Creative Idea: Stopmotion

'Her Morning Elegance' is a narrative/conceptual video with a prominent use of stopmotion that follows the life and dreams of a young woman. The camera work is extermely simple and reflects the simple storyline with the use of only one angle, 'bird's eye view' to create a sense of surrounding and to keep the audience's focus on the female character within the video. There is also little movement within the video and is mostly fix in one postion. This subverts the convention of a music video, where movement is ususally used to maintain the energy or attention of the spectator. The main shots used are long shots reveal to create a sense of voyerism, where the audience, from above, is watching this woman's life and dreams.
The only variation is when close ups are denoted of the female at the beginning and end of the video, connating that she is the main focus of attention and also no beauty shots are denoted of the main singer, again subverting conventions. The singer also only appears in parts in the video, perhaps for the spectator to focus more on the music rather than himself and is dressed in all black, going against the conventions of star persona.
The mise-en-scene also plays a large factor within the video, especially the large white bed which is the 'performance' space for the video. Other props such as blankets represents water and pillows for clouds adds a dream element to the video, relating to the storyline. The props also helps to illustrates the lyrics, for example where a cello appears when the line 'a cello lying in its case' is heard. The use of lighting also defines a difference between a difference of location, despite still in the same location. For example, when the girl is travelling 'underground', the ligthing becomes dark, with the use of one light to recreate the lighting of the underground.
The editing is the important mirco element to the video with the use of stop motion and mise-en-scene to create the young woman's 'world'. Other editing techniques mainly consists of cuts, not to distract from the stopmotion and from the video to becoming over complex. For the video 2096 still photos were taken during the process of the video and timelined to create motion and effecitvely convey a storyline. The benefits to using stopmotion is that different materials can be used ie, use of actors, plastine etc, to create motion and can be cost effective for a music video. Another benefit is that stopmotion allows to create effects that would otherwise be hard to create realisitclly, ie jumping on clouds. However some of the disadventages to using stop motion is that it is difficult to create fluid animation and difficult to main the correct speed to prevent it from looking like a series of still images put together.Overall, this is an impressive yet simple concept that produces repeatiable viewings and enjoyment to the audience. This inspired me to use stopmotion within our own music video although only for a segement as it is so time consuming.