Dry the River- Video breakdown

Today in class we listened to the song, "No Rest" by Dry the River and had to write down notes on how we imagined the video would like as well as the genre, and whether we thought it was by a band or a solo artist. In groups we swapped our notes around and together came up with a basic idea for a video narrative that could be paired up with the song.

We came up with a narrative idea that centers around the lyrics "I used to be a King" and "I loved you". And we thought it would make sense for the narrative of the video to follow a King and his fall from power and perhaps the loss of someone he loved. This both fits with those lyrics and pieces together a coherent plot for a video.

The props and setting for this video idea would be medieval and would have lots of costumes to make the setting more apparent or exaggerated. Due to the somewhat slow pace of the video we thought it would be appropriate for the video to have a mixture of slow moving shots as well as stationary shots. I had the thought that it would make sense to have several outdoor landscape shots, setting the tone and theme of the video.

This idea for the video would be much more narrative focused but would have some performance. How I thought the performance would work for this video would be to have the characters in the narrative singing the lyrics, as opposed to cutting away to the band performing the song on a stage or something similar to that.

After that we watched the actual video to compare our discussed ideas to the actual video and found that it was quite different. The official video was much less narrative driven than ours and had a very big emphasis on star image, showing the band members prominently throughout the video. This exercise showed how lots of different ideas for a the same song are possible and that the song doesn't limit the video that can be made for it.