Music is one of my biggest interests and it is something that both me and my girlfriend share and enjoy. Concerts are a big part of our life. For my final project I wanted to take my love of music and use it to tell a story. In my opinion music already tells its own story. It can tell an actual story, like the story of the Battle of New Orleans or it can be more vague and tell a story about the person who wrote the song and how they felt at the time. Combine a song with a video for a music video and *boom* you’ve got yourself a whole new story to see.

I’m a big fan of the band Fair to Midland and had recently seen them in concert. Their music video for Dance of the Manatee is one of the quirkiest music videos I’ve ever seen. It also manages to tell the story of a giant who helps these people move from their desolate home to a more plentiful area. The giant puts himself at great risk to help them and to repay the giant they start to destroy the area they have moved into. The giant is outraged and falls, cracking the land and leaving them stranded on this area that they slowly destroy. By itself that’s a nice little story about a giant and some evil people. Fair to Midland came out with another video with them just sitting in a room singing, playing instruments and occasionally smashing a piano with a sledge hammer. This can tell another story but it was a pretty lazy story in my opinion. It’s the story of someone that really hates a piano.

Anyway I decided that I should take one of Fair to Midlands songs and do my own music video for it or just a story board. It was a terrible, terrible idea that I should never have done because my prefectionistism kicked in and made it difficult to do much with. The song that I chose to try and story board was the Walls of Jericho.

It’s a very moving song for me and I had a whole little story worked up in my head for months. I’m extremely bad with taking what’s in my head and being able to transport it onto paper in a way that doesn’t make me delete everything right away. So I had a bunch of little doodles done for the project to start with as a road map for what I would later construct.

So those were a few of the story board rough drafts that I drew that I would later use to fill in for a very artsy storyboard that tells a story. The story would have involved a man who feels very frustrated at the world and feels that everything is going to end and sees misery in the world instead of joy. If the storyboard worked better it would have shown a transition as the man walked by, such as the car turning into a tank with every step he takes past the car and the young children turn from happy playing kids into skeletons. It would have given the story the view that the young man held. In contrast to that there would also be a girl who walked around and made the world look better. They would meet briefly, she’d throw a smile his way and suddenly he’d realize that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all. Pretty standard story but whatever. That’s the feeling I got when I listened to the music and that’s the story I would have wanted to tell.

I was able to take care of a few of the scenes but they ended up taking a lot of time to get just how I wanted and even then I was like meh.

This image would have been the first scene that he saw upon waking up in the morning.

This image would have been a scene from him walking outside. During all his story views the world would have had a reddish tinge to it. As he walked away from the house it would have collapsed into rubble.

Anyway that was it, can’t say I was happy with the outcome but I should have picked something more obtainable given the amount of time left this semester and everything else I had to do.