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Week 5 Blog

This week Noor and I experienced filming three of our shots from the shooting script. We encountered several problems during the week but we maintained a level of communication and resolved each situation as it came. 

The first problem was writing the treatment; Noor and I had finished writing it together, but then faced an issue of blogger playing up and deleting the post. So we had to find time to re-write the entire post. Though this was not as time consuming as we already knew what to write, it was difficult to find time because of how our time tables were clashing through the week. We decided to complete the treatment after we finished our shooting scrip as it became our priority in the past week.

We had been struggling with the shooting script due to the detail we were going into, we had decided to plan out how we were going to edit whilst writing the shot list so we do not have to waste any time during our post production stage. This will be useful later on, however for the time being it was quite time consuming and long winded. We spent an estimated amount of three to four hours solely on our shot list, meaning we spent most of the week trying to complete one post. Of course independently we continued with our own work, I completed the analysis of music videos and Noor did further independent research looking for locations within London to film at. My partner managed to find a bridge which had an outlook to the London Eye, Big Ben and a city view of all the buildings. She took a few primary source pictures and looked into how we could film from certain angles. Me and her are happy with the final plan of filming using the mise-en-scene of central london, we feel as though it will give the artist a softer representation. 

Another problem we faced was having to decide our final guitarist. We both looked for some consultation and were told that a guitarist not strumming the guitar properly would be the equivalent of some one not lip syncing correctly. Since we were given the advice, we decided to go back to our very first option of using a boy named Harry Maxwell who has experience with guitars and musical skills. We have asked him to listen to the song and he claimed he would be available to film with us. Unfortunately neither Noor or I know Harry on a personal level, so we are unsure about his reliability in terms of punctuality and enthusiasm; but from the feedback we have gathered about him, we have found that he seems an appropriate candidate for the task. We have very limited options to begin with, not using Harry would be an unwise decision and would lead to more time being wasted in looking for another guitarist.

We filmed for the first time during this week and we made the mistake of not playing the song outloud as well as sam not singing outloud. We only filmed three shots which could be easily refilmed but we will still experiment with using the footage already recorded. We decided to film at all the locations closest to us first, so far we have been to roxy ave and later this week we are making plans to go to hainault forest to shoot a few more guitarist scenes as well as lyrics.

 

Pre production call sheet 1

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Pre-Production Treatment

The artist we have chosen to work for are called 'Balloon Ride fantasy'. It consists of a team of two composers, a guitarist and vocalist who have been creating for a very long while. Their content contains a sense of humour, they write song lyrics based around quirky topics such as zombies, Japanese dream lands and other bizarre themes, sung in catchy tunes. Their representation is unique and different to what we have already seen on the market, they have a strong indie-pop flair to them and Sam and I want to highlight this feature about the band. We want to represent them as very modern young adults who know about whats happening today. We would like to present them to our target audience with a vibe of sarcasm and irony that the current generation is swarmed with due to the Internet. Whilst doing some research, we found images from magazines and artists such as Ed Sheeran and the Kings of Leon who resembled exactly what we would like to portray. 

Our target audience will be between the ages of 15-25, a young generation who have experienced education and 'young love'. The age range involves people who would either be able to relate to the experience as statistics show divorce rate for couples under twenty is 80-85%, or they would be able to sympathise with the main narrative character as they are in a stage of their life where they are most prone to heart break and rejection. The type of activities our target audience would be most involved in would be gigs and celebrity meet ups, people who socialise and have access to meeting new people and learning about new artists through word of mouth. 

The music video we plan to create will have a number of different locations incorporated into it. We have planned the mise-en-scene so we have a variety of shots and places to choose from; allowing us to have a wider selection and prevent ourselves from limitation. We will show a representation of our artist through his background and he starts off being in the streets and ends up being in London, just like our narrative couple. We are going to use a HD camera which will allow us to capture the real colours and brigthness of London. We did not want the video to seem gritty at all so we made the choice of using a HD camera rather than a standard camcorder.

The editing will be snappy and fast, at first we would edit to the bar and then move onto editing to the lyric, then return to editing to the bar. The style we have chose is slightly simillar to that of Rizzle Kicks video 'Down with the Trumpets', we will use clear match-on-action during the begining but then move further in the narrative later on in the song. The pace of the video will also match then emotions of the male character who will propose to his loved one. At first he feels excited and happy, the camera movement will match this as well as the editing. It will be slow and the panning will be gentle with slower cuts, then later as the music speeds up and the male character feels upset and has a break down there will be more cuts rather than camera movement.

The needle and thread that will string our three products, the music video, the magazine advert and the digipak will be a balloon and a garaffiti wall along with a metal door Noor found in her independent research. The balloon will relate back to the album name we created, called "float away". The balloon will be in a few shots and seen toawards the end drifting away to symbolise how things we have now, might "float away" later. Also, the metal door will be used on  the cover of our magazine advert and on the digipak to show a clear link between the sense of location. We aim to portray the genres of indi rock and pop, as the artist has the voice of a mod-indie. The type of audience member we will target to appeal to will be indie and edgy who will find contemporary music most apeasing to their personality.

To film we will use a HD camera to make every shot clear and visually appealing. This will provide a more pleasant visual for the audience to look at. Music videos do not tend to have any grittiness, they are usually shown in good quality even if the scene being shown is depressing or dark urban. We will also be using a still camera or my personal sony digital camera to take pictures, I will also use my camera to make short vlogs of moments of us filming to give a 'behind the scene' look into our work, and how we have progressed. Later on during the post production stage we will use 'Photoshop' to begin creating our digipak and magazine advert, along with 'FinalCut Pro' to edit our music video together.

We plan to film in local area's close to us around the school, many of them are all street locations this will be just the artist on his own, this will also be done first due to the locations being more convenient. We also film in London locations close to the thames, in these locations we will be filming our two narrative actors and the artist, we will also be filming in hainult which will be green locations and the guitarist and the artist will be filmed.

The only permission we needed was from the artist 'Balloon ride fantasy' for their song 'monocle city', they were very cooperative and also sent us the lyrics for their video. They were comfortable with us using their song and making a video to it. We have not had the issue of copyright at any point.

Pre Production Shot list

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Pre Production Feedback through social networking

To make giving feedback a little more interesting and gain as much qualitative research back I created a video briefly explaining what the narrative will revolve around. I have asked people to give me some feedback and their responses were as follows:

Some feedback was more productively helpful than others, I understand this was because I didn't go in to depth about our ideas and how we would carry them out. I should have created a power point perhaps going into an explanation of each area of the music video, discussing mise-en-scene, costume, design and how our ancillary products would fit into the music video to gain more qualitative answers.

From the comments above, 3/4 of the people gave brief answers with no detail. The last comment on the post however gave a response with a little insight regarding story and camera movement. There was the suggestion that we have a montage of all the 'happy moments' the main narrative character had spent with his girlfriend in the past compiled together and shot of the girlfriend walking towards the former partner towards the end. From this particular feedback myself and Sam feel that we should explore the montage idea and plan out how we could arrange it. It would be slightly difficult as we would need the actors to be available to do numerous shots at different locations such as at home, at the park, in london, going to the cinema, in a shopping mall, eating together in a restaurant and having fun at a bowling ally. 

I have already looked into gaining permission for the 'bowling ally' and the 'restaurant' however filming in a shopping mall would be difficult, although we could over come this by filming on the high street where the shops are outside and open to filming. This 'montage idea' could be used as a flash back in the video giving us the opportunity to play around with colours and use grading as well as effects and lighting. 

 This person connotes that the video should be comical, of course the initial plan is to make the video serious and ironic. We will continue to launch our initial idea as although the idea may sound comical the video in itself will be dramatic. The general theme of the band is comical because they explore topics regarding supernatural beings, however we feel it would be appropriate to show a seriousness with in 'monocle city', to reflect a more relatable image to the target audience.

Once again, I feel as though I was not clear enough and should have made my points clearer. For future reference, if myself and sam need detailed feed back with constructive criticism, I will create a power point explaining the themes and ideas we wish to portray.

 In this feedback we were given a lot of advice, with warnings about how love is a very common theme and is done very often. Which is true, but most videos involve the artist or narrative characters falling in love rather than falling out of love. The videos which have had plots about leaving love behind have not been based around marriage, a theme which our video will explore. From this we have started planning more detail into our narrative and have decided a studio based performance by the guitarist would be appropriate and add a visual appeal to the target audience which we will grasp through the theme of rejection and the 'pain' as well as memories that come along with it. 

 The comment above suggests that there should be another appearance of the main female character, and the point made about having her appear once again towards the end is valid. This helps to reinforce the idea of creating a montage of all the happy times celebrated by the couple over the years, what they used to be and what they have become. This allows the video to explore a new angle and insight of the characters feelings. We can have the male character having a mental break down and during this mental break down we can have editing to the beat or to the lyrics "go, go, go." to make it fast pace and visually memorable. Another factor pointed out in the feedback is the effectiveness of the lip syncing, which we will be very careful with. As Sam is going to play the role of 'artist' in our video, he will be sure to have the 'appropriate look and lip movement' whilst we film the artist based performance.

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Week 4 Blog

This week we finished our flat plans, we decided to have a six fold digipak and made sure that there was a theme through out the mediums, the main theme would be street imagery. In our digipak we included and chose typography that would be used throughout.

The flat plans included the magazine advert as well, after doing research we knew to include quotes from magazines to entice the readers. We also included date and title of the film and when its coming out. We also included a balloon in our typography to tie in with the name of the artist which is 'Balloon Ride Fantasy.' The imagery in our magazine will be the same as is the Green Day album which matched their magazine adverts.

This week we also started our shot list which is a very long process, me and my partner have been taking a long time to complete this due to finding the beats or lyrics which we are going to cut to. Producing our shot list has helped allot it has painted a bigger pitchure in our heads of what its going to look like and it doesnt seem complicated. Doing this has also given us more ideas what we want and how we are going to produce them due to it being clear because its now down in writing.

Also this week we have nearly finished our production schedule, we are deciding to film mostly on Thursdays due to me and my partner having half the day free. Due to a half term coming up i think me and my partner will be filming over the holidays to get the London footage but it does depend on personal preferences. Next week we would've liked to have all our pre-production finished and have our first opening 30 seconds of the video completed

Initial research into locations

Flat plans

Research and final fact sheet

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

Pre-Production analysing survey results -audience research

During this week myself and Sam thought up questions to put into a surveyusing Survey Monkey for our audience research. We asked questions involving topics such as age, race, style, clothing, camera movements, design and typography to help us see what our audience is interested in viewing. 18 people answered our survey and gave us feedback on what they would prefer seeing or what they think would be the best route to choose regarding our music video.

The first question we asked was "Do you like the concept? if not please specify why." and the response we recieved for it was mainly positive. 57% of people thought the initial idea was an interesting one. The question had a choice of 'No, it has no appeal what so ever' but no one gave us a verbal response- but we are quite happy with what we already have planned and seeing as the majority of people like the idea, we feel it will be successful. If we had an explanation from the person who answered with "no, it has no appeal what so ever" we would have taken into consideration of how to approve our initial idea. This is one of the problems of using a survey, not everyone are interested in answering or typing anwers into boxes which give them flexibility to express their opinion.

The second question was based around style and costume to see which 'look' the consumer would prefer to see in the video. We will definitelty take forward what the feedback suggests. All the options have almost gotten the same amount of responses, there was a verbal response of "Levis Jeans with a Hugo Boss shirt to indicate that he has everything apart from his love". I discussed this with sam and found out what his opinion is on the matter and we decided to create a compromise and instead of wearing one style of clothing, during our production stage we can arrange to take numerous outfits including the one suggested by an audience member. 

 The font we intended to go with was something along the lines of 'InkBoy font' or 'ArtBrush' on dafont.com but we recieved feedback saying otherwise. We wanted to know what would stand out more to our audience and seeing as the majority of them thought "bold and colourful font" would suit the brand of the artist best, we have made the final conclusion to use 'ArtBrush'. The answer to this particular question has influenced us but not made us change anything we have already planned out. We aimed to learn what the consumer wanted and our feedback reflects that our decision is wise.

The next question aimed to ask the audience what they were most interested in seeing and the two answers which were most voted for were "Narrative (A story) line involving the band" and "A performance and narrative"- this boosts our confidence in our plan to do a three dimentional video with two sets of performance, one by the artist, one by a person playing a guitar and the last as a narrative. We learned most people enjoy watching a story with the video- I find that it could be because they like seeing something in corrolation to the song so they have something to imagine or remember when they hear the song. 

The artist most compared to Balloon Ride Fantasy are the 'Kings of Leon'. They have a very strong rock theme to their videos and songs. The style we have chosen to go with is quite different to the kings of leon, but we will take certain things on board. The kings of Leon have very tasteful, modern indie clothing, sometimes their choice of fashion is quite subtle but sometimes it is bold, we will follow the same path and make our 'artist' look like a young adult with a 'rock and roll' flair as well as a subtle indie look. The audience replied with some feedback saying that "Blink-182", "Guns and Roses" and "Neon trees, owl city, the killers" are similar to our artists as well. We have decided to have a slight childish flair as 'Owl City' has- (we will use a balloon in our ancillary products and in the end of our music video.)

The mise-en-scene we had already decided on was 'local' and 'central london'. This doesn't influence our decision but it does enforce that our initial idea for location is strong and people will appreciate it. We are limited with location to begin with and using london city (its main land marks) will be significant in setting out the 'london rocker' setting. No one voted for 'inside school' meaning we will definitely not be incorporating high school teenagers, instead of a boy or a teenager, we will use an office with in the school and make it look like a business work place for the narrative section of the video.

The age group that would be most interested in our theme, style, concept and song would be people between the ages of 16 and 24 as they are most voted for. We would round it up to a generation of about 10 years, so we are going to aim for the target audience of 15-25 as this is the age range for all prime 'love problems' that our video will be demonstrating. Some teenagers propose too young and get rejected and some young adults propose and are rejected by their partner because they want to experience life. Not everyone will be able to relate to the video because everyone do not necessarily have the idea of marriage denied, but they have had some sort of a rejection. Whether if that is being rejected by a person they like, a person they had a crush on, a long term relationship that may have ended. Our video sets up a situation where the audience who haven't experienced heart break to feel sorry for the person who has. 

Most people listen to music through youtube, as this is the fastest and easiest recourse to use. Not only does Youtube allow you to listen to the music it allows you to enjoy the music video for free, along with being able to interact with other people in the comments section. It works as a playlist as well because of certain features youtube has introduced into its interface. Our video will definitely be posted on to youtube, we had finalized this since the beginning.

We are going to use Sam as our 'artist' due to easy access, although most people voted for 'brunette hair' we have no choice but to use someone with ginger hair. This was our initial idea and although people expect brunette hair, we can give a 'shock factor' in our video by having the unexpected. With this question we wanted to know what type of a person the audience imagine and which type of a look they are most interested in seeing. A lot of people did actually answer with "caucasian with ginger hair".

From this we have learnt that people like movement. They like to see constant panning or tilting movement which we have already planned out. We are going to use a number of high and low angle shots as well as zoomed images and close ups of the artist singing. The plan for editing is to keep the camera moving until the very last few seconds where the camera remains still to connote the heartbreak of the main character in our narrative. We will have a few close ups of the artists face as well as his hands and a 'side on' close up from a high angle. Through doing this the hair will be quite highlighted therefore boosting the slight 'shock factor'. One person responded with 'fade ins and outs' which we will use at the beginning and at the end, then through the middle when he is on one knee proposing to his lover, and she rejects him. The black outs will seem almost like time speeding up and moments going so fast its like a flash. 

Allocated Job Roles

Pre Production

Planning and research:

• Pitch presentation - Individual
• Beach Combing - Individual
• Audience research - Joint

Surveys - Noor

Audience Profile - Noor

• Analysing existing products

3 Music videos - Sam

3 Magazine adverts - Sam3 DVD covers - Sam

• Focus group feedback - Noor
• Detailed flat plan:

DVD cover - Sam
Magazine advert - Sam

Shot list - Joint

• Production Schedual - Joint
• Call sheets - Joint

Production:

• Photography - Noor
• Vloging - Noor
• Filming - Joint
• Directing - Joint
• Lighting - Joint
• Location schedual - Joint

Post Production:

• Editing - Joint
• Photoshop - Sam

Week 3 Blog

This week was less productive due to other homework from subjects, but this week we learnt more about two of the three mediums. First of all we learnt how magazine posters can relate to the audience so they feel associated with the artist, an example we looked was Britney Spears selling perfume. It had a theme of freedom and nature which can appeal to a female audience.

We also learnt that an audience can relate to an artist due to the poster that he or she is using or wearing the product which can make the audience buy it thinking they have something in common with the artist and have a closer connection.

We also learnt about different types of CD case e.g. Square, rectangle digipaks. The CD can have different folds, nets, which depends on the content which will be included, the more content included the more folds needed.

Also this week i have been finishing analysising three mediums. I chose videos that represent different themes. This week we also plan to finish our production schedules and callsheets together.