Review Of Filming For Our Mini Video

Filming for our mini video has now been finished and we are planning to crack on with editing as soon as possible.

Overall, I feel filming went rather well. We were able to stick to our overall plan of what shots to get, we were able to get a large variety of both performance and narrative shots. We were able to shoot in a variety of locations and also get several extras to help us with the shots of people acting 'freely'.

We did encounter some difficulties with the task of lip-syncing, this proved to be rather difficult for our 'lead singer' Ben Hudson especially and the shots of this lip syncing to a long time to get right. Also, I feel that the mise-en-scene in our video won't be to a particularly high quality since all three of the 'band members' were wearing rather average clothes and were not really dressed as a band.

However, overall I was pleased with filming and hopefully after editing, we will have a brilliant 'mini-vid'.

The final video will be posted on here when editing is complete.

Ideas For Our 'Mini Vid'

After listening to the song several times, our group began to think up some general ideas of what would happen in our 'mini video' and how/when we would film.

After much discussion, we began to finalise our ideas. The general gist of our ideas were going to be performance and narrative based. Since the song is very musically driven we decided we would have many band shots, which would also incorporate some lip-syncing from the 'lead singer' of our band Ben Hudson. Me and Conor would be playing guitars during the performance shots, whilst Ben will be playing the role of a lead singer. These performance shots will compromise around half of the video, the rest of our video will be narrative based. 

For the narrative aspects of our mini-vid, the general concepts of it will be people/band members acting 'freely'. The majority of the narrative of our video will consist of our lead singer spreading his 'freeness' to fellow band members/random people who are looking very upset, but when Ben 'touches' them they become free too! Also, there will be several random shots of people/band members acting 'freely' to help fill in the video. These shots will consist of people acting joyously free, rolling in grass, hugging etc.

A review of filming will be posted on here as well as the final video once editing is complete.

'Mini-Vid' Preparation

For a task to help us in our A2 coursework, we were assigned into groups of around five people. Each group was assigned three different tracks from a wide variety of music genres. The task was to pick one of the three songs, and then create a 'mini vid' for a snippet of the song, a length of between 30 and 60 seconds.

Our group chose the song 'I Feel Free - Cream' from their 1966 album 'Fresh Cream'.



The reason we chose this video over our other songs was because we thought it would be relatively easy to create a music video for, because of how the song goes and even its title gives us a lot of freedom to do whatever we please with the video.

Ideas for our video will be in a following post.

Review of 'Britney Day'

On Tuesday the 12th, the filming for our recreation of 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' took place. The day was a renowned success and hopefully, we will have a polished off music video when all the editing has finished.

Our day started with a 'practise' session where we were allowed to practise our choreography and also perfect our lip-syncing. This was a fun and relaxing start to (what turned out to be a surprisingly stressful day) and it allowed our group to be ready for the filming of our 'corridor' scenes.

The filming of a our corridor scene was overall, a success. We think we were able to get all the shots we needed (although when editing is complete this will be confirmed). Filming was highly enjoyable - although it did take slightly longer than planned and we did actually go over our allotted time, however this proved to not be a massive problem.

When I wasn't filming our corridor scene, I was helping out other groups in their filming as an extra, dancer etc. This was pretty laid back but I enjoyed helping others out and also my dance moves turned out to be pretty epic...

Overall the day was thoroughly enjoyable and I found it a rewarding experience. It taught me the large importance of how hard music videos are to create. Time management is definitely essential (especially as we went over our allotted time), lip-syncing is incredibly difficult but it's completely needed in music videos. But foremost, being professional and having each member contribute equally is quintessential to creating the music video.

When editing is complete, I shall post the finalised music video on here.

Pre-Britney Video Work

In the line up to us re-creating Britney Spears' video for 'Hit Me Baby One More Time'...we had several tasks to complete.



Firstly, me and Tom had to deconstruct a certain period of the music video. We found this to be exceedingly difficult because of the vast variety of the shots, and also the speed of which they'd been edited made it extremely difficult to deconstruct. This task took us a lot longer than expected, but we did eventually finish the task and found it to be very rewarding because it allowed us to examine the video in great detail and we became experts on that particular exert of the video.

Secondly, the two media classes had to create a call sheet that would be used on the day of filming. All media students equally contributed to this and it proved to be largely valuable on the day of filming, as it gave direct instructions on how to film each shot.

Final Cut & New Equipment

For our A2 project, we are switching from the software we used in AS. We are switching to using 'Final Cut' to edit our videos after filming, as opposed to 'iMovie' (which we used at AS). I have had a quick tutorial on the fundamentals of how to use 'Final Cut' and essentially, it seems very similar to 'iMovie'. However, 'Final Cut' has the ability to have layers of frames in one shot, an ability that 'iMovie' lacked! This will be greatly useful to use when creating our music videos, as it is a very common convention used in many music videos.
Another 'step up' in equipment that we have access to from AS is that we now have access to HD video cameras. These greatly improve the quality of how productions, as they use a wide lens. This will make our productions appear a lot more professionally made.

My Favourite Music Video

This was a no-brainer really.
My favourite video ever is November Rain - Guns N' Roses from their 1991 album 'Use Your Illusion I'
What makes this my favourite video is the clear narrative at play, the story of a man gone from the epitome of happiness at his wedding to a drug idled state and ultimately, death. The performance shots in the video are absolutely epic and I think my favourite scene from any music video ever is that of Slash walking from the little white church in the middle of no where to play his amazing guitar solo...

Performance/Narrative in Music Videos

So far in lessons we have been discussing key music video ideas/codes and conventions.
We have discovered that every music video usually consists of either a narrative style of video (based on a story, like a small movie) or they're performance based (focusing on the band/artist playing their instruments, this is primarily used in rock/metal bands where the focus is on the band playing their instruments, as opposed to rap artists).
The below is of Without You - Hinder, which incorporates both performance and narrative in a brilliant video.