The music video for Avenged Sevenfold's song "Nightmare" will include both performance and narrative elements. It will feature a creature causing people nightmares and stealing their souls. Scenes will switch between animation and live footage to illustrate lyrics. Most of the video will take place in a dark forest to convey a sense of isolation and fear.

1. 6400800-457200Background of the song<br />‘Nightmare’ is a heavy metal song written by Avenged Sevenfold. It was on the band’s fifth studio album and their first without drummer James ‘The Rev’ Sullivan due to his death on the 28th December 2009. The song is meant as a tribute of sorts to him and the album had his backing vocals left in for the same purpose. It was released on The song was released digitally on May 18 and 21, 2010 on the US and worldwide, respectively, on iTunes as well as an animated lyric video on YouTube, which received over 275,000 plays in 24 hours. It reached #1 in both the UK and US on the iTunes rock chart, #2 on the UK Rock Chart and #51 on the UK Singles Chart.<br />The Music Video<br />66294001006475-2286001006475Our music video is going to be both performance and narrative based as we are going to have a creature causing many people nightmares that it uses to steal their souls for its own use. We are not going to show a drummer in the video as the official video for the song doesn’t show the drummer and we feel we should keep the same. We are also going to recreate a photo of vocalist M. Shadows in which he has his arms spread wide with the band’s iconic logo the Deathbat behind him to make it look like he has wings under his arms. During the performance parts of our video we are going to use fast erratic movements for the camera movement whilst using medium shots and close ups to depict the band. During the narrative parts of the video we are going to use a wide variety of shots depending on what is needed at the time. We also intend to use the program Miku Miku Dance which is meant to create animated dance videos however as the characters can be fully manipulated so we could make them do whatever we want meaning we could use it for either the performance or narrative.<br />We want to make the video have a creepy feel as we are going to be making nightmares part of the narrative and we want them to scare people in the same way their own nightmares do. We are going to achieve these by appealing to the audience’s phobias and by using dark colours and plain masks on the creature and other performers. We feel that this will add to the creepy feeling, as a plain white expressionless face is quite scary. The reason we are doing this is because the name of the song is ‘Nightmare’ so we thought it would be a good idea to use this as the frame for our narrative. <br />-228600378460A scene, which we have thought about in a lot of detail, is the switching from animation to real life footage. The reason we have done this is because this is to kind of illustrate the lyrics of the song. Which in the first part of the song when the vocals kick in the singers say ‘Now your nightmare comes to life.’ We thought this would be an interesting feature of the song and appeal to the audience. When the drums kick in we are planning on matching the camera cuts or the performance to them (thought beat).<br />The location of our video is mostly going to occur in a dark forest, this links in with idea of nightmares as in horror films this is usually a convention. Forests have the feeling of seclusion, no escapes and loneliness. We will be filming this in Crimdon Dene Park this is a local forest. <br />3771900291465Our costumes during the band performance of the song will be dark jeans and black t-shirts possibly band merchandise. This is a common feature for bands of our chosen genre. <br />