Political Videos

We knew that if we were going to produce a controversial, political pop video we would need to research previous videos that had this kind of theme. Here is a Prezi interactive presentation of various political videos...

http://prezi.com/nuuw0tylrv9v/political-pop-videos/


There are two key images in my presentation that I found, and they were important influences to me as we already had the idea of toy soldiers to represent children and child soldiers.

Click for bigger image...

Political Research

When we came up with our idea to have a political twist to our video/CD etc, we new that we needed to research current politics and increase our basic knowledge.

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born 6 May 1953 and is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007; he resigned from all these positions in June 2007.As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was accused of misleading Parliament and his popularity dropped dramatically.

Gordon Brown

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician, who has been a Member of Parliament since 1983. He served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007, after the resignation of Tony Blair and three days after becoming leader of the governing Labour Party. Immediately before this, he had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007. His tenure ended in May 2010, when he resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party.

David Cameron

David William Donald Cameron born 9 October 1966 is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party.

In the 2010 general election held on 6 May, the Conservatives gained a plurality of seats in a hung parliament and Cameron was appointed Prime Minister on 11 May 2010, at the head of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
 

Nick Clegg

Nicholas William Peter "Nick" Clegg born 7 January 1967 is a British Liberal Democrat politician who is the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Lord President of the Council and Minister for Constitutional and Political Reform in the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Clegg is the Leader of the Liberal Democrats and is the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam.

New Storyboard

After completing two storyboards we were still unsure about the organisation of the type of shots and the dialogue/lyrics that would fit. Because of this, I made a third storyboard that included timings, different shots needed and correct lyrics to give us a clearer more structured idea...

Performers

Because we wanted children in our video we needed to advertise to various students about what we wanted to do and the type of things we would want them to be doing. After we have our performers we will have to get consent from their parents due to their age therefore I made this advert to give to the children whilst including a follow up consent form.

Click for bigger image..

Timings, Props And Locations

To present our video preparation in a more interactive way I created a post it note video and uploaded it to Youtube..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHyGGyHB6jQ

Complete Story Board

New idea.

We had completely changed our idea and had realised that even an upbeat song like The Libertines can actually have hidden meaning. We had listened to the beat over and over and it feels like it had a marching rhythm to it. This is were our link with Tony Blair had come in as he had a huge impact on the decisions on whether our troops should go to war. All our ideas came together and to keep on top of them I created a small collection of relevant images.

I made this word cloud on a website called Wordle as a colourful and different way of presenting text. These words have all been used in my work and can give me a different way of presenting ideas and key words.

We took this word summary and whenever we needed inspiration, or an idea we would refer back to this and words would instantly trigger off an idea, motif or even a reminder for us to do something.

Too Cliche !

We started to discuss our ideas with each other and our teachers and we were convinced we had a great plan. Until our teacher suggested "turning the idea on it's head". At first we were unsure at what she meant and was surprised that she thought our idea wasn't great. We wanted our video to be based around a group of teenage friends and their routine before setting off on a holiday e.g. the packing, the journey, the arrival etc.

 

We decided to try what she said and we began to think completely

out of the box. We started to think about the opposite of everything we had said...

E.g.

Happiness to Sadness

Fun to Bordem

Freedom to Controlled

Friends to Enemies

Sun to Rain 

At first I struggled to understand how an upbeat, youthful indie song could work with such a low depressing motif, but after listening to the lyrics AGAIN, we realised that maybe it isn't such a happy song.

" And all the lives you said, who did you save!"

"Let me go! "

"They played that song at the death disco" etc.

We took one line " And all the lives you said, who did you save!" and thought of all the things we could do that was relevant to this. We all thought of someone we could use this lyric against that had an unpleasant reputation of lying and who had recognisable features and mannerisms. This was when we had the controversial idea of a character like the ex prime minister Tony Blair.

Deconstructing the song..

We decided to make a mind map about all the ideas that we have and what the song makes us think of. The song itself is a very up-beat song that is sometimes used in the teen comedy "The Inbetweeners" and also the popular "Gavin and Stacey". We kept this in mind and started to think about why this song is used in these programmes. The common link was fun! Both comedies are full of fun and youth and humour and this stuck in our minds. We pulled apart the lyrics to find that the really wasn't a lot of actual singing and the focus was on the band. To our group it screamed youth and attitude; with lyrics like " You're looking rough and living strange" and "Yeeeeeeeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" With this we came up with our FIRST idea.