One of our main inspirations for creating a music video which uses both illustration and amplification was to produce a video that was more creative and powerful at portraying the songs message than the original version. In the original video, the main focus is on Jazmine Sullivan singing in a recording studio. But, we wanted to go further than this quite tiresome idea and add a narrative to our version mixed with a performance element. Moreover, even though this artist does not cover the same genre as Jazmine Sullivan, I believe that Michael Jackson is an amazing artist and extremely inspirational to many other artists and very influential to his audience. His music has touched thousands if not millions of people over the many years through the way he has expressed his lyrics. So, we aimed to produce a video where the lyrics are dominant and powerful and the audience can relate to the feelings and emotions expressed by the artist. Just as Michael Jackson had done.
In addition, Missy Elliot is both an artist and producer; we studied some of her work as it is a similar genre to our song and found that dance routines and close up camera shots of the artist are very common in this type of music video. I also researched the R&B/Reggae artist, Sean Paul. In many, if not all of his video’s there is no clear story line and he often uses disjuncture and dance routines too. However, illustration and amplification are not generally found in many R&B/Reggae videos. Therefore, we decided to use a mixture of both an illustration of the songs story line and shots of our star singing and performing a dance routine. By using a mixture of both, we are including the normal conventions of an R&B/Reggae music video and we are being more original by combining it with a storyline to break away from the norm. As a result, we can amplify the songs meaning and make it more interesting and visual for the audience at the same time.
