Music and Moving Image

For this project, we are required to create a music video for one of the two given pieces of music, and I choose Bye Bye Blues because I think this piece is more dynamic and open to interpretation. In class, we explored the concept of the inempathetic use of music, which is to sharpen the emotions expressed through visual language by intentionally setting up a contrast between the image and the music. As Bye Bye Blues is an exceptionally jubilant music piece, I wanted to experiment with its collision with some more distressing images. I chose the movie Midsommar as my inspiration and the source of most of my visual materials because it has both some of the most festival scenes that fit seamlessly with the cheerful chord of Bye Bye Blues, and shots of inhumane killing rituals that are both gruesome and weirdly aesthetic.

A Standard Dream

I settled on the theme of my music video as "dream" upon choosing the movie. In our daily conversations, the meaning of dreams is always extended to carry either a good or bad meaning; In good dreams, our secret wishes are realized despite the difficulties that are impossible to bypass under logistic settings, while in bad ones everything tends to go against our wishes. However, to me dream is always too abstract to be categorized; my own will is never a part of it as it is always so disorganized and bizarre, yet I'm always unconscious of the chaos so that I never conjure the will to steer it to the right track. This vague perception of things going against your logic and the incapability of figuring out what exactly is going wrong is, this detachment from reality and all the emotions you connect with reality, always gives me goosebumps. The contrast between the gruesome rituals and the exquisite camera language in Midsommar reminds me of this subtle feeling, and I plan to use this music video to pick out this feeling and pass it down to the viewer. In the hope of achieving this, I made the images shifting back and forth between scenes encircling the main character from Midsommar and random clips that I downloaded from Internet Archive to show the chaotic nature of illusions, and cut off the music during its climax to show the disconnection of dreams.