In this post me and my partner will talk about how we put together the script for our music video and how the whole process went, and honestly it was a lot more back and forth than i expected since we had a pretty clear idea of the story we wanted to tell but actually sitting down and mapping it out shot by shot to a song with a fixed runtime is a different thing entirely.

The song we chose is Stay High by Tove Lo and the story we decided on follows a guy who goes out to the club to get drunk and forget his ex, which ironically just makes him remember her more, and by the end he stumbles out onto the street, runs into her, and they end up arguing which shows that nothing has changed for him and the drinking didn’t help at all, i feel like that arc is a really honest way of showing how unhealthy coping mechanisms work since they don’t actually fix anything they just delay it.

The way me and my partner built the script was by going through the song section by section and figuring out what visual made the most sense for each lyric and each beat, some parts were obvious like the chorus where the flashback kicks in and you see him buying flowers and chocolates for his girlfriend in a POV shot which contrasts really sharply with him being drunk in a bathtub surrounded by bottles, and some parts took a bit more thought like figuring out how to handle the bridge where we switch back and forward between the past and present every time the “ooh ooh ooh” hits which we’re thinking could involve some kind of rotating shot.

The pizza hut scene was something me and my partner came up with pretty spontaneously and i feel like it’s one of the stronger moments in the script since it’s funny but also kind of sad, his girlfriend sees a message from another woman on his phone and mouths “who’s this” and he mouths back “pizza hut” which says a lot about where their relationship is at without needing any actual dialogue, and the outro where she slaps him and leaves using a match cut between the past and present is something we’re both really happy with since it ties both timelines together in a clean way and lands the point that he hasn’t grown at all.

Below you will find the script:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nnZoNT-ifXgRjKg0xAnfYcqXwIeQA7sJ1kMzzK4uD88/htmlview