Hard Life: Nightmares- Student music video (2020)

As part of my creative media studies at college, I was tasked to create a music video for whatever song I wanted. As this project was for purely educational purposes, we didn't have to worry about copyright. Hard Life (formally known as Easy Life) is one of my favourite bands, my brother introduced me to their music and I feel like I connect to their songs on such a deep level. The songs give me a feeling of lost nostalgia that's now been found. Their song 'Nightmares' is one of their more popular ones and is one of my favourites. The lyrics of the song culminate into themes of insomnia, anxiety, and peer pressure. The context of the lyrics combined with the up-beat nature of the melody, makes the whole song a oxymoronic metaphor of what it's about. It's sinister meaning hiding within the catchy melody, really wanted to make me visualise all of this by creating a music video that's designed to look like one continuous shot, with hidden cuts. It follows a character (portrayed by myself) living in a nightmare or a heightened version of reality (it's up to your interpretation). He's haunted by his inner demons (insomnia, anxiety, and peer pressure) that's represented by the occasional possession of an evil version of himself. The oner illusion of the whole music video, makes you the viewer, forced to be on this journey with him, and it also reflects how the inner demons of this character follows him everywhere he goes. The aspect ratio that the music video is presented in is 4:3, which helps to create a vintage feel to it (along with the film grain), and it also helps to communicate the claustrophobic and trapped nature of the character. As the song progresses, our character seems to just accept the the fact that his demons are taking him over, by letting the evil version take control of his body by dancing to lure himself further into a deeper possession. This along with the daylight setting of the majority of the music video, and the bright pink hoody that my character wears, captures the happy nature of the melody. Still till this day, it's one of the projects I'm most proud of and while it's not perfect due to it having some technical problems (I was and still am learning as a filmmaker), overall I feel like I communicated and created my exact vision for the music video to serve one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands.