This is not your average music video.

This is a story of female power and unity. A story of losing yourself and the support that guides you back. It is the interwoven connection that sparks the magic of womanhood.

This is big femme energy.

This is slick.

This is theatrical.

STYLE

A Sixties Witchcraft Musical

Production design and characters of 60s/70s sexploitation films (drawing heavily on the modern take on the genre: The Love Witch)

Treated as a number in a musical. Realism gently choreographed

Shot and edited with a touch of Edgar Wright. The action feels continuous although time is contracted. Smooth camera movement following our characters, match cuts, cutting on action, whip pan transitions. All working to compress time while maintaining one flowing thread we are following.

THE LOVESICK WITCH

and her coven

Production Design

For the setting; Think basically a really big house where witches live - ideally older looking. We only see one interior space at a time. Mostly domestic spaces and the off-beat attic.

We can use a bunch of different actual locations and use carefully planned transitions to cut between locations. This way we can make the most of existing cool production design, and just add to it, rather than having to build up the art department  from scratch.

Lighting starts more neutral/light with a colour palette of pinks, blues and gold coming through in the production design… as the story unfolds it gets darker and darker, light sources start to be an otherworldly pink and blue, the saturation of the colours becomes more intense. 

The production design of locations, props, hair, make up, costume should be the intersection of; 60s/70s retro, sexy sexploitation and witchcraft.  However, this isn’t set in a specific time period. Like The Love Witch it is era-ambiguous.

Harmless Swooning

The opening is a slow move across our three coven members doing what looks like a hand clapping game as they sing the backing vocals. A domestic setting, that comes across as Witch Manor.  We move past them to introduce our heroine, who I’ll call Lovesick Witch, wholesomely swooning - old books clutched to her chest singing wistfully. 

The first verse, is total rose-tinted innocence, think Sandra Dee “hopelessly devoted to you”, as our Lovesick witch, glides gracefully from activity to activity. 

The activities she moves between are one of three things;

1. an expression of her love (drawing a heart in a steamed mirror, or pulling petals one by one) 

2. a dreamy divination swooning at her imagined future 

3. Preparing love spells - they are sweet and simple spells with not too many steps, and using common place ingredients like candles, water, roses, lavender and sugar.

Her coven floats around her, assisting in the magic, and delivering the backing vocals.  Ref: Tangled when will my life begin.

The Lovesick Witch’s Descent

The second verse our Lovesick Witch has an air of desperation in her pace and energy.  She is making a much more diverse range of love spells, more complex with more materials, she moves through them quickly. Manic. The coven is still going at their normal floaty speed, they seem out of sync with her. They try to draw her in, to slow her down, guide her away from her furious spellwork. But she’s not having it, she pushes through and prepares spell after spell after spell.  Less swooning here, more action. Ref for love witch: Tangled later. Ref for coven: Dua Lipa New Rules choreo.

Towards the end of the second chorus we see the Lovesick Witch setting up another circular candle arrangement in the attic, she drinks from a gold chalice, and drips a drop of liquid into the burning candle, from a small metal bowl, she sprinkles a herbal dust over the arrangement of petals. An escalation of the previous spell.  This time the coven do not help. She kneels in the circle of candles and repeats the incantation alone, adding a choreographed hand movement.  We cut between this scene and the coven sitting around a kitchen table, a pile of large spell books sits in front of them.  As they drink tea and pull tarot, they deliver the backing vocals of the chorus - we can see that they are concerned.

The Coven Band Together to Bring Her Back

The coven, in their nightwear holding totems of protection, barge in and surround her. As we come into the last chorus, the camera whips around and transitions into a shot circling the Lovesick Witch, we see she is now kneeling, with a sexy shibari tying her arms behind her, and a rope heart over her chest.  We are back in the attic but now the space is lit with unnatural blue and pink lighting. The coven members, place petals around her, and a candle carved with symbols.   In front of the Lovesick Witch where previously there had been a photo of the 60s heart throb, we see it has been replaced by a photo of her, smiling sweetly.  A coven member ties the loose end of rope around the photo frame.  The coven kneel at the edge of the circle and sing the backing vocals, while performing a spell casting choreography as the Lovesick witch sings and writhes around. 

At first it may seem that the Lovesick Witch is tied to be held in position while the coven do a spell on her, but as the scene plays out we should get the impression that the Lovesick Witch is filled with good sensations. Self-love sensations. 

The spell cumulates in a “moment of release”, the Lovesick Witch exhales, and there is a bright flash of light.

During the outro, the coven untie her, and they cuddle on the floor, post-spell aftercare.