THE PITCH

The song presented is a melodic feel good jazz inspired hip hop song from young rapper Quest and producer Thelonious with a quick pace witty lyrics and nostalgic sampling.

The mood of song takes you back to memorable moments in music without being a full-blown history lesson; easing in listener as the song proceeds

We feel with the direction of the video should keep up with the tone mood of the song, making it almost visually nostalgic without being overdone; the style of the beat is reminiscent of a classic J-dilla song from the mid 90’s. Listening to the track you can hear classic piano sampling colliding audibly with a 60 – 90 bpm

The song builds up gradually with lyrical content and then occasionally interjects with a old jazz sample which could be reflected in the visuals

In terms of directive styling we researched the work of Quest’s past videos and also the work of new creative directing teams like “creative control” While at the same time looking at concepts presented by other directors like Sanaa Hamri and BLKDMNDS. We enjoyed the pacing and styling of their videos and wish to implicate this in our videos.

We noticed in these videos the director used quick paced edits and a number of focusing and lighting techniques which the direction we’d like to take our video in.

We want to give the Artist, Quest a clear-cut image of a young witty rapper who’s creative and artistic direction coincides with his the direction of music when it comes to his styling and direction of his video.

For this video we want address the topics raised in to the video by the artist via video projection on to the artist him self as he narrates this through the lyrics. We plan to shoot a video in the style of the directors referenced and then project the video on to the artist and rerecord, similar to the techniques used by the band THE XX on the song Crystallized. We’ll include quirky costume changes and clever props that will help communicate things sighted in the lyrics.

The song opens up with a skipping sample and a Mario sound effect, we want to reference this visually On the projection we have an short clip of The video game character Mario jumping into a pipe Following this, the main star of the video jumps up into the scene as if he is emerging from the Mario pipe.

Once this is over, the performance beings; introducing the concept of video. A projection is played on to the stars face as he beings to narrate the lyrics of the song, also we’ll introduce the props for example

“hello my ladies” – The artist would pull out a Barbie doll and throw it away before pulling out a ken doll on the line “hello my fellas” . This would act as an intertextual reference to the rap stars Nikki Minaj and Drake and their Barbie and Ken like personification. For references to money we’d use monopoly money and make it rain down from the sky like the typical convention of many Hip Hop videos; while the rapper continues to narrate and perform, we’ll more visual representations of his lyrics on the project while at the same time allowing him to interact with the things projected. In between verses costume changes will occur

In verse one – The artist talks about him self and how cool he is so we want to reflect this in his costume; dressing him in key brand names that are considered “cool” in hip hop media

In verse two – the artist talks about money and how much he wants to get in his career; so to help reflect this we plan to dress him in more formal attire. Blazer, white shirt maybe even a red bow tie.

In verse three – he talks about the state of hip-hop, and how he feels about it so we considered in old school hip hop attire from the early 90’s

Both videos will be filmed on a Cannon 500D and edited on Imovie and Final Cut pro