The hardest part of a music video is not shooting it. It is deciding what it should be. Here are twelve concepts that hold up across genres and cost nothing but time.
1. One world, one hour
Pick a single setting and stay in it for the whole track. A launderette at night. A stairwell. A car park in the rain. The restriction is the idea, and it always looks more deliberate than variety does.
2. The object film
Choose one object and build everything around it: a payphone, a bunch of flowers dying, a burning cigarette. It gives the video a spine without needing a person in it.
3. Colour drift
Start in one colour and move through a sequence to another. Blue to orange over three minutes. Nobody consciously notices, everybody feels it, and it makes an eight-scene video feel like one piece.
4. Weather as structure
Rain for the verses, clear for the choruses. Weather is the easiest way to signal a section change without cutting to somewhere unrelated.
5. Empty spaces
Places that should have people and do not: an empty stadium, a shut shopping centre, a road with no cars. It reads as loneliness with zero effort and suits an enormous range of songs.
6. Extreme close
Stay uncomfortably close for the whole track. Hands, eyes, fabric, water. Cheap to make and visually distinct from almost everything else in a feed.
7. The single continuous move
One slow push forward for the entire song. No cuts. It is hypnotic, it loops well, and it is the single easiest concept to execute well.
8. Analogue decay
Grain, tape warble, VHS artefacts, scan lines. A strong shortcut to mood, and it forgives a multitude of imperfections in the underlying footage.
9. Scale mismatch
Something enormous where it should be small, or the reverse. A moon at street level. A person the size of a building. One image like this is often the whole video.
10. Repetition with variation
The same shot repeated through the track, changing slightly each time. Season, time of day, weather. It is the visual equivalent of a chorus.
11. Documentary of nothing
Mundane footage treated seriously. Traffic, a kettle, a bus window, a corridor. Works especially well against a big emotional vocal, because the gap between picture and sound does the work.
12. Pure abstraction
Ink in water, smoke, light through glass, particles. No subject at all. Suits instrumental and electronic music, loops indefinitely, and never dates.
Picking one
The concepts that work are the ones you can describe in a sentence. If you need a paragraph to explain the idea, it will not survive contact with a feed where people decide in three seconds.
Pick one, generate it, and then make three variations of the same concept rather than three different concepts. Consistency across a release beats novelty within one video, every time.