Treatment

My chosen song, the Price of Glory is an anti-war song, looking at the lyrics nothing about the war is glamourized, the verses are very graphic, they paint a picture of a fight. The first line “standing on the field of valour” could be either taken in a literal sense or as a dwelling on an event that has already happened. I decided to do my music video as the latter, so the verses that describe a scene are a memory , the chorus on the other hand follow my idea of a memory better because it looks like hindsight.

The music video will feature two teams of army cadets doing a training simulation in a forest; the leader of the first team will be the lead singer; however it is not the cadet version of him that will be singing it will be a version of him that is older, a full soldier. I have decided to do this because I have taken the memory approach to the song and decided that the lead singer will be looking back on his life, how he reached that moment on the battlefield which he is singing about. This means that soldier version of him will be like a ghost in the training scenes and will not be noticed by his younger self or any of the other performers in the scenes (aka: his memory). The band will perform in a graveyard; this will give the audience the knowledge that the soldier is dead, so the training scene will actually be seen more like his life flashing before his eyes. I decided that a narrative and performance based song will work best because the genre is metal/rock and one of the main ideas of metal is a performance-based video while anti-war songs generally have narratives to support the lyrics.

The target audience is males and females between the ages of 16 and 28, the age at which most people would join the army; the actors in my narrative will also be this age, between 17 and 18. This is because the song is more about looking back on a battle and it has the feel of a person telling a story to others to prepare them. The song is very graphic and I think that this is why it should be targeted as younger people because they are the ones that are going to be living it if they join the army or we have another world war. Young adults are the ones that will be in charge of the world within the next 20 years and will be the ones who have to deal with a war if it happens. The metal/rock genre aspect of the song will also appeal to young adult audiences as it is more targeted at rebellious people who are generally adolescent.

The locations are just the forest and graveyard; I will use natural lighting because it will give more realism to the narrative and performance. The training scenes in the forest are meant to be about giving army cadets a taste of real life situations they might get in so I think using the natural light and shadows of the forest would look more realistic and give the audience a better feel for the mise-en-scene and make them feel more included, I will also do this by doing some POV shots and having the lead singer sing directly at the camera most of the time, while at other times he will be watching the memory of himself training. The band performing at the graveyard will also have natural lighting, I intend to do the filming during the morning when the light is brightest so it will contrast with the forest scenes, the graveyard scene will also have mourners in the background and they will play a part near the end of the song which makes the band a part of the narrative just before the song finishes.