(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.