Intertextual references

Although when planning our music video we had no intentions of explicitly referencing a specific text heavily throughout, it is unquestionable that our video was influenced by various texts in theme and tone more than anything. In this way, we have subtly referenced certain concepts and structures, not necessarily with the clear intention to do so from the outset of the planning of the narrative, mise en scene and editing, but rather have injected these influences in a more organic way.

'Tyler Durden' - 'The Narrator' 

There were, however, specific themes we wanted to explore from the offset which were heavily influenced by other texts, such as the pivotal device of duality running throughout our production, and the inner struggle of one characters identity and morality, even portrayed by two separate characters representing two parts of one characters psyche. A text which i feel had a strong influence on this portrayal is David Finchers 1999 film 'Fight club' in which the unnamed protagonist meets 'Tyler Durden', a soap salesman who drives his life to ruin and completely disenfranchises him, effectively removing him from society and normalcy and who we later learn is in fact an internal projection of the narrators identity, and for the audience has been a visual representation of the characters psyche and constructed hypothetical personality. I found this visual representation effective and relatively simple to implement into our production, using the concept that two separate characters could be used metaphorically in order to portray two sides of one characters personality, and could be understood in this way by conveying their differences through their costumes, behaviour and mannerisms. Not only this but even more subtle concepts such as the shapes used and design of the characters to further emphasise a juxtaposition, for instance in 'Fight Club' 'The Narrator' has a relatively circular, formal and neutral design, whereas 'Tyler' has wild spiky hair, and wears ridiculous and flamboyant costumes. we were specifically representing two polarised opposites, which  made the visual representation easier to convey to our audience through the use of juxtaposition, hence the characters 'H' and 'V' who are binary opposites in their mise en scene and behaviour. A more classic portrayal of this structure of duality is 'The strange case of Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde' with a heavier emphasis on the morality of the dual representations, and struggle of 'good' vs 'evil', which i feel we implemented in our video through our use of Gothic imagery within the design of the character 'V', however chose to not stress this theme to the point of confusing the tone and draining the humour from our production, and so we chose to more subtly reference this construction. We felt it was more important to simply convey the connotations and clearly construct the metaphor for the audience rather than to take a concept like morality so bluntly and literally.

A more specific and intentional reference we made was a nod to cheap B-movie practical effects, seen at the climax of our fight scene where a melon was used in place of a head being crushed, in an almost intentionally obvious way, firstly to reassure the audience of the tone of the video and not suddenly introduce a dark realism into our relatively light hearted narrative, but also to reinforce the ironic and juvenile tone of our production with a slapstick-esque segment. We were influenced to introduce this technique by other videos of similar genres like 'Mac Demarco's 'Passing out Pieces' which featured a similar scene which, with quick cutting, created a comedic yet memorable peak in the narrative.