- Unfortunately due to the poor weather conditions on October 28th, Monday our group were unable to go to London and film our first shoot as it would not have been appropriate for our music video.
- As a group we have decided to reschedule our first shoot to next weekend, when the weather is better as this is the nearest time the whole group and the cast are available. This is frustrating however is something we prepared for and although we have been delayed should still be able to get the majority of our filming completed in half term.
- Whilst currently shooting is our most important concern at the moment, we are currently putting some creative thought into our own digipak ideas and magazines adverts.
- From previous secondary research such as digipak analysis and analysis of brand image (which is found in the pitch).
- It has allowed us to develop our ideas and opinions on what we want the album cover to look like and what it should represent through different signifiers, and polysemics.
- An example being the brand image for Bastille. As in all their singles they follow the same trends, this being the name of single and word 'Bastille' incorporating within one another. Shown in picture's below.
Planning this week has been specifically for locations in London, in preparation for our first shoot. Here are specific examples of locations in London, and stations we will need to get to in order to shoot there.
- London Eye, Waterloo Station
- Westminster Bridge, Waterloo Station
- Camden Markets, Camden Town Tube Station
- Hamleys, Charing Cross or Regent Street Tube Station
- Hyde Park, Marble Arch Tube Station or Lancaster Gate Tube Station
- Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross
- Science Museum, South Kensington
We also have several ideas for particular shots:
- Several establishing shots of places in London, e.g. London Eye, Big Ben, etc.
- Track movements of the Thames.
- Close ups of boys emotions, specifically in 'happy places' e.g. Hamleys.
- Time Lapses, e.g. along Thames, traffic, train journey.
- Low angle shots, from the boys perspective.
- Birds- eye view shots.
- Pull Focus.
We also have ideas of props:
- We have reached the finishing point of the animatic. We have edited all the shots of the storyboards together, showing the appropriate length and right camera movement in each frame.
- There are some final touches that we need to do. This includes putting our track behind the visuals so all can see what is going to happen at what point.
- Furthermore we need to do some last touch ups to make sure all the shots are straight and centrally focused to give the animatic a professional look.
- We have learnt a lot from the animatic.
- Firstly it has given us a good idea of how much footage we are going to need, and what ratio of action to filler shots we will need to prevent the video from being to boring.
- Secondly we can now see what areas we are lacking in. For example a music video should always contain lots of close up shots and have minimal static shots. From our animatic we can now see if we have too many static shots or not enough close ups and then when it comes to filming our first shoot we can improvise and change our planned shots to make them more interesting.
- Lastly we have learnt a lot about the process of making a music video. The animatic has really helped us to map out our shots; we have since learnt that this is vital for any music video to be successful, otherwise it could go wrong and look bad quality.
- During today's lesson I planned where we would be filming for our music video in more detail. I did this by noting down specific places and locations that we consider would be ideal for our music video, including road names, nearest stations and areas of interest. This is important to us as a group so we can use our time efficiently and get as much footage as possible.
- We have decided we are going to shoot in half term and as a group are currently deciding on an appropriate day that ourselves and our cast will be available for. We are very aware that our shooting is relatively whether dependant as we do not want to film in the rain or too murky conditions, therefore it may be a spontaneously decided day.
- To be well prepared for our first shoot I believe that if we research further into what shots and smaller technical details that we plan to use in each location. These notes will give us more ideas and save us potentially multiple trips when going to locations and we are stuck for shots. Therefore this planning is key to getting good footage for our production.
- As a group we have each contributed to creating a storyboard
for a music video. This includes 50 drawn shots with descriptions of camera angles
and movement on them. During this lesson
we filmed the storyboard shots and intend to import these onto our computer and
create an animatic storyboard, we also used camera movements to reinforce the
movement intended each frame when filming.
- We believe that the storyboard will be useful when filming
our music video as it gives us a basic series of events, assisting our planning
and therefore saving us time during the filming of our video as we will know
what shots we want to shoot, where.
- However it was also hard trying to demonstrate the feel of
our music video through the use of our storyboard as we intend to film a lot of
footage spontaneously at our locations, for filler shots. Therefore we were
unable to put these in our storyboard.
- In this lesson Jacques edited some footage he took over the weekend, these were preliminary shots of actual shots we hope to create in our final production. We did this because feedback from our pitch said we needed to practise filming in a house, to ensure we understood the difficulties. One of which being the constant movement needed in every shot of a music video. As well as this some feedback from our pitch was that the pitch audience could not visualise particular shots, meaning we should do some practise shots. Jacques filmed his brother, who is to be our protagonist, to try and show our pitch audience what it could look like.
- Nathan and myself aimed to storyboard our actual concept. We found it fairly easy as we had ideas about specific shots, however as Nathan and myself are not artists we found it hard to make detailed sketches of shots. Currently we have 18 frames, but we hope to have around 40 shots when creating the animatic. Which we will start filming in the next week. Here are some examples of the storyboard sketches so far:
