped from a side perspective, after the photo has been burned the main character drinks from whiskey bottle he has in his hand and slumps it’s to his waist level loosely, a quick shot of the bottle swinging down to his waist helps to punctuate the main character loose and intoxicated nature which together when shot quickly in sequence will last approximately 5 seconds. after a short singing part by the bands lead singer on stage for 14 seconds we return to the main characters grip on the bottle visibly getting weak, as the band ups the tempo in a short scene where the emphasis is on the guitar playing strumming more harshly for 3 seconds , we quickly return to seeing the bottle drop and get smashed from two different angles in slow motion which I believe will be quite visually impressive especially when accompanied straight after by a strong band section with heavy use of guitars.

Moving on, this scene is followed by a moving shot of the main character walking down a side walk from an over the shoulder shot and a front facing medium length shot with the character walking towards the screen lasting in total 10 seconds, I have made it clear in my intention that there will be something to bridge these two scenes, the strongest of which will be a scar, cut or burn that the main character has sustained in the previous scene. In this scene the main character walks past a church with disinterest or care, in a deeper meaning this helps promote the sombre tone but its key meaning is supposed to represent the main characters situation, and how little the concept of death bothers him in relation to the implied preparation for suicide in the first scenes, the camera stops halfway when it reaches the gates and pans up the building, showing the height of the church.  Immediately following this is another section with the band lasting 6 seconds but it then leads to another scene, in which the main character walks carelessly past a homeless man from the front in an upwards facing ground shot for 3 seconds, indicating aggression from the main character, as the main character walks on in a tracking shot that walks in front of him facing towards his face and body for another 3 seconds, the homeless man in the background is blurred out to indicate a lack of caring from the main character in his current depressive state.

There is a quite long section with the band directly after this which is essentially the band playing out the end of a chorus, it’s a series of shots starting with the lead singer, moving onto the guitarist and then onto the drummer then ending on the lead singer again, this quick succession of shots will mostly be medium shots which will in total last 11 seconds.

What follows after these scenes is what I refer to as the ‘Emotional Redemption’ of the character, emotional scenes from a park bench show the main character sitting contemplating and gripping his leg to show frustration from a POV Shot, he is however interrupted by a female character seen walking up to him from a medium shot with low length focus set on the camera, she extends her arm to him in a friendly gesture and leads him away from the bench in a side medium shot, this scene will be done with a short set of mid-range shots and POV’s of the two characters looking at each other. This is followed by a short section of the band playing. But immediately returns to the two of them walking to a large rocky structure on a sunset, the implication of which is to show the main character the beauty he has been missing in his life. As they are looking over the sunset, their hands come together in unity and he lightly squeezes her hand slowly, this is seen from a shot from behind but it moves to a smooth tracking shot where it ends at where there hands meet.

Finally, the scene returns to where the piece started, the main character simply walks away from the railing in slow motion, and the scene fades out, at this point background noise of cars and people can be heard much more strongly indicating a return to reality proper.