Nearly All The Filming

The last couple weeks we have been busy desperately trying to get the remainder of our filming sorted and ready to edit as we were really running out of time. Firstly i took a camera and tripod home for the weekend so that i could film the scenes of me and Nathan(plays the boyfriend) in my friends house. The first shot was a medium shot of me and him sat on the sofa, and him trying to put his arm around me while i move away from him and look quite annoyed and fed up. This was going to be a vital shot in our video because it clearly shows the audience that my character doesn't really like who she's with and it lets them put the pieces together to work out what's going to happen, before it actually does. We also felt that it would fit perfectly in the breakdown of the song where it's slower and more mellow with the lyrics "see now you're having fun" being repeated, as it creates quite a nice sarcastic view.

The previous shot ends with me get up and storming out the room so the next shot we filmed was a quick medium shot of my leaving the room on the other side of the door. After this was another medium shot of me in the bathroom looking quite upset (which was to again emphasise the unhappiness in the relationship) and then texting on my phone. To enable the audience to actually see what the text was, we did an over-the-shoulder shot and focused it properly so that it was just a close up of my phone screen. We needed the audience to see this because the text read "Help me! x" and was sent to "Ryan Blake" to show the clear development in the story of the two people starting to act on their feelings.

We set these shots in someone's house because we felt it needed to be believable and wasn't the sort of thing we could re-create in college as it wouldn't have the same effect. This way it gives the idea that this is what happens all the time when the two are at home or outside of college which could provoke some sympathy from the audience towards the female character who is clearly unhappy.

In this time we also went to re-film the shot of me and Nathan walking across the hill because our previous shot had Elliot in it and he was no longer able to do anymore filming so we had to re-film any shots with him in it, and replace him with Nathan. We had a slight problem with filming this shot because nobody else in my group was available and i couldn't get hold of anybody else to be a cameraman for us so we had to make do. This meant that we had to set up the camera, press record and then do the scene and hope that we were in frame properly. To avoid this in future we should be more organised and make sure that we plan ahead more so that filming doesn't become an issue.

Digipack Designs

In the past week i have been thinking a bit more about my plans for the digipak i will need to create for our band. I thought i'd take a look at some of the different designs of them to get a nice idea on which ones i think work well and maybe get some ideas on how to present mine.

On the right is a typical example of a digipak as it has the actual CD on one fold out, the list of songs on another and a book containing either information about the artist or lyrics to the songs on the final side. The front cover is quite a striking image of the artist himself and is kept quite simple with just this picture and the title and a tribal type design next to it. The rest of the digipak is consistent with this as the colour scheme remains quite dark with black, browns and white mainly which indicates that the type of music will be a bit dark in itself and is unlikely to be very upbeat, happy songs.



This digipak only folds out the once, much like a normal CD however it still has the CD and a booklet inside, with the list of songs on the back. I looked at this one because if the interesting, yet simple image on the front. This is also a good example of showing why the programme i am likely to use will be photoshop because it enables you to create images like this by getting two seperate ones and editing them together to create a lovely image like this one. It's mainly effective because of the contrast between the girl being in black and white and staring into a jar filled with colour and a sunset by the sea which i think represents a sense of wanting to get away from everything. With this in mind i get the idea that the type of music would be quite calming and relaxing. The colour theme has again been consistent throughout.

Remainder of Filming

To help us get a bit more organised and realise properly what we actually have left to film, we've complied a list of whats left filming wise.

• Medium shot of me and Nathan (plays the boyfriend) with me looking bored and getting up and walking out.
• Medium shot of above, on the other side of the door to see me walking out at a different angle.
• Close up of my phone writing a text to Ryan
• Medium shot of above
• Pan across two bedrooms, showing the two characters in individual settings but doing the same thing.
• Close up of laptop screen - showing the conversation between boy and girl
• Possibly a close up of boy and girls facial expressions - shows happiness from talking to each other
• Shots on the boy and girl finally meeting properly
  

Ideally we want all of our filming to be done in the next week at the latest, to be sure we give ourselves enough time to complete the editing properly and do the ancillary tasks.

Crowd Fail. Again

Because our filming of a crowd had gone wrong the first time, we decided to find a local bands gig, get permission and film their crowd as it would be a smaller space and any crowd would look like a bigger one because of the smaller space. We found a gig at the Joiners which had about 5 different artists playing including Are We Famous Yet? who were meant to be headlining and were also the same genre of music that our track is. So as everyone else was unavailable i went to go capture some footage of their crowd, however to just our luck, there was hardly anyone there. Not even enough to resemble any crowd with the help of clever camera positioning. This is where we decided to knuckle down as a group and say that we needed to mold our idea slightlty differently as this clearly wasn't working and was going to take too long to get what we needed and we really dont have the time to mess about with the crowd shots.

The Bright Side

So after discussing ways around our problems we realised that this may not be all bad. When watching music channels, people tend to change channel when a song/artist that they don't know come on screen unless they get drawn in by the story/effects of the video itself. So if we don't put as much emphasis on the actual band itself and tell more of a story, then the audience is less likely to switch off and instead be intruiged by how the story will end. With this in mind we feel confident that we can develop the story enough to fill the song, and we're also still going to be using the shots of the guitar, bass and drums that we got previously.

Filming at the Gig/Party

On Friday the day had come around for our gig that we planned to get pretty much the rest of our filming done, because we would have the band, crowd and a venue all ready to go. There was a slight problem before-hand with the times because they had double booked us with somebody else but this only meant that we had to change the time to an hour later and make sure everyone was aware of this. We got there about 45minutes earlier than we told people to get there so that us and the band had time to set up. In this time we also got a number of shots that we wanted of the close ups of the instruments being played however it was at this point that we found out that the band who originally did the song couldn't make it, but Ryan had found out before and organised some other people to come and play the song, so it wasn't a complete disaster. After this we managed to encounter another problem which was that the drum kit had to be back in an hour meaning we couldn't film any shots of the band with the crowd in one shot like we'd hoped because the kit would have to be back by the time people got there, so we decided to do any shots with drums first.

We started off with Ryan playing the drums the whole way through the song (with headphones in playing the track so that he was definitly in time with it when it comes to editing) and me getting several different angles so that we have a variety to cut through when editing, these angles included a close up of the foot pedal, close up of both of his feet on the pedals, a close up of the toms, medium shot of all the toms and a cymbal, close up of the bigger cymbal, close up of the high-hat and a medium shot of the whole kit.

For the lead guitar, shots included a close up of the strings being strummed by the pick-ups, a close up of notes being played on the fretboard, a shot of the whole guitar and another close up by the pick-ups when individual strings were being played, whilst he was playing the song through i moved between these different shots depending on the part of the song so that we have some nice bits to cut to.

This was pretty much the same for the bass guitar however i added in a couple of different angles like being positioned at the end of the guitar and looking up at the rest of it which is quite a nice shot and also one looking down on the guitar as well, we liked this one because you could just see some of the cable leading to the amp in the top corner of the frame which gives it a bit more of a gig feel. We couldn't do the vocals because Tim, who was going to be miming, didn't want to do it in front of people as they had started to arrive, but we didn't think this would be too bad as we could just get the close ups in college somwhere because you won't see the setting.

Now as for the rest of the filming, we came across another huge problem. There wasn't enough people to make the place look quite full and resemble a gig. From the amount of people that had got back to us and said they would go combined with the amount of people who had been invited by other people, we thought we would have plenty of people. We did what we could with the amount of people by getting them to all squash together a bit in one space close to the stage so that when we filmed them you couldn't see the empty space in the back and it just looked like there was alot of people there. These shots weren't too bad however, we feel we could do much better and now have an idea to go to a local band's gig and get some shots of the crowd there.

I think the main point we took from all this is to organise everything so much more and in detail so that we are prepared for anything that might go wrong. For example if we had properly sorted out where we were getting equipment from before-hand we would of been able to organise things around this to make sure we could film certain things in time.

More Filming

Today we carried on with our filming and now that we had decided that i would play the female character we thought today would be a good time to film them. First we got a medium shot of me walking past and looking up (as if i've seen ryan) and smiling shyly so that it shows the audience that there is a likelyhood my character is interested in Ryan, we made sure to keep to 180 degree rule so we didn't confuse the audience and it makes sense when editing, and it's also important because it's as if the camera is from Ryan's point of view, it's what he's seeing. We had to do this a few times as it was hard to get the pace of walking right so that the panning could match and keep nice framing still as it followed me.
Next was a closer shot of just my face but with the same content as above, which we did to emphasise the shy expression on my face.
We also filmed a long shot and pan of me and nicole walking down the corridoor, through a door and outside just to give this section a little more than a random shot of me walking past and smiling. It gives it more context.
We repeated this with another long shot/medium shot of us doing the same as above however this shot was filmed from the other side of the door.

During this lesson we had finalised the method of creating an event on facebook to advertise our gig to people, so when i got home i created this on facebook and invited a load of people to attend the gig as extras. We also discussed re-doing the over the shoulder shots of ryan on facebook so that we can get a close up of the event and him looking to see if my character was attending the party, as we now actually have the event set up and know who the female character is now as well.

Also we came up with another few shots that we could include when filming at the gig -- shots inside the guys bathroom of Ryan talking to someone about the girl being there at the party and being nervous along with an almost identical scene in the girls bathroom with me. We thought this could be a key scene in helping the audience understand the plot and gives the whole video a little more structure and variety. A close example of this is in the FallOut Boy video - Dance Dance about 3 minutes 13 seconds in --

Digi-Pack Research

Front covers of a bands album can have different purposes depending of the band and how known they are amoungst the public. The main difference is whether they want to promote the band or promote the music, because if you're promoting the band then there will most likely be pictures of the band themselves or something like a band logo on the cover so that people recognise them as they pass by in shops. To promote the music of a band then they often opt for a more abstract image on the front or something that matches the genre/tone of the music.

An example of this is Muse's last album 'The Resistance'. I would say that this album cover is souly promoting the music because they have this big colourful image taking up most of the cover, and then they're name 'Muse' fairly small in comparison in the top left. This image of all the different colours could represent the eclecticism of the album as it has many different music styles within it like Progressive rock, symphonic rock, space rock and a lot of clear opera influences which is something interesting and therefore needs to be promted.

On the other hand, a good example of an artist promting themselves is Rihanna and her new album 'Loud'. Rihanna is a perfect example of an artist who is promoted more by herself and her image rather than her music, and this can be seen in the album cover below. It is simply a picture of her filling the whole cover, with the name of the album written across the bottom, this is because when people walk past in the shops this will catch their attention as someone they are familar with and are therfore more likely to pick up the album and buy it.

21st October 2010

Intodays lesson we thought it would be a good chance to go dow to Ryans house and get the shots we needed of him looking at facebook on a computer. We were originally thinking of just filming these scenes in college on one of the computers here but it looked too much like we were in college and it wasn't really convincing or homely enough so we thought that filming in Ryan's house would set the scene much better.

The first shots we got were a long shot of him walking towards the camera then turning into his front door, we then did another angle closer to the door of him walking through the door so that we could cut these up later and edit them together nicely. To continue this we felt it would look good if we got another long shot of him walking into the house, only from the inside of the house this time.

Our next shot was filmed from inside of Ryan's room and was a medium shot of him walking into his room and sitting down with a beer and looking at his laptop. We thought it would look quite effective if we filmed an extreme close up of the bottle of beer being opened as well, we included the beer in our video because it lets the audience know that this character is going to be quite a stereotypical teenager and gives them a slight insight of whats to come. Including facebook as part of it also increases this idea to the audience.

Oue final thoughts of the lesson was that instead of us continuing to look for a girl to play the female character in the video, i would do it. This means that we're now able to film the parts with that character in it whenever we want as we no longer need to worry about when the person would be free to come in and film.

15th October's Lesson

Today we planned our big day of filming of the party/gig with the band playing because we felt that we really needed to get this sorted because it's very important and will take up the majority of our video. We knew already that we would be using the bigger hall at the Totton and Eling Community Centre because they have a stage and a large capacity to fit people in. Our main issue was the date to hold it because the band's singer only recently got back to England and they need a little time to practice, we also needed to make it a day that a large amount of people would be available and that all members of our group could make as well. So to give the band a little time to practice we thought that the first friday of November (which is the 5th) would hopefully give us enough time to then edit everything after as long as we work hard and keep organised.

Also in today's lesson Donne showed us some examples of Digi Packs which is one of things we will be creating individually as an ancillary task. It has to include a front and back cover, spine, inside design and a little booklet to go with it which usually includes information about the band with pictures of them, along with lyrics and notes about how the songs were recoreded and produced.

One that we looked at was 'Little Creatures - Night People'. We listened to the song and then looked at how the design of the digi pack has similarities to the mood and feel of the song and also the music video. We noticed that the song was very calm and relaxed and that the cover clearly refelcted that with lots of green foresty scenes which was consitent through the whole digi pack and the video and then a couple of ghosts as well relating to their name - Little Creatures.

Capturing and Editing

In Yesterdays lesson we decided to sort through all the shots we had filmed so far and pick which ones we wanted to capture and keep because there were quite a few that we did wrong. Below is a link to all the shots we logged.


https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1fjtCa4st5-iKNB_6C9ITTj1qRqZ1JVi52bRO9EUGlbk&embedded=true

While the others captured these shots and begun to cut out little parts we didn't want, i uploaded the audio track and begun editing it. I put some EQ on it and boosted the frequency range which included the vocals because they're quite quiet and makes it harder to understand the lyrics, meaning the audience might not understand the video as it's not put in context for them if they can't hear the lyrics very well.

Starting Filming

In the past two lessons we have made a start on filming a few of our shots and so far it's gone quite well. Yesterday we decided to do a couple of shots with different angles of Ryan walking into a class and looking up at the clock, we first shot it from inside the class and then did a close up of his head so that the audience would be able to see that his eyes look up at the time and to follow this we filmed a clock displaying the time of 3 o clock to show it being time to go home. We also filmed him walking into the class from the outside of the classroom, just so that when it comes to editing we have plenty of cuts to show good continuity and make it slightly more interesting. Other shots we got done were an over-the-shoulder shot of him searching through his ipod and clicking on the song, over-the-shoulder of earphones being put in (left and right) and a close up of the ipod screen.

The next day we continued with our filming and got a medium shot of Ryan sitting at a bench eating his lunch and then looking shocked with a 'jaw drop' type expression to show that he has just seen someone really atrractive, we also got a close up of this expression to emphasise it. After that shot we plan to cut to a shot of the girl that he likes walking past, possibly in slow motion, however we still haven't got someone to play this part yet so we will take care of this later. We then went onto film a few shots at different angles of him walking home which we will later follow with the shots of him looking at the girls facebook page on his computer.

Purpose and Importance of a Music Video Research

Purpose and Importance of a Music Video on Prezi

Basic Set Up and Stuff

We had a couple of videos which influenced us like Jimmy Eat World - The Middle and YouMeAtSix - Gossip because it involves a big party with the band there playing as well. Some videos that combine performance and narrative have the band playing somwehere completely different and are not in the same location at all, which we think looks quite odd because the two sections to the video don't seem to fit together very well which is why we will have the two connected in some way.






For our typical 'boy likes girl' storyline, we had influences from New Found Glory - Dressed To Kill but slightly less on the stalking side of things and just have them both liking each other without knowing the other one likes them too, and instead of ending on a bit of a cliff hanger like this video, ours will be resolved with a happy ending of the two being together. This was also our main idea because it fits with the theme of the lyrics in the song we will be using as shown at the bottom of this post.






These are the lyrics to our song that we will be using and basing a story around -

Verse 1

Hey girl why you standing there,
Seeming like you do not care,
Get on your feet lets have some fun,
We'll go round and round,
When i say wait you'll say right now,
See now you're having fun, lets go 4 3 2 1!

Chorus

Allow me to have this one sir,
Move aside and let me take her,
I'll show you a real good time,
And then you'll wanna be mine.

Verse 2

Jump like it's just begun,
There's nothing that can't be done,
Time to live all your dreams,
Forget the ones that could of been,
Somethings should be unleft,
Somethings should be unsaid,
Now it's up to you,
There's nothing left we can do

Chorus

Allow me to have this one sir,
Move aside and let me take her,
I'll show you a real good time,
And then you'll wanna be mine.

Middle 8

See now you're having fun x5
Lets go in 4321,
4 3 2 1 !

Chorus

Allow me to have this one sir,
Move aside and let me take her,
I'll show you a real good time,
And then you'll wanna be mine.

Allow me to take this one sir,
Move aside and let me take her,
I'll show you a fucking good time,
And then you'll wanna be mine.

From these lyrics it's quite clear that the girl in this story already has a boyfriend or is already dancing with a different guy and throughout the song the other guy who wants her is consistent in trying to get through to her by saying and proving how much happier she will be with him instead of the guy she's dancing with.

We're planning on following this sorta storyline but also developing it a bit more and giving it an ending of the two getting together, as the song doesn't quite bring it to a close.

Research

Types of Music Videos on Prezi

After considering these different types of music video we decided that ours would fall into a combination of Performance and Narrative as we had an idea of having the band playing at a gig and through it we will have some shots which will show the typical story of a guy in the band liking a girl, and her also liking him back but not showing it, and most likely finishing with a happy ending, although we haven't properly developed this story yet. We chose to combine it with footage of them at a gig because this is often done in the pop punk type of genre and this is pretty much the category that our track falls under. For example in this video by You Me At Six -





For the performance side of the video we've considered renting out a hall somewhere in Totton because it gives a large amount of space with a stage as well for the band to play on with enough space to film as well. We're going to have lots of close ups of the instruments being played and of the band memebers themselves because we think it will look really effective when we put everything in time with the music. This type of thing can be seen in a video by The Pigeon Detectives - This is an Emergency, however we probably won't be using the 4-way split screen.

Narrowed Down Ideas

After talking it through as a group we decided upon creating a music video rather than a short film because we think we will be able to express all our ideas easier and make progress by narrowing these down quite quickly, which we would have slightly more trouble with if we were to do a short film as there are so many ideas. We also thought this would be a good idea because Ryan has a couple of recordings from his old band meaning that we would be able to get started right away with expanding and producing our ideas.

After making this final we decided to do some more research souly on music videos by using the site www.youtube.com which is full of new and old bands of all genres and even previous A2 media productions from various different places. These are what we paid quite alot of attention to as it was really useful to take note on which things worked well and which things didn't and also why they did or didn't work.

For example, making sure we didn't use the same clip too many times. Some professional music videos use certain clips more than once if that part of the song has been repeated so that it gives the impression that they're still singing and puts emphasis on the chorus/part thats being repeated. However, by looking at this video below done by some other A2 media students we noticed that they have used certain clips too many times as it just makes it look like they couldn't be bothered with filming so they just repeated them alot.





Another point we took from other student music videos was to make sure that it looks realistic because in some videos they had people miming singing and playing the instruments which is effective if it's done well and resembles the beats and notes of the song a lot, although it looks quite bad and messy if it's not done well. Also if the editing is out of time with the music then this will make any video look un-professional even if they have a really good storyline/idea.






Kate Nash - Merry Happy
( A2 coursework 2008 By Made: Jade Hughes,Megan Kearns,Emily Kearns,
Beverley Garcia)



Liked the quick shots when things changed like the glasses change on each shot



This song by The Cribs also does this.

First Ideas and Research

For the A2 course there is Me,
Nicole [[http://www.nicole-collas.blogspot.com/]],
Rich [[http://www.richwellsa2.blogspot.com/]] and
Ryan [[ http://www.blakeryan1.blogspot.com/ ]] in a group and after looking through the 3 options of possible tasks we've decided to focus our research around option 2 and 3 which is either a music video or a short film, however we're not sure which one yet. So we're going to research both of them mainly by looking up different videos on youtube and seeing how they're structured and what sort of ideas we could pull from them so that have a certain impact on the audience and maintain interest.

For a music video we have to get an original track and base the video around this meaning that we will need to ask some musicians we know and see if they are willing to help us out. We'll need to do this as soon as possible because to get a good idea of what to include in the video, it would help to see and understand the lyrics and the story behind the song so that the video doesn't end up really irrelevant and making no sense.

For a short film we have a really open choice of what to create and include which does make it a little more difficult to pull together ideas which aren't too complex and long as it won't fit properly in a short, 5minute film. We'll need to base our film around the '3-act structure' which every good film made will follow.