For our locations, we wanted an industrial landscape with an edge to bring more of an ‘indie’ edge into the video.
We decided for the running scenes we would use urban areas and film in back alleys mixed with local scenic roots, such as the sea front. We wanted the skies to be bright blue to create the idea of something bright, colourful and intriguing coming towards the characters’ lives, but we’d still have the dull, uninteresting landscape they are currently trying to escape from. Here we tried to incorporate the idea of escapism, as the characters are trying to break free from their current surroundings.
For the band performance, we mostly concentrated on the motif of the sun setting. Our original idea for the performance was to go to the Baltic at the viewing point and to let the performance have the back drop of the Newcastle nightlight as the sun went down. We had to chance our idea because the Baltic had the Turner Prize on around the same time that we wanted to film, and it also became very difficult to get permission. We then considered filming in a field as the sun went down, but again it was difficult to get permission and thought we would have a very limited amount of time to film.
As we had decided that we would all like to make the sunset a stronger motif in the video, we decided that we could bring into the performance of the band. We had then all finally settled on the idea of projecting the sunset and looked at how and where we could do it. We decided we needed a black room to make it most affective, so we used the drama hall at our school, where we put up a white sheet and projected the sunset from behind. We then put all the band and instruments and added leaves, which has become a theme through our running scenes.
The tea party was also filmed in an industrial landscape. Luckily, Iona had noticed an area where a building had been knocked down so it had rubble and was very imperfect. This was essential for our video, as we tried to incorporate Claude Levi-Strauss’ idea of binary opposites. We also thought it could be a metaphor from their perfectly normal lives, the normal buildings, to their wanted lives where they destroy the things that define them most, relating to the rumble around the site.
Another location we used was the shoe tree in Jesmond. We thought it would be a fantastic idea for the homeless man to collect his shoes from there, and looking at the footage, I think it looks very good!
