Animatic Concept - I'm goin' out of my mind!

Sir said I should now make another animated storyboard as a follow up to the one I did for The Great Escape now I have a bit more background knowledge about music videos. This time I have been allowed to pick a song for myself from my chosen genre (I wanna ROCK)... so it will be this -

(Well, not this particular version, the one that's on iTunes.)

This song has a lot to play with for a music video, so I think I should throw down the ideas I have.

First up - I really like Temporary Veterinary. Therefore they will return. In the TGE video we managed to flesh out a bit of the band members personalities' through their costume; we can reinforce this through the followup video. This ties in with the star image theory, in that I, as the exploitive record company boss I am, am using their music videos to construct a marketable image for them. That way I can earn MONIES.

This will have more of a direct link between the lyrics and the visuals as per Goodwin - in the TGE video I touched on this in a slightly obscure conceptual manner with the spiders; though here it will be so obvious that even an X Factor contestant could understand it. This is to a) widen the audience and b) make it more engaging, to tie in with the light hearted nature of the song.

To explain this further: the song is about an obsession with Namco's Pac-Man. I plan on using a link to the lyrics by featuring shots of the band members running through the maze levels of the game during the verses, with the things we see on screen tying in with said lyrics - for example, during the "So I'm heading out the back door and in the other side; Gonna eat the cherries up and take them all for a ride" part we see exactly that on screen. Not sure how I'm going to handle the "I've got Speedy on my tail, and I know it's either him or me." line purely because it baffles me slightly - Speedy is unlikely to be on your tail in gameplay; he's much more likely to be trying to get in front of you (no, I'm not making this up to be difficult; that is actually how he's programmed). May have to be creative with that one.

Point that needs carefully addressing: I don't want this to be a gimmicky "oh look, it's a music video about videogames!" thing, but as a video which employs Pac-Man as part of the narrative. Reason? So that it doesn't annoy videogame players. There's little that annoys me more than the way a lot of media represents videogames - I'm pretty sure we've all seen a TV programme that fits the TVTropes "Pac-Man Fever" trope or some other kind of misrepresentation of how videogames function by either relying on LOTS OF FLASHING LIGHTS AND VIOLENCE or spamming out of place chip-tune music (not that I dislike 8-bit/16-bit music! This is coming from the guy who went out of his way to learn the Metropolis Zone riff on guitar!). In short, the narrative should get the point across to casuals whilst being relevant to nerds.

re: Narrative? Video starts with the frontman (I should really give these guys names...) walking up to a Pac-Man machine in the corner of an arcade alone. He starts playing, and we 'zoom' into the game where we see the band members in place of Pac-Man. Lots of time-lapse cuts will be used; the end of the video sees the frontman successfully reaching the split-screen level (256 for those interested!) and having a crowd gathered around him. The choruses have performance elements weaved in with the whole band present.

-HM.