Marina and the diamonds Analysis

This video is called Shampain by Marina and the Diamonds.

This official video for Marina's single 'Shampain', taken from her debut album 'The Family Jewels'. 'Shampain' was released on 11th October 2010. The video was directed by Kim Gehri who has recently directed videos for Goldfrapp, Chase & Status, and Wiley Feat. Mark Ronson. The video clip pays tribute to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson's legendary music video for 'Thriller'.

Marina explaining the video " ‘Shampain’ is about the depressing side of getting drunk, the obliteration side of having a good time. This was actually the first co-write that I ever did… It was good to write a simpler pop song because when I write on my own the melodies are all over the place. It was good to do something a little bit lighter, and this probably is my lightest track on a record. It’s about insomnia and the joys of champagne"

Marina Lambrini Diamandis inspired us as she is exactly what we was looking for in a lead singer, her look is very 80s punk rock chick, she has a way of enticing and keeping the attention of the audience and she seems very comfortable on camera which puts the audience at ease. Mariam our decided lead singer for our video looks very similar to Marina, and she is able to be comfortable in the camera similar to Marina.
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In this video there is alot of intertextual references to Micheal Jakcson's legendary 'Thriller' video, Marina and her zombie backing dancers are performing bits of the thriller dance, in a series of cutaways in the video.



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Watching this video closely i noticed that Marina seems to be almost always be alone. In this particular frame using the rule of thirds enabling us to cut the frame into three parts and allowing the audience to find hidden meaning. The first third Marina is squashed into the edge of the frame as if to say she isnt free to do what she wonts , the next third allows the audience to see the emptyness, Marina appears to be lonley. And the last Third Shows one fo the Zombie dancers.
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This is a High angle Close-up Shot, We liked the effect this shot has on the audience, because its very intimate as it allows the emotions of the singer to be seen clearly, we used this same shot in our video, having Marina not look into the camera can show shes disconnected with the audience and she dosent wont the audience to be able to see into the windows of her soul, towards the end of the video this same shot type is used and she then looks right towards the camera it could be to assume something on her has changed that she can share with the audeince. Also we loved her make-up here, its simple but it makes her look like she is glowing.
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This shot really brings out the gothic feel to the video, before this she seemed quite innocent but its as if she has transformed because her make-up has messed up and brightened(lipstick) her hair is unruly and her facial expression is controlling, she is glaring at the audience, this used as a cuteaway for about 5 secs but its very effective.

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This is the last close-up used in the video, this brings you to the first close up, its the same angle and this could be done to show the progression the singer has been through, its where she ended up, in the same position but in a different place. She now looks directly towards the camera, her make-up resembles just waking up from a hang-over. And it losses the gothic feel as you assume it was all a dream


By Evette Anderson-Sampah

8/10/10

We filmed our music video today. Evette and I travelled the night before with my family down to Yatesbury. Unfortunately, Myung and Mariam could make it on the Firday but would travel down by coach the next day. Evatte and I both had an early start the next day, preparing and setting up most of the equipment. We mounted one of the cameras on to tripods and one on to the monopods. Evette sorted out out storyboards and made a scedule of what we were going to do that day. The day was cold and rather grey which made it perfect for the video, as we wanted a dark gloomy feel to it.

5/10/10

We are drawing ever nearer to our film date! The plan is that Evette and I will go up to the my godmother's house on the Friday (8th of Oct) and stay for the whole weekend. Then Myung and Mariam will come up by coach to the house at around 11. Evette and I would have set up the lights and everything else. We have some worries about the limited time that we have but we have planned the day extensively with schedule for the day and storyboards. Now all we have to do is put our storyboard together and create an animatic.

Our Inspiration

One of our biggest inspirations for our 'Raindrops' music video is 'My Immortal' by Evanescence. This music video features a lead female singer, Amy Lee, as do ours. This video greatly deals with the issues of death and the afterlife. In the video the main singer is in a simple white dress to represent purity and simplicity of death and also symbolising the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. As seen before, we bought a simple but beautiful white lace dress. There are many shots we wish to mimic such as:

- Our song also features a piano just like in the 'My Immortal' video.

- A bird’s eye view of the singer laying down and singing, but instead we are having Mariam lying on a bed.



The slight cantered angle of singer Amy Lee. I particularly liked this shot as it looks similar to someone lying in a coffin, which gives the veiwer more hints to the fact that the singer is dead. We have included a similar shot with Mariam lying on the diving board of the pool.

Possible location number 2- Graveyard

I went to this Graveyard in Kingston to take pictures and explore our options of places to film. We will be filiming majority of our footage in Roshi's godmothers house, however we may want to move from indoors, to outdoors. These are some pictures of the graveyard we might also be filming in for some of our outdoor scenes. I think this location is great because it is very spacious and it allows us to experiment with the different shots we will be taking. We are going to film here in the evening in order to bring a haunted atmosphere to our scenes. We will have our character wearing the same costume in both the house and graveyard so that we can link our scenes together without creating any confusion for our audience.

Mariam Nikpour

The Costume

We had a number of different costume ideas, but we mainly wanted a white dress. Here are our intial costume designs:


We were looking around the shops in order to find the perfect dress for our main character to wear whilst we film the music video. We decided to look for a white dress as we thought this would make our main character seem more ghost like and our audience would recognise her as being a frail and lonely.






I tried on three different dresses that we thought would match our characters look. The dress we chose was the white lace dress (number 2).

27/10/10

-Here Evette edited our recorded diary of our shopping trip (Music = Bluey Robinson - give me a sign)

Today we decided to go shopping to buy Mariam's costume as well as the props we needed. We met up at lunchtime in Kingston . The we proceeded to look around different shops like Top Shop and H&M. After almost an hour of hunting around and trying on a number of different dresses we found the perfect one. We then went to a party shop to buy two black roses and two packets of fake cobwebs.



While we were looking around the shops, we discussed whether or not to hire a fog machine. We know that it would make our graveyard/ outdoors scene look great but the prices we found were unbelievable. So after much deliberation we finally ,and painfully, decided that the fog machine idea would be given the boot! The overall day was a success.