Track Pitch to Group - One Week

One Week - Barenaked Ladies

I think that this would be a good song to make a music video to for six main reasons:

1. The rapid-fire delivery of the lyrics should challenge our new skills concerning performance / lip-syncing.
2. The range of topics mentioned in the lyrics should provoke some interesting ideas for the treatment as we can't really do a music video for this particular track literally.
3. The track did get to #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #5 in the UK Singles Chart but that was from 1998 so the song isn't nearly as mainstream anymore.
4. The track's genre is recognisable as rap, with a clear sub-genre of alternative rock.
5. As fans of the Barenaked Ladies have made music videos to this particular song, I doubt that copyright will be an issue.
6. There is nothing in the lyrics that makes this inappropriate for a school-based project.

Barenaked Ladies are a Canadian alternative rock band with an element of comedy in a lot of their music and videos. Since the success of their album "Stunt" in 1998 (which also had this track), they gained large audiences outside of Canada, in the USA and UK. The main audience for the band are Canadians who like alternative, geek or comedy rock artists such as Great Big Sea, Jonathon Coulton and The Arrogant Worms.
For the treatment, I have several ideas based around the idea of showing lyrics on screen in a similar to way to the 'music video' for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and later videos (see above). The reason for this is because the song has a reputation for having lyrics that are random and consequently hard to remember. Some variations of this idea could be to:

• Hold up cards with individual words on it to form the lyrics when hold up in time with the music like in the music video "Subterranean Homesick Blues" pictured on the top.
• Lots of people holding up individual coloured squares of card to form letters (see below for example) like in the music video for "This Too Shall Pass" pictured in the middle.

• Editing together several videos together in a grid to make a mosaic that spells out letters or words like in MysteryGuitarMan's video for "Serfs Are On Their Way" pictured on the bottom.
• Another idea that I had was based around the delivery of the lyrics and how choppy the song sounds as a result. Having seen the "PEN Story" advert (see below) and having made a short film like this; I think it would be entirely possible to have elements of stop motion animation in the music video. One specific idea was to have band members hold up changing pictures of other members to transition between them. My tutorial on doing this and a test shoot / edit can be found here.