My Idea

I thought about making a music video for the song "xanny". At the time when I had this idea, the song didn't have a music video. However, during my planning process, Billie announced that she is going to release a music video for the song. On the 5th of December 2019, the "xanny" music video was released.

For my video, I decided to make it a concept based on the main character, who will be playing Billie, feeling isolated at a party while everyone is drinking, smoking and doing drugs. She is the only sober one, watching everyone slowly hurt themselves. This is how I interpreted the song. Though Billie's video for "xanny" is mainly based on the idea of cigarettes, I interpreted it as something deeper, hence why I thought of including more substances such as alcohol, cocaine (powdered sugar) and marijuana (cigarettes wrapped in rolling paper).

Similar to Billie, I decided to not go with the generic genre conventions of typical pop music, which has been researched previously. Billie's latest music videos no longer follow these genre conventions. Her older music videos such as "watch" or "bellyache" are more similar to the typical pop music videos. Her newer music videos however, such as "bury a friend", "all the good girls go to hell" and "everything i wanted" are quite dark, and attempt to get a message across. This is what I thought of doing with my music video which doesn't follow generic pop music video conventions and it is trying to get a message across.

In the video, the main character has been told to not react to any of the event happening around her. This is a very common thing in Billie Eilish's music videos. Especially evident in her video, "everything i wanted" and "all the good girls go to hell". In both those music videos, Billie has a straight face which is held onto throughout the entire span of the video. The main character maintaining a deadpan expression also emphasises the fact that she feels isolated, while people are too intoxicated to realise how she is feeling and fail to notice her while they are partying.

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I thought it would be a good idea to film my whole music video as a single continuous shot, thinking it would be the best idea to match the slow pace of the song. Though I was aware that it would be difficult to do, I still was very optimistic about the idea and felt that it would work out. After filming it twice, I realised that I had to pay attention to every detail and that if one part goes wrong the whole thing has to be repeated. As expected, during the recording, I missed a few factors that made the whole video unusable.

In the first recording, we started recording very late in the day, and by the time we had to record the outdoor part of the video, it was already dark. I realised that my phone, iPhone X, wasn't too good at recording in the dark and using lights made it seem extremely fake. This was a bit of an inconvenience considering most parties take place late afternoon, when the sun has already set.

Despite this, for my second attempt, I recorded earlier in the day, so that even if the recording went wrong in some parts, I still had light outside to make the recordings turn out better. Here is the second attempt:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/3a936c_6551123ac9984bcab196e9f7ce7b9ee8/480p/mp4/file.mp4

Even though, the recording quality this time was better, something was not feeling right. In my opinion, the party scene seemed slightly unrealistic. The party felt like it was taking place midday which doesn't allow me to set the party scene properly. I also had to re-use some actors, which also made the end result unsatisfactory.

After the two failed attempts, I decided that maybe using cuts would be the better option. Initially I was afraid that the use of cuts would make the video feel faster than the song itself. However, after careful planning, I realised that if the cuts are used properly and in the right place in the song, it could turn out even better than my original plan.