New Shooting Schedule

Tuesday 7th February - Filming to begin on Sidcup highstreet after school at 3.30pm. We plan to find a cafe where we can film from the outside showing our characters enjoying a meal together. This is contrasted when we will film just the male on his own. Head shots to be done of each character, long shots, medium close up and close up shots to be taken against a plain wall.

Update: Completed

Monday 13th - All to meet up at Emily's house at 12.00 to finish our filming. We will shoot some scenes at her house where we will film the male looking into the house where he will be looking at himself and his girlfriend eating dinner. Additionally we will then go into Dartford and film more scenes such the cafe scene again in order to make sure we get the best footage for our final cut. We will locate a bridge in which we can have our male actor looking over looking at himself and his girlfriend walking by again showing that he is looking back at his life. Here we will film all the performance side to our video which will help to promote the artist.

Update: Completed

We spent the whole day filming in Dartford to ensure we got all the footage that we needed for our final video. Doing a performance video we had to change our approach to our video as we needed to be aware of the artist looking at the camera, we made sure we filmed scenes twice to ensure we got the footage that we needed.

After looking at our footage we were still not happy with some of the shots, the natural lighting from our location was very vibrant on screen and made it difficult to see the lip syncing of the artist. With the deadline fast approaching we wrote down which bits we wanting to re film and went out to film so that we had time to edit it in time for our deadline.

Change of Ideas

 From the feedback that we had received we knew that we had to make some major changes. The whole point of feedback is so that you can change it to satisfy a customers wants and needs. We only had a short amount of time in order to change our rough cut to our final cut and so we did not have time to plan a whole new story board as our original one did take around 2 weeks to produce. We decided that our story did not fit in with the song we had chosen. Although we still wanted to use our characters because we had planned our filming around them we decided to change our story line. Instead of our male character having a stalker we decided to make the male and female boyfriend and girlfriend but sadly they had split up, the video now looks at him looking at his past with his girlfriend and going back to all the places they have visited together. As well as keeping the video a narrative we are also going to make the video a performance video so that we can promote are artist a lot more than we had previously done. A new audience watching this video would not know that our main character was the main artist of Bloc Party and so we decided we needed to make this more clear after looking at our feedback. We had already filmed in Camden for our music video but now we had changed the story line most of this footage could not be used however some of the footage can be used for example where Emily comes closer to Jake as he is standing still, this still creates a sense of mystery and illusion for the audience as its almost as if she is ghost like. The end of the video will show Jake concluding his journey looking back at the past with his girlfriend and will show him walking off alone into the distance. We felt that this was a much better story line and actually fitted in with the lyrics of our song.

For example in the chorus it says 'we were hoping for some romance, all we found was more despair' this portrays that our male was looking for the romance to continue but because they had split up despair was created.

Visuals complimenting the visuals...
Due the large amounts of rendering we had to do every time we edited our music video we decided to change our choice of camera to a hand held video camera. Due to the fact it took so long to edited we did not really have enough time to try out different effects as simply to test one effect took around 5 minutes which was vital editing time. The use of the new camera will allow us to place in more effects such as overlays as it does not requiring rendering as often. Lyrics such as 'if your right hand is causing you pain cut it off, cut it off' we will place an overlay of this happening so that the lyrics and the visuals compliment each other.

New Locations

It was difficult to try to get up to London again seeing as we all lived in different areas and getting trains was sometimes difficult and expensive. We therefore decided to film more locally this way we knew what locations were best and we did not waste time looking for places to film. Our chosen three locations to film were Sidcup, Dartford and one of our houses. Having three different locations creates a variety of shots for the audience watching our video. This should help to prevent audiences thinking our video is too repetitive.

Dartford Highstreet

Sidcup Highstreet

Emilys House

Initial Feedback

After showing the class our rough cut we received some feedback...

This is a picture of our feedback, the general summary was that:
-not enough variety of shots, the song has a lot of chorus and only a few verses and we used the same shots for the chorus, which caused some repetitiveness for our audience.
- story line was not clear and our song did not promote the artist because it was a narrative and not a performance.
-The strobe lights used in our rough cut, although some liked the effects they were not bright enough and so some of the shots were not very clear.
- In our animatic we underestimated how long it would take to film something and so our ending lasted longer than the actual music which needs to be changed.

Looking back at our rough cut we all decided that we needed to make some major changes...

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.

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'.