Constructing a Narrative

One of the things we identified as an important aspect of an 'emo' music video is the narrative involved, narrative meaning a story created in a constructive format, or telling the story of the song within music videos.

The vast majority of 'emocore' music videos focus around their subjects, either directly or abstractly, and due to the style which focuses around emotional issues such as break ups, jealousy, depression and such like, the narratives reflect these with often quite controversial videos, the Jimmy Eat World 'Pain' video being a good example, in which the protagonist tries to take away his emotional pain from a break up by hurting himself physically, such as jumping into walls, throwing himself down stairs amongst other methods.

The lyrics of the song 'Pain' are more or less about the pain the narrator is going through from his break up, and 'taking the pain away'. Because of this, we have decided to focus the narrative of our video around these aspects.

Creating a realistic narrative in this style will be hard as the issues focus around self-abuse, depression and drugs. These subjects are hard to tackle whilst maintaining a professional feel to the video.

The reason that these subjects are hard to reflect is because we are limited in the way of actors and equipment, as we are using consumer cameras and actors our own age. Using these alongside with limited time and £0 budget there is a limit to how professionally and realistically we can reflect these issues. We identified this as a problem that we needed to try and overcome, and so we set to finding ways over this obstacle by researching and thinking of what we can do with the equipment and actors we have.

Though we have not constructed a final and complete narrative, we have many ideas for how we could structure it. We decided that we will focus the narrative around a teenage boy, probably around the seventeen to eighteen age region. It will be about his unrequited love for a girl that couldn't care less for him, and his frustration and depression while trying to capture the affection of the girl he loves.

We decided also that for the narrative we could cut between realtime in the protagonist's bedroom as he is getting more and more frustrated, as well as in his head his imaginings of trying to get her attention. Within these shots, she would be going about her everyday life, completely oblivious to him, imagining he is there, so perhaps partially transparent or cleverly framed so his presence is ambiguous. Later on in the song, the guitar solo would start and the narrative would climax, perhaps including the main character having a mental breakdown. The reasoning for this is that I have noticed in several videos that the narrative and the song reach a climactic point simultaneously. An example of this is the Fall Out Boy 'Thnks Fr Th Mmrs' video, in which in the last chorus Pete Wentz starts smashing up the stage set.