The Animatic

Here is our final animatic

This is our finished animatic, we did not use transitions in this animatic as it messed up our timings but we hope to add in over lays, and fade in fade outs in the real thing. The beat of this song was strange and sometimes changed on the beat of 7. For the majority of the song we changed scene on beats of 8, 4 and 2 with the occassional 7 and 3 because it fitted in and was apropriate to change there.

The Pitch

Before we went to London we decided to make a poster showing what sort of places we would like to visit and where abouts we needed to go. This would make it easier when we went there as London is a huge place. Below is a picture of what we created.

Here are some key images of Camden for our music video.

Why London?
We chose to film our music video in the town of Camden in London, we thought it was appropriate here as there is easy tube access and busy streets which give off the type of atmosphere we want to create.
What in particular appeals to us here?
Camden is famous for its busy market and graffiti art, the busy street will allow us to create a 'no escape' atmosphere, making our actor Jake look scared and wanting to get away. The busy street also allows us to blend in with the crowd for when we want to create a scene for example bumping into Jake as we can not do this with a person we do not know in London. In our music video we have several scenes where we will speed up the passers by to create a sense of time moving quickly. The popular town of Camden will allow us to do this. We also have incorporated ally ways into the music video and there are various places with graffiti which we can use. The lighting in Camden is vibrant especially at Christmas time where lighting will be strong and colourful, this will allow us to see facial expressions to portray the real emotion shown by the characters.
What is the music video about?
- Our music video consists of two main characters one being an 18 year old indie looking male and the other an 18 year old small and petite girl.
- The music video is based in London where the male character will be seen walking out of the tube station, as he walks down the street he finds himself in an alley to get away from the busy street. However he finds himself met with a girl (who will be dressed to look mysterious). The audience do not know this yet, but this is the males stalker. It soon becomes clear in the rest of the video where the female is present in almost every scene to show her obsession with the male.
-To convey the obsession for the chorus we will make a wall of pictures of the male (Jake) which the female has created (Emily). This makes it clear to the audience that Emily is obsessed with Jake.
-The fast tempo of the song has allowed us to use fast editing at some points of the music video. One of these points is when the scenes change from a picture of Emily to a picture of Jake quickly. For the audience this should create an ominous atmosphere and really emphasize the obsession.
What emotions will be portrayed in the music video?
The lyrics in Flux do not really give anything away. By this I mean that it is not obvious as to what the lyrics mean. This meant as a group we had to decide on what we thought the lyrics portrayed. Using key words in the lyrics such as 'Despair' and 'Romance' we came up with our stalker idea.
The types of emotions we need to create are...
- Paranoia
- Despair
- Anger
- Loneliness
- Confusion
- Mystery

Editing and Camera Effects

For a music video to stand out you can not always just have straight cuts to change scene or film it and put it straight out onto the music market. It takes months of editing to produce a music video and this will be no different for us.

The use of overlays...

These pictures are taken from Pixie Lott's music video 'All about tonight'. The overlays are used here to show the artist and the location, this is interesting for the audience as they can see two things at once on a screen which is not something that they would usually experence.

Lighting

Here is a video of Bloc Party performing Flux at Reading Festivl in 2009. The band use a large anount of strobe lighting in the back ground which compliments the beat of the song. This is what myself and the group will try to recreate for the chorus of our song with the use of a strobe light.  We think that the strobe lights will create shadows and definition for our character so that the audience can see the emoitions of the character clearly. The fast pace of a strobe light will fit the fast tempo of the chorus.

Our music video will be filmed at night in Camden where there are various lights which enable people to see where they are going. One of these lights are street lamps which we aim to incorporate into our music video.We need to be careful that we do not film in areas that are too dark as our camera does not have a light on it and so may not pick up the images as clearly as we would like.

Editing the animatic

The purpose of our animation slideshow was so that we could get a rough idea of how our actual music video would look when it was all put together. We put together all our images from our story board which we had previously drawn. These pictures were all cropped and edited in photoshop so that they all had a consistent house style. In our group none of us had used final cut before and so before we actually began we decided to have a play around on the programme and get used to all of its controls. Adding images into the programme was easy as all we did was import a folder where all our story board images were. Never using this programme before also meant that we did not know how to edit and after many attempts of trying to put it together on where we thought the scene should change was often at the wrong times. After working out the songs beat we mainly used beats of 8, 4 and 2. This made the animatic much easier to edit and also looked much better. As well as the images we had to import our music track, we did this by uploading the song onto the Apple Mac and ensuring the file was MP3. We could cut and extend images to however we liked and meant we could see which scenes we wanted longer and what scenes were not needed. The creation of this will enable us to look at all our timings and scenes so that we can create a similar peice for our rough cut.
The timings that we had originally planned for did change slightly as the song we had on the computer was slightly different to the one we used on the animatic. In our animatic video we did try to add in slide transitions however this did began to mess up the timings of our music video so we decided to leave these out until the real thing. We hope to add
-Overlays
-Fade in fade in out
-Shaking effect

Here are some picture of the process of editing the animatic, the green bar is the audio and the blue bars are the story board images. I found this process exciting as it brought all of ideas together with our chosen music choice.

Bloc Party

This is the band Bloc Party, it consists of four band members. They are an indie rock band composed of Kele Okereke (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Russell Lissack (lead guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass guitar, synths, backing vocals, glockenspiel), and Matt Tong (drums, backing vocals). Their type of music has been to said to have been drawn from bands such as Radiohead and The Cure. Bloc party was formed in 1999 at reading festival (a popular festival consisting of indie music). The band did not set on the name Bloc Party until 2003.
The band first had their break through when Okereke gave the single 'shes hearing voices' to the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand during a concert, from here the
song was played on Radio 1. The song proved popular and this lead to many more releases of songs. There first song was vital in setting the scene for the type of music genre and target auidence they were aiming for. The indie genre has a huge fan base, and proved popular.

ALBUMS

Bloc Party released their debut album 'Silent Alarms' in Feburary 2005. This album was voted 'album of the year' by NME and reached number 3 in the UK album charts. The band turned out to gain a good reputation and it was dicovered they had positivite reviews from those in the US. Bloc party were now not only a UK band but a global band.

This was Bloc Party's first album cover; as you can see it is simple yet effective. Bloc Party have taken the name of the ablum and portrayed it in the picture. It presents a tranquill setting in a field with the use of whites, grey and black colouring. The band have not used their picture in this cover, this is possibly because the band had only just started out and fans and new audiences may not realise who the band are visually just yet. This however does work in the bands favour as they could put the band name in a large type face in order to stand out on the shelves with the hundreds of other albums. Releasing a first album is always difficult and the sales will decide the success or the failure of a new and upcoming band. This album sold over 1,000,000 copies worldwide.

The bands next album was called 'A Weekend in the City' which was released in February 2007. (2 years after their first album), however this ablum was leaked in November 2006 and so was put on itunes for download so that the band did not lose out on sales. It debuted at number 12 in the Billboard 200, with 48,000 copies sold. This ablum reached number 2 in the UK album charts.

This is the art work for the second ablum released by Bloc Party, again the band do not use images of themselves. Having an image as the second cover begins to set a house style for the band and audiences will now notice that this is a Bloc Party album. The name of the album reflects the image on the cover. This picture is taken from a high angle where you can see the roads that you would usally find in the 'city'. Additionally lighting is key here, they use ambient lighting for example using the street lamps. The lighting on the roads has been cleverely edited to show the break and head lights of a car without actually showing the cars in the picture. The bands name and ablum name has been placed in the top left of the album. It has been coloured in white in order to stand out from the rest of the ablum.

The bands third album was named 'Intimacy' and was released in August 2008 one month after the band released their popular single 'Mercury'.

This album cover again does not feature the band but does have an image of two people about to kiss. This reflects the ablum name as kissing is an intmate thing. The lighting is used effectively here with the faces in a pale colour with a dark background in the space between them. The shadowing here helps to define the facial features of both faces.

In 2009 the band did not have a current recording contract and so were under no obligation to produce any more albums. They did release one more single called 'One More Chance' in August 2009 which almost relfects the state were previously in. After this the band decided to go on 'hiatus' and were unsure if they would continue with the band. However in 2011 the band are currently writing their fourth album with 15 new tracks. There has been speculation whether the band are looking for a new lead singer or not.

Looking at these ablums covers has given inspiration and ideas when we come to make our cd cover for the single 'Flux'.

Planning the story board

Here is an audio clip of Sophie and Emily discussing the next scenes for the music video. Whilst they were doing this me and Voke were drawing the images out ready for them to be pictured, uploaded and edited in final cut.

These are the drawings of our animatic all layed out together. Myself and Voke drew the pictures onto the story boards and helped with planning whilst Emily and Sophie worked out the timings for our video and how long each clip should be. This was extremely useful as when it came to editing the animatic we could look at our timings and then see how long each clip needed to be. Planning a story board was a long proccess especially for a three and a half minute song in which each scene did not last more than ten seconds.

Female Character

This is Emily and she will be playing the part of Jakes Girlfriend. In our orignal media story line we planning to dress Emily in a distinguishable outfit for example a leopard print jacket so that the audience could clearly identify her from other people who may be in shot. When we changed oustory line we decided to dress her in normal clothing so that she fitted into the 'girlfriend' rather than a stalker. This made the story line look more believeable. We believe she has the right quirky dress sense which can be seen in the indie genre.  

Male Character

When planning our video we decided that we needed an male around 18 years of age with an indie look, with this brief we found our man. This is Jake, he is 18 years of age, long hair, tatoos and is a smoker. With this he was perfect for our video and perfect for giving us our indie look. In our original music video Jake needed to portray emotions of confusion and panic at the fact that he is being stalked. When this changed we no longer had to portray this kind of emotion and instead asked Jake to lip sing the whole song and also give off the feeling that he misses his girlfriend. We will dress jake in a zip up hoodie (as drawn in our animatic) and skinny jeans, he has sweeping hair which is a distinc characteristic of the indie genre.

Planning

We recently started to put down final ideas for our music video and began to story board. Using sheets that had four black boxes on we were able to draw pictures of each scene with a brief description of what was happening. In order to do this I had our chosen song on my phone and we listened carefully to what we thought the opening scene should be, after listening a few times we finally decided that we would film our character coming out of the underground at camden.



We drew this on our story board...

As well as this we had to ensure that timings were accurate; when listening to the song we found regular intervals where we felt the scene should change and wrote down how long each scene will last for. This started to put a real picture of what the video would look like.

Whilst planning our story board we decided to change our idea slightly, instead of solely focusing on drugs and delinquent behavious we decided to introduce a female into the video. This female would be a stalker of the male character and would appear frequently in the video to create the stalker effect. We found that this was a good idea and fitted in well with the lyrics which talk about 'romance' and 'despair'.

Mood Board

To make our mood board we used two peices of a3 paper to make a large surface area. On this we printed out the lyrics for the song and around it put pictures of our ideas and images we wanted to create for our music video. The kind of images we used were pictures of indie boys, location shots, drug use and graffiti. As well as this we took key lyrics from the song and enlarged them as you can see these were 'state of flux' 'despair' and 'romance' which we want to create in our music video. Below are images or the finished mood board.

Copyright Letter

For our choice of music 'Flux - Bloc Party' we had to get copy right permission to use the song and make a music video with it. In the letter we said how we wold not use our video in the mass media and only the exam board and the class would see the video. To find out who we needed to send an email to we used 'Google' to find out the producers of the Bloc party records. After researching we found one name 'Paul Epworth' that was a producer of Bloc Party music. We could not find a direct contact for him but found the company who managed him. This was Empire Management. We sent an email to them regarding the song copyright permission. We received an email back saying that we needed to get in contact with the record label 'Witchita' records which could be more useful. We sent this email...

After a few minutes we recieved an email back which said...





We were now getting closer to getting copyright permission as we were given a personal email address. We sent an email to Hannah Neaves using the same letter template we had for all the other emails we had sent. After a few minutes we receieved this response...

We now have permission to use 'Flux - Bloc Party' for our A2 media music video

:)

Here is a brainstorm of what we are considering to do for our music video...

Flux - Bloc Party on Prezi

Editing

Editing is the post production process of rearranging shots to create a new piece of work.

The three videos below show the use of editing in indie music videos. After looking at several videos I felt that these three had the best editing. Green day's video even got an MTV music video award.



The type of editing in this video mainly focuses on the pace of the editing. The editing has been sped up especially when the band are being puppets. Images are added to the music video for example the ribbon in the screen shot below. They caputre imagery very well in this video and use it to create the appearance of them floating

Green day won an award for this music video, they use editing throughout their video to create an old western effect. As you can see from the screen shots below you would of had to edit these effects in as they would not be captured on camera.

The use of editing is very clever in this music video. Below I have taken screen shots of images where I think editing is used very effectively. This music video is a performance video but has additional extras for example using text to represent a lyric.

Editing Tips

TIP	EXPLANATION
Leave 10 seconds before significant footage is taken	This allows you to identify the shot which you can later voice over. This will speed up the process of editing when it comes to finding certain clips
Always take two shots of scene	This means you have back up if one of the scenes goes wrong. This will save time as you will not need to go and film this scene again. One of the shots may also be better than the other and so you can have a choice to produce the best peice of work
Consider moving shots	The length of a shot needs to be relative to the pace of the music, there is no point having a long shot in face paced music as it will not make sense. The length of shots can also be effective for example when using zooms (short shots will be used e.g when you are showing what someone is looking at).
Avoid jump cuts	This is when the scene cuts from one scene to one that has no relation to the previous scene which can confuse the audience
Shorten the scenes	In order to fit in all the shots you want and to keep the audience interested you can cut out unnecessary scenes for example if you are showing someone walking down the stairs you only need to show the first few steps to establish what the person is doing. You would not need to film all of the stairs as this would waste time.

The Script 'Nothing'

The music videos that The Script create have a specific mode of address and have a regular house style. Mostly all of their music videos are set in a busy town or city such as London where you can clearly see the lead singer (Danny O'Donoghue) walking down the streets lip syncing to the lyrics. The videos are always based on boy and girl situations for example 'The man who can't be moved' consists of the male sitting on a corner waiting where he last saw the girl and staying there until he sees her again. The Script incorporate narratives and performances in their videos; you will always find that the lead singer is filmed the most whilst the other band members can be seen as the 'friends' or during the performance. This creates a brand image for the group and those watching the video will be able to distinguish the lead singer. This is typical of a music video which singles out and focuses on the lead singer. The location of the music videos are exactly what we are looking to create and therefore analysing one of their videos should help to get some ideas and inspire us for camera angles, movement, lighting, sound and mise en scene.

We decided to Analise 'Nothing' because this video represents how some people can turn to drink after a break up. This is similar to the music video we are trying to create but with a drug addiction instead. Although the music is much slower we still feel that the story line will fit into our fast paced song.

The song begins with a guitar introduction, the tone of this is calm which is complimented with an image of someone under water with harsh lighting reflecting on the water. The next shot is set in a club, artificial lighting is used to create the stereotypical club setting. The camera is placed behind the bar where we can see the lead singer Danny and his band mates drinking. The lighting behind them really defines the facial expressions of the band and so the audience watching can easily see the type of emotion being created . The typical music you would hear in a club is not apparent in this video; they silence it and add in the melody of there song creating a calmer atmosphere, the lyrics begin and the first few lines say 'am I better off dead, am I better off a quitter, they say im better off now, then I ever was with her' this is met with an image of a alchol, automatically we realise that the lyrics represent a break up and he is getting drunk to forget about the girl. This video uses a lot of close ups to isolate the facial expressions of Danny, and also means the audience can clearly see how his speech matches up with the lyrics making the video more realistic. The video uses a shallow focuses in order to draw attention to the lead singer, I really like this effect and think it would be effective in our music video. Straight cuts are used to change scenes and a to a certain extent continuity editing is used which makes the cuts un obvious to the audience. After a few more drinks the band make there way out of the club and onto the street, here the lyrics say "'cause im shouting your name all over town" . As you can see the image shows Danny shouting on the street, this is a typical convention of a music video that matches the lyrics up with the visual, which again creates realism. At 1:50 of the music video it incorporates the performance side into it . The image at the beginning of the song (underwater) is referenced throughout the song unobviously. It was only after watching the music video serveral times that I noticed the links to water throughout. When images of performance are shown the lighting behind the band looks like the reflections of the water. This ambient lighting creates helps to draw attention to what the band members are doing. When using close ups the relfection of the water also helps to brighten up the lead singers face contrasting the dark background, this really emphasizes the emotion being portrayed .The next image is of the band walking over the bridge, I really like the lighting used here as you can clearly see where they are and what they are doing, as well as creating a mysterious atmosphere. The two other band members walk off and Danny is left on the bridge by himself; the audience here begin to worry as he is drunk and leaning over the edge. After a few lines have been sung the inevitable happens and Danny gets ready to jump. This shows how much he is depressed about the girl he is willing to take his own life. This is similar to what we as a group are trying to create as the boy will turn to drugs because of the girl. As he jumps into the water the line says 'sometimes loves intoxicating' showing that love can be like a drug and can make people lose control of their faculties or behavior. The music seems to be calmer as they drag Danny out of the water; here the first verse is repeated. The line 'am I better off dead' is emphasized here as the audience know that he tried to kill himself. This image is contrasted with one of Danny walking in the street singing directly to the camera. This is an important feature of a music video which really included the audience and gives the appearence that they are singing to the person watching. It is also easier to see mouth movements and actions when they are facing the camera . The last image of the video is the same as the starting image creating a cyclical structure .