Development of our narrative

Our narrative started as Jay being a social outcast who's girlfriend, Zoe, is in the 'popular crowd', a group of mean girls who's harsh judgement of people deter her from being herself and showing her affection for Jay in public. He tells her via song that she shouldn't have to wear her 'best fake smile' in order to impress her 'friends' and she should just be herself and forget about them so as to maintain their relationship and end her inner turmoil. However, after reviewing the shots we filmed for this narrative, we didn't think they showed what we wanted them to show well enough due to the poor acting of the popular girls, small range of shots and unintentional cheesy feeling created. We decided not to re-film it and instead changed the narrative as we thought it would be a greater opportunity to get better shots.

This narrative change removed the 'mean girl' plot completely and created a different story where Zoe's boyfriend is a guy called Ben, and Jay is Zoe's friend who can see that she is unhappy in her relationship and wants her to end it. To do this, we had to shoot new scenes with Ben and Zoe together.

We then decided to change the narrative to make it more exciting where Jay and Zoe are in a relationship, and Zoe seeing Ben behind Jay's back. Jay is aware of this, however, and is telling Zoe via song that he wants her to come clean to him and not lie to his face. Although, after reviewing the music video, we realised that we didn't have enough footage to efficiently portray this and so we changed the narrative again to something easier to portray and filmed more shots for it.

This new narrative became Zoe being in a relationship with Ben, but seeing Jay behind Ben's back. Jay can see that Zoe is unhappy in her relationship with Ben as he doesn't pay her much attention, and Jay sings the song for her as a way of telling her to end things completely with Ben as he cares a lot more about her.

However, after looking at the music video and showing it to a focus group, we realised that the narrative was still quite hard to understand as there still weren't enough shots of Ben to demonstrate his role in his and Zoe's relationship. Therefore, we removed all the shots of Ben to eliminate this confusion and changed the narrative to Jay and Zoe thinking about their past relationship together when they used to be happy. This narrative is a lot clearer in the video than previous narratives and although simpler, this simplicity can relate to the indie genre as the narratives of indie videos don't tend to be very convoluted.