Stromae’s Influence on Our Music Video

(Papaoutai)

For this shot we initially was going to have an extreme close-up of my eyes and then zoom out to reveal me frozen and seated next to the mannequin. However, when shooting the extreme close-up we found it looked better if I held the camera towards my own face when trying to obtain the extreme close-up of my eyes. So in editing we changed it to a Super Imposition shot of my eyes going left and right and me smiling seated outside. We also added a tea cup as a prop in this shot as it would make the shot look more surreal than just sitting their smiling with my legs crossed. This choice of prop was also influenced by the Mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

I am frozen at the start to mirror Stromae in his Papoutai music video, and we have the mannequin sitting next to me to add more surrealism to the shot once we’ve completely zoomed out, which was also an idea that came about after watching Stromae’s Papoutai.

These are extra frozen shots we added to our music video after being influenced by Stromae’s music video. We have extreme close-ups of my eyes looking left and right whilst I’m frozen and then cutting to a zoom out shot of me holding a spoon to the bowl of Lego which is an original surreal object/prop/image we created and the famous melted clock on the left hand side of the table.

In Stromae’s music video there are some shots at the beginning including TV snow on a television screen and the mannequin of Stromae is seated on the sofa but is not looking at the television, and even if he was the young boy in the video blocks what would have been his view of the television (as seen in the picture on the bottom left hand side.) So we thought we’d have a shot of TV snow between the shot of me sitting down on the sofa to change the channel and the cat seated with the mannequin. We wanted to add these two different shots to show movement of the mannequin by changing her position but needed a shot between to show time has passed. Also instead of just having TV snow we chose to have me watch a shot of the cat in Alice in Wonderland disappearing in quite a surreal way, as we aren’t trying to copy Stromae’s video, we have just been inspired by it and our main focus is Surrealism.

In Stromae’s music video the mannequin does a lot of naturalistic things despite being a mannequin. Such as having a shower and holding a water hose to water the plants in the garden. This influenced our ideas of what we’d use the mannequin for in our music video , such as having the mannequin crying whilst lying down in bed and holding a spoon in her hand at a dining table with a bowl and cup of drink in front of her as though she’s human. Overall Stromae’s creative ideas and camera shots throughout his music video really helped us develop the surrealism in our music video.