Recently, we were assigned a genre of music to do a music video on for Media Studies, our's being R&B (rhythm and blues). Of the three songs we had to choose from, my group agreed upon a peculiar sample: C'mon Talk by Bernhoft. We had to act as if this was our brand—our character— and market this music video as if it were our first song. Amongst the current circumstances and limitations we faced, we had to get real strange with our ideas: we decided to brand our musician as an omniscient being who is simulating the music video through artificial intelligence.
The first time we heard the song we thought the file was corrupted, to be honest. The song begins with very harsh auto-tune, becoming more and more glitchy as if it were a broken record until it leads into the main hook. From there on, the song seems to be be relatively normal, however getting pretty repetitive after a while. This gave us the idea that the music video could be a simulation, with the artist attempting to create the perfect music video through artificial intelligence.
Small details throughout the music video would start to suggest that there is something wrong with what is being shown, eventually stacking up to be incredibly noticeable until the simulation collapses on itself and the music video simulation has to be rebooted after the artist inside the video becomes conscious that he is inside a simulation music video (trippy, I know). We would introduce the idea that he is in a simulation with effects such as data-moshing—a technique of damaging video clips to create a glitch effect wherein frames that should change don't. The level of glitchiness would be in relation to how aware the character inside the video is becoming, eventually becoming engulfed by darkness as the environment disappears. Overall, we want to fill our music video with lots of abstraction and experimental effects like these mentioned to create a surreal experience for the audience which will attract them to our artist's brand.
