Ariel Griffiths AND207 Blog

The Music Video tells a story of a young couple becoming parents through surrogacy. As such there are three main characters in this Story, The Mother, The Father and the Child The Mother: The mother character has the most on-screen time and is considered the closest relation to the child, along with the rest of the world, the character is designed in monochrome. Along the story, I want the Mother to age considerably. The Father: Of the three important characters, The father has the least screen time and is going to be killed off mid-story. Again, the character is in monochrome, and I want the character to have a cool and almost dis-interested feel. The Child: Like the mother, I want the Child to age considerably through the move, starting as a baby, just born, to a young woman leaving for university by the end. Unlike the rest of the world, the child is going to be in full colour.

Combining my inspirations of 13 Reasons Why and This is Us, I envisioned a TV show that featured a anthology of stories involving various persons dealing with a breakdown in their life, and I want my Sequence to envision that.

The Father was the first character I designed, unlike the other characters, I didn't take aging into consideration as he is going to die mid-way. His overall look was inspired by Youtube Singers Landon Austin and Tyler Ward.   Here's the finished Character Turnaround for the Father.         

The Mother is the most central character in the video and ages the most throughout, my main inspiration for this character were chef Claire Saffitz and the female protagonist from Disney's Paperman    I wanted to add a signature to my characters make-up so I took influence from my own choice of eyeliner, which in turn is inspired by singer Chrissy Costanza   As I started the design for this character very early in development, the character went through numerous changes while I was trying to decide the overall character style for the video.         Finally I settled on this as the final design         

The Child character presents the most changing character throughout the video and thus I need to design the character throughout different stages of her life. For her baby and toddler ages I was inspired by Riley from the Pixar film Inside Out.   For her grown up design I was inspired by Elsa from the film Frozen, the singer of the piece Adeline Hill and a bit of myself in there as well.    

As I want my Title sequence to accompany an anthology style TV Show, I need the music video to represent a number of stories coming together, as such I've designed a number of scenes to fit. Below are a few examples

My choice of Music is from an Atlanta, Georgia based singer called Adeline Hill The song is quite literal, telling the story from first person of the singer growing up, from birth, to leaving home. The song itself is 4:30 minutes long, so I've decided to remove the second verse and chorus, to bring the video down to a reasonable 3 minutes.

For the music video I need to find influences for the story and the cinematography. For the story, I want to follow the overall story of the song, the story of a little girl who grows up. A music video I've found that has influenced the way time passes in the space of three minutes is Kelsea Ballerini's "Legends". For the art style, I wanted to convey the metaphor of the child being the colour of the parents life, and was inspired by the Disney short "Paperman"