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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.

Analysising Mediums | Magazine Adverts

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