Planning Our Video

Today it was necessary for us to decide the final decisions for our video so that we could create our research in more depth.

Firstly we decided on our locations we were going to use.
- As the video will be based around a love story we thought it was be a good idea to have various places to shoot the video, in the outdoors and within two seperate houses, implying one is the boy's, and the other is the girl's. This would help create the emotion of separation between the characters and appear more distinct about what is happening within the story.
- Our second location would be the drama studio, as one of my previous A levels was drama, I was fairly certain we would have permission to use it. The plan was the seperate the instruments and have spotlights to add a delicate touch. There are only 2 instruments used within the song, guitar and the violin.

We then thought about about characters.
- We wanted to keep the story to the lyrics of the song and thought it would be best to have just one girl and one boy, anymore than this may disrupt the delicacy.

Next was our genre.
It did not take long to decide our genre was romance. With a story line of a girl crying out for the love of her soulmate and trying to get across her love for him.

We then discussed our camera shots.
We decided that a wide range of shots, from extreme close ups to panning shots would be relavant. We don't want to over complicate the video and take away what is already there, but we would like to include a variety to keep it visually attractive.

Finally we decided on our editing.
We concluded that we were going to limit our special effects and create lots of emotion from the slow pace of the song, and allow to meaning to take over. We want to make all the syncing perfect, with instruments and vocals.

Asking the Artist for Permission

This is evidence of us asking Kate Nash's permission to use her song for our video.

Kate Nash - Nicest Thing

Our main reason for choosing this song is that it tells a nice flowing story to which we had ideas of how to tell this story and keep a slow pace. We both knew that that its a love story and we could get people or even ourselves to act it out. We had the ideas of telling the story and also alot of close ups of the artist, making the video about them too.

Another advantage to this song was that there are currently no official music videos for it and so all of our work we new would come from our own ideas.

This is a brief snapshot of our 5 minute brainstorm talking about the effects of the video, black and white or colour contrast, also the locations and different camera shots we would like to use.

Reseach

We thought it would be good to research a simular song with the same genre so we could see how to produce our video and the findings proved that the video was very idolistic however there was the story line inbedded as well.

Planning Process - Next Step!

In todays lesson we were able to eliminate a number of different songs due to the research we conducted into the lyrics (crossings out on the diagram) however, after the research we found ourselves adding new songs and thus having more to choose from.


After adding these songs I had an idea but I wasn't sure if it would work, I asked Abbey to put "Nicest Thing" by kate nash on her ipod and as we started listening to it, we knew we had both decided to do it. We were happy to go with this song rather than all the others on the paper as we already had ideas pouring out of our heads.

A2 Brief

A promotion package for the release of an album, to include music promotion video, together with two of the three options:

• A website homepage for the band
• An album cover
• A magazine advert

Summary of Planning Process so far...

In todays lesson we arranged our groups and Abbey & myself decided to go together as with think we can work well together and also have a lot of time available to put into the production.

We started off by creating a large spider diagram of different songs and artists we could think of that would make a good music video.

Some of the songs we thought about more than others were:

Nickleback - Photograph - we thought this could be a good song choice as the lyrics tell a story and we had the idea that we could possibly tell the story rather than having the video about the artist.

Busted - What i go to school for - we also thought this would be a good video to shoot and a fun story to tell, however because we both new and spoke about the original video, our ideas may not be able to differentiate from this, therefore we would just be recreating the same video rather than our own.

Be concluded that we would need to do more research to what lyrics a song has, this will help us decide also because we are planning to film a music video that relates the the lyrics. As we did not have any means of researching, i.e. no internet, we will continue this in our next lesson.

1st Music Video Attempt

In our last media lesson we were given the task to create a music video. Our teacher arranged the groups that we worked in and also gave us each a different song.

My group consisted of myself and 2 other females. We had the song by Maria Carey "Without You". From the start we listed to the song on the laptop and discussed what would work and what wouldnt in terms of the song's pace. As it is very slow we had to match that with the filming.

One of the girls (girl 1) offered to be "Maria Carey" and mime the words to the video, we agreed and she also said she would do it soon as she is available to do so. Myself and the other girl (girl 2) would help out as much as we could with filming and editing. Also, we wanted to film a kind of scene where someone was leaving, so we encorperated the nearby park and planned to have some editing effects of "disappearing" - by filming something there, then film the same thing in the exact same place where it is not there, and fade the clips together.

We had a lot of problems with getting girl 1 to forfill what she actually said she would do, day after day we still had no filming done, but we was reassured we would get it the next day. However this was not the case. We were promised lots of filming, with different locations and camera angles however what we eventually got was a single continuous shot. To make things worse the lip syncing was extremely hard as I could not see what she was miming so matching it to the song was mostly done on guess work. Due to this problem I myself and girl 2 had to scrap most of the video as it was impossible to work with and also it would just look messy.
Furthermore, due to not having the film until the last minute myself and girl 2 were rushed for time to complete this production to which we made clear and unnecessary errors, including spelling mistakes in the Title and credits and the difference in fonts.

The end result turned out to be dreadful. Myself and girl 2 managed to edit about 1 minute 40, the video is 2 minutes long including credits. Although this turned out to be a disaster, I did learn that you have to have trust in who you work with. Although girl 1 may feel that we offloaded alot of work to her, she clearly and kindly offered from the beggining, we no way forced her to do it, because we were quite happy to find someone else.
The second thing I learnt was that you cannot rush your work, when you rush you make silly errors which can cost you a few marks that could have been for the next grade boundry. You must have enough time to complete the production and be produce it at a comfortable speed.