The Idea Generator

 Coming Up With an Idea

So in a previous post I was talking about planning stages and one of them was the biggun, coming up with an idea. Since I didn't cover this in enough or decent detail in that post here's full stage planning of the video that got turned out at the end of this process.

Looking back at that post in particular there was a few ideas that were brought up. Mainly the initial one which was producing a video to the song 'Shoot To Thrill' by ACDC and this was a good idea as there wasn't technically a current or existing official video for the song to work alongside it meaning that whatever ideas I came up with for this would be their own.

Obviously the first thought is to do something big dumb and crazy as that's what would be good and generally considered the norm for a video like this as it plays well into the idea of the song itself, but that wasn't the angle that I wanted, I wanted something unique and different to work alongside the lyrics and maybe not create a master piece but somethig
n that was fun for the viewer. To that end I ended up participating in a focus group in order to get a wider range of opinions from a bigger body rather thna my own brain.

I collaborated with other craetors who were working in a similar field to me and were bouncing ideas off of one another to get the crowd reactions and get the best possible outcome for our projects, when I presented my mood-board to the group at large and what my thoughts were based off other sources from around the same area as examples and with what I had planned originally for a back-up should the main faulter.

A lot of really great ideas came from this session, my new idea came from a spur of the moment decision made at 3AM where the back-up and primary ideas got scrapped due to a number of reasons. The main main one being a complete lacking of application or resources in order to achieve the best effect possible for the chosen song, the continegncy/back-up plan for the video wasn't particularly great either as it wasn't fully fleshed out and was a mess of ideas that weren't fully coherent.

Upon realising this and other short-comings of the idea due to limited resources and timings I couldn't make it so I made the choice to change track and video idea, but I took some feedback that was brought up from that focus group and from it I got the main idea that I have been working with.

The contingency plan was to make a live action version of the video, so it would still be a remake of sorts but the drive behind was to incorporate some of the original music video as well as remake some more of the other elements in order to achieve a great effect. Using this would also help to achieve my goal of making it appear to be a homemade video in the style of a VHS tape as live-action is typical of this method of video production and as such there comes certain conventions, like there has to be noise on the screen and slightly diluted colours.

I was listening to 'Tribute' by Tenacious D and a load of ideas came through my head and I began to wirte out and think about what I could do with this and I settled on the idea to remake the original video of the song but with a home film appela to it while keeping the idea of the original cheesy humourus visuals to go with the song.

So that's the full length story of how I went from an original plan of using ACDC to off piece cheesy home movie humour within Tenacious D.