Comparing our video to Colbie Caillat

Colbie Caillat blurs the lines between reality and dreams in her video 'Brighter Than The Sun'. Her bedroom becomes a grassy field which shows how she trying to say that the relationship is brighter than the sun. This could also mean that she is trying to say that the love she has for the guy can out last nature which is why everything becomes overgrown with nature. Our video shows the hidden desires of the younger sister and like in Caillat's video, it is shown in her dreams.

In her video 'I Do' it shows lots of close-ups of her singing the song, this is because the song is more personal and is about realistic things. Instead of the video being brightly coloured and have elements of fantasy it remains dull in colours and lighting and focuses more on her singing and playing the guitar, this is like our video which for the majority of it is in black and white so the audience focuses on what is happening. Also the background is blurred making the audience focus on her even more, we tried to blur the background in our video but we were unsuccessful.

Comparing our video to Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has made many music video's for her songs, so naturally we used her video's as inspiration. Taylor Swift's video to We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together features Taylor in her pyjamas at home, we have also used this as the scene we filmed in the bedroom has the sisters in their pyjamas too. However unlike ours Taylor wears bright colours and the room behind her is also bright for example the bright red cusion and bright blue chair. Taylor is also promoting her album 'Red' which this song is featured on, as the bright red lipstick has been a trademark for the promotional sale of the album. We aren't promoting an album in our video so we have no need to do this.

Taylor also uses elements of the abstract in We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together as her band are wearing fur suits and at the end of the video there is a knitted bird, this makes the video funnier to watch and makes the audience duoble-take at the unusual clothing choice. The fur suits also have nothing to do in relation to the video - it's almost contradictory - in our video we also have contradicting video and lyrics coralation as the song is about being safe but safety and happiness is just a dream to the sisters.

Taylor also plays around with dreams in her song 'Picture To Burn'. She sees her ex-boyfriend with another girl who is driving his truck, he never let Taylor drive it whe they were dating. This trigures a dream sequence in which Taylor dreams of trashing his apartment in revenge. Although in our video the topic is different, there is a dream sequence where the sisters run away.

The Techniques Used in our Video

In our video we use flashbacks when the sisters are remembering the good they used to have with their parents. A film that uses flashbacks is Titanic (1997), the majority of this film is flashback as the older Rose (Gloria Stuart) remembers what happened on the ship when she was younger (played by Kate Winslet) with Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). This is similar to our flashbacks as they are both reminiscing about a better past were they had fun, however ours is a more family based flashback whereas Titanic is about love.

We also used green screen in our video to use the sunset/rise and Libby sleeping over Bethan lip-syncing. Alice in Wonderland (2010) uses green screening to have the Utopian feel to Wonderland. Most of the sets were done via green screen to add to the characters and make everything bigger e.g.when Alice drinks the shrinking potion she remains tiny until given the sizing potion so everything needs to be bigger.

In our video we also exaggerate the colour of our flashbacks to differentiate between past and present. In the Wizard of Oz (1939) they use exaggerated colour throughout Oz, the main colour is on the yellow brick road which stands out, another example of this is the Emerald City which is only green. This is to differentiate between Kansas and Oz which is what are doing in ours. 

Research Into Films about Dreams and Reality

In our video we play around with dreams and reality. In our video their is a sequence in which the sisters run away, we later decided to have it as though the youngest sister was dreaming of running away and having her 'happily ever after', then she wakes up and she is faced with the reality of her life, the arguing parents.

 

The film Inception (2010) also plays around with dreams and reality. The main character Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled theif who steals secrets from peoples dreams. This is the opposite of what we are doing with our vdeo but is shows how the line between dreams and reality can become distorted and surreal. It also shows the state of the mind when certain events happen.

 

Another film called The Descent (2005) features a dream sequence that is like ours. The main character Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) dreams of escaping the cave which she is trapped inside with some monsters. The dream sequence shows her escaping safe and sound and as the audience you feel that she has escaped because we don't know its a dream yet. However as she nears her car she see her dead child and husband who had a tragic accident in another mountaineering expedition after this discovery she wakes up and we realise that she hasn't escaped at all and is still trapped with the creatures that killed her friends.

This scene resembles ours as it is a dream sequence which features an escape and a false sense of security only to wake up and find that everything is still the same.