Week 5

The main shoot and editing.

Me and Michael looked over the shooting schedule before Okapi arrived to check we knew what we were doing. We were both a bit nervous as we knew we had to get it right this morning as we wouldn't get another chance. This might be why I forgot to ask anyone to take pics of

Michael and me shooting the band!

The shoot didn't take very long, about two hours. Okapi were easy to work with and put us at ease. (I did think that it should have been the other way around.) As with the Y8 practice shoot the camera angles were still a bit limited but we had solved the short green screen problem by adding layers of thick green curtain material we found in the art department! We had two cameras set up so that we could maximise the limited camera angles a much as possible. I think I have got better at dealing with people and communicating my ideas as a result of these shoots.

The feed back we had got on including Adobe special effects from teachers and class mates last week was that they weren't needed to keep the audience interest,so the only effects we used were basic reversal footage, sped up film and of course the green screen. I personally feel these effects worked well together.

I enjoyed perfecting the editing. This is an area of strength for me although we ran low on time which meant there were a couple of things I would have liked to have added. This is something I will hopefully remember in my next production. I don't feel that it affected the overall result which we were pretty pleased with. Once we had added the titles it looked good.

Feed back from teachers and audience.

Mr Durran stated that the use of green screen was cleanly done and that we had lit it well and he liked the range of different techniques we had included.

Mr Hind saw the completed video and gave positive comments.

Y11's - " great bit with the suitcase with the clothes going backwards."

" How do you get the backgrounds?' - "why don't they move?"

" I like the quick changing clips where the girls sunglasses keep switching"

" Yeah, it almost like a real music video!"

(4/10/10) week 4

I spent part of the morning adding pics to my blog and writing a plan of action for the rest of the day. I also did quite a lot of work on my Music Video Research Report.

After lunch we set the green screen up in the drama room and then rounded up the Y8 kids we had enlisted as our band stand in. Freya (technician) supervised us as we set up the lights ,she understood that we wanted to learn how to do it ourselves .I was glad we had a plan to follow as the introduction of the Y8's was pretty chaotic and I think we would have not got as much done without it. (It was a lot calmer after we had let the two loudest kids go!)

My role was cameraman. This was more challenging than I thought it would be as the green screen was just across one wall and therefore made it difficult to get any camera shots that weren't straight on. I found this frustrating as we had already worked out that we needed interesting angles to take to editing but I was as creative as I could be in the situation and it was a lesson learnt!

Michael pulled the short straw and was directing the Y8's. He came up with some good ideas for shots.

Our main problem (apart from controlling the Y8's) was that the green screen was too short and it cut off the children's feet.

It's now important to work out how to extend it for nxt weeks shoot of the band.

The next step was editing the footage we had just shot. We took turns in using the editing software, Adobe Premier. We tested placing different backgrounds over the green screen footage and also reversing footage and testing of Adobe's wide range of effects.

Mr Durran give us some useful and positive feed back about out editing and tips for shooting .I felt satisfied with what I had contributed and what we had achieved.

(28/9/10) Week 3 - Music Videos Topic.

This week we were visited by the leader of the band that we will be making the video for.They are called Okapi and there are 3 members.We ran him through our notes and he gave some interesting feed back. He thought it would be nice to have something to do with beaches as the songs lyrics are all to do with going on holiday.

Me and Michael thought it would be cool to put a ton of kids on a beach with the 'green screen'. We talked to Mr Duran and he said it would be possible to do, but it needs a week of preparation do set up, so we would have to do it next week. Then we had an had the idea: why only a beach for the background? We decided to have a range of funky and wild destinations ie statue of liberty, a glacier,India, maybe Indian restaurant, jupiter, multi story car park,Hawaii. I was quite excited about this as I'd seen

Madonna's video Ray of Light while doing my report resarch which does this brilliently and the rest of the group are going to look it up on You tube to get the idea.

we shared our ideas with friends at lunch and they thought it sounded good. Max warned us to keep the feel of the video professional so as to avoid it appearing too silly. I thought this was useful feed back and we took it onboard.

The next step is to hopefully film the band so that we have the option of replacing the kids with the band members...a better idea, we now think. The kids will be an excellent test of our skills in this area.

As we will not have long to shoot and edit I think we will need to make and keep to a tight shooting schedule. I will write up a plan of action for next week.

I would also like to get shots of the drummer throwing his drum sticks and then reversing this so they fly back to his hands as I have seen this kind of film reversal done in another music videos and it looks really effective.

We achieved a lot today as group. I'm becoming more organised in the way I work, if not the way I think! My main contributions today were recognising the need for a disciplined approach to our test production as well as creative input.

(21/9/10) week 2 of the music video topic

We spent the morning looking at more music videos with good examples of lip syncing such as the song 'There She Goes' by 'Six Pence, None the Richer'(below), while we were watching Mr. Duran also ran us through the use of different camera angles. Mr. Duran told us that students frequently came back from filming their band to find fatal problems in there filming such as no interesting camera angles (close ups, over shoulder, etc) or they filmed it in a dim room which meant their video was dark and dull. We then were given an mp3 player with 'There She Goes' on it, a portable speaker and a video camera and were told to go outside and film each other lip syncing the words to the song. Me and Michael decided it would be easier to mime 'Three Little Birds' by 'Bob Marley'. After about ten minutes of me and Michael arguing who should go first I managed to conquer my embarrassment and mime words while Michael filmed this excruciating episode. After that Michael did the same but just before I started filming he managed to poke him self in the eye, which meant he was squinting the whole time.It was unfortunate ,but still a rather funny event. (couldn't get the original 'There She Goes' so I got the American version.) Today was fun and satisfying. I successfully learnt to use film editing soft ware to lip-sync . It was also really useful to see to students past work and to learn valuable tips on camera angles. I think I now appreciate that when filming you need plenty of different shots such as close ups ,otherwise successful editing can become a real challenge!

(14/9/10) The first day of the 'MUSIC VIDEOS' topic

Today was the beginning of the our new topic -'MUSIC VIDEOS' .Obviously ,as the title states we will be making our own music video. In more detail we would be making our own music videos from scratch, using songs made by local bands. We were shown some music videos which I will explain in more detail in my research report. We were then shown some music videos made by the previous group, the one I liked the most was by Hadid and Ronnie who did some incredible cutting and pasting, which made it look like he was walking towards the camera while the enviroment around him kept snapping to somewhere else. I'd like to find out how thats done as I feel it could be used in a lot of ways.

MUSIC VIDEO

'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley: I first heard about this song from a friend who was trying to make a remix of it. Although I didn't know a thing about this song I did remember hearing it a long time ago. I ended up liking it quite a lot and decided to help make a remix. While doing so

we used a lot of the original video, so I saw a lot of it.

The original music video (on the right) looks a lot like those ink prints you famously get at psychiatric tests.

The ink pulses with the beat and changes with the song. Mixed in to the ink is the faces of the musicians who are singing (a good example is the picture on the right). I had problems getting the video so here is a link to the video on You Tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2B6SjMh_w&ob=av2e





THE LATE 1980'S

'Take On Me' by A-HA : I heard this song in an advert and found out from my mum it was a song from the 80's (1985 to be exact). It was one of the first music videos of its time to use such a massive amount of special effects, particularly a mix of drawn animation and film.

Its starts with animated sketches of race cars which start to move. It zooms out to show a young women reading a comic ion a busy cafe.The love interest in the magazine winks at her and then invites her into the story by extending a drawn hand out to her.

She accepts and the video now has a lot of fun showing us both characters,and other lesser band members in both filmed and animated states. A very cool video I thought,especially as it would of taken so long to sketch out all the frames. Pretty incredible for its time.

I really like the idea of maybe using still comic strips in a music video. A kind of Roy Lichtenstein .

'Thriller' by Michael Jackson was released on November 30, 1982 by Epic Records as the follow-up to Jackson's successful 1979 album, Off the wall. Thriller cemented Jackson's status as one of the top pop stars of the late 20th century.The video's release was hugely hyped and long awaited. It was also an unprecedented length, running for about 15 minutes. Often referred to as the greatest music video ever and has also been voted the most influential pop music video of all time, Thriller proved to have a profound effect on popular culture and was named "a watershed moment for the music industry for its unprecedented merging of filmmaking and music. Guinness World records listed it in 2006 as the "most successful music video", selling over 9 million units. It was directed by John Landis,a film maker who had made 'An American Werewolf in London.I WILL EXPAND ON THIS AS WE GO THROUGH THE TOPIC.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album. The song has no chorus, instead consisting of three main parts - a ballad segment ending with a guitar solo, an operatic passage, and a heavy rock section.

When it was released as a single, "Bohemian Rhapsody" became a huge commercial success, staying at the top of the UK charts for nine weeks and selling more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs,it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases.This video is really the mother of all videos and the beginning of the contemporary mix of sound and image.