Pretty When You Cry
Music has always been my escape from reality. I like to plot different scenarios for every song in my playlist. I often create false realities and transcend into them as I daydream. It might sound awkward, but I usually seek love and care from these fantasies that I lack in my daily life. I sometimes think that I do not belong to this period of time, and music really helps me to travel back to the 1960s California, where I truly belong. I have always been amazed by the glamour of 60s Hollywood. Also, California with the shining sun and even brighter movie stars is another obsession of mine.
Today, the only artist who can truly call back this desirable era is no other than a fellow New Yorker the infamous Lana Del Rey. Other than her amazing vocals I truly worship her level of artistry and originality. She usually reflects the themes of sadness, tragic romance, glamour, and melancholia. I believe that we can take a break from our “perfect” life and feel blue every once in a while. With her angelic vocals and depressing lyrics, she puts me in a coma where I can be my own depressed but equally glamorous self. When I figured out that we can film our own music videos I immediately decided to film a music video for her song “Pretty When You Cry” which is a part of her album “Ultraviolence.”From my perspective, this song is an anthem for toxic relationships and heartbreaks which separates this piece from the popular culture.
I imagined this music video as a group of video clips that shows fighting couples in an overly dramatic way. My initial thought was to film my sister posing in a depressive way while projecting different photos on to her. For these scenes, I had to create a totally different slideshow that consists of vintage nature photographs combined with stock video clips of a fireplace. I developed it on PermierPro and exported it. Then, by using a portable projector of mine I projected the slideshow onto her. We have filmed different shots in this way but soon we realized that it will be a bit monotone if we decide to craft the whole video this way.
As a result of our enlightenment, I decided to search for stock video footage. After a few hours of searching, I came across a website that provides the kind of footage which I was seeking to find. Here I downloaded a couple of video clips of couples fighting. After making a few modifications to them I combined these videos with the ones I shot. However, even this collection was not enough to cover the whole song so I shortened the song to only 2 minutes. This way I had a chance to come up with a more dramatic and energetic video.
The final touch was the coloring of the video. After debating for hours, I decided to make this whole video black and white. This decision made this video appear more vintage and glamourous than it actually is. Also, the original cover of the album “Ultraviolence” is black and white too. In this way, I connected my video to its original theme by still making some creative decisions.
