Friday 21 October 2011

Rough Cut

Photos of our costumes and props

Here are the photos of the costumes we used throughout the film.



This is a photo of the main prop we use in the video, being a microhone


Product Placement

Throughout our video we have used a lot of product placement. We decided to do this as we were trying to keep our video strongly associated to hip-hop.

We used a lot of nike, and adidas as  these are the most relevant style brands worn throughout the hip hop scene.
Harry was dressed in a nike tracksuit, whilst Tyler wore nike trainers. We placed an adidas shoebox in one of the shots to further suggest this product placement.



We believe this was a successful idea as the video now coincides with typical hip hop conventions

The Nextmen Email

Recently we as a group emailed the band who created the music to our video. The email consisted of a few copyright issues, also us asking the band if they had any suggested input.
The email we sent consisted of the following:

The Nextmen!
We are a group of students from Long Road Sixth form, Cambridgeshire
currently studying A level media studies.
Our current project is to pick a track, and create from scratch a music
video for this song. We decided to choose your tune 'My way'. We understand
hugely copyright concerns, but we want to clarify the video is purely for
college views, and will not be released, sold or used in any other intended
way.
Whilst we have a plan for the video, we wanted to ask if you or any of your
team had any input or ideas that we could possibly include within our video.
Any input would be hugely appreciated and gladly included.
If you would like to see our final video or hear our plan, please feel free
to email and we would be more than happy to have a concussion about it.
Kind Regards,
 Tyler, Martin, Harry, Dan




We sent this email not expecting a reply, but an hour or so later we received this reply:

Hello.


Yes this should be fine. We'll leave the creative input up to you guys though if that's alright :)


You could tell us the plan if you like, or just keep it as a surprise.




Thanks




Dom & Brad

Monday 17 October 2011

lyrics and ideas

"In my zone, thoughts running through my zone,
on my own, real far away from home,
but let it be known, not all alone,
just me myself and my microphone"

We have decided to try to link our video more with the lyrics of the chorus which are clearly revolved around microphones. We had a vague idea as a group how to include microphones into the video and concluded that we would use irony throughout our video to feature microphones. For other ideas we tried to inspire ourselves with suggestions from other artists' music videos.


This rizzle kicks video features the same sort of irony as at 1.28, discretely in the background a drug deal styled transaction between the dealer selling a trumpet and the buyer.
This has influenced and inspired our ideas for our music video, where instead of the mugger wanting to buy drugs/stolen goods we have edited it so he now wants to buy a microphone.
There will be various points throughout the video where microphones will casually, but not blatantly be dropped in, for example at the beginning there will be a picture of a microphone on the laptop screen.
And as in the Rizzle Kicks video, When the transaction happens at the cashpoint, there will be someone selling a microphone near by in the background, in a sketchy manor.

We believe that this will add a bit of a twist and keep the audience engaged as it does not follow the conventional story line of a hip-hop video, however the mood and genre of the video are kept similar and match with the beat and lyrics of the song in order to not lose/confuse the viewers.


Moodboard

Copyright

Definition of Copyright

A copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to the creator of an original work or their assigned for a limited period of time upon disclosure of the work. This includes the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.
We have all discussed these issues, and agreed not o directly copy any scenes or shots that our inspiration Johnathon Glazer or any other form of video may possess. Although we are using different editing shots and techniques as inspiration, we understand we cannot directly take the idea and copy it into out music video

Opinions, things to include and further planning

Over the past few meetings we as a 'production team' have had, we have further planned, hinted to change and concluded what our filming will typically be.

Although we all decided to that Johnathon Glazer was our inspiration and we wasnt going to include any lip syncing, there has been a few discussions concerning changing this. Although we wanted to keep our video mainly based around conventions J Glazer uses, we have discussed maybe adding an extra person into the group to lip sync over the chorus of our song. This person would only be included during the chorus to keep the video consistent and un-confusing. We are still debating whether to do this or not, and on the day of filming we are going to make a final decision whether to use this idea or not, although we will film it so if we do decide to, we can use the footage.


As well as this, there has been a few issues with transportation issues, and whether we can use a car in our video or not. If the reality is we cant, we will change the shots to instead of meeting in a car, meeting in a secluded area to still keep the aspect of secret rife throughout. If we do change this,we will comment on the blog surrounding all of the changes, different health and safety aspects and shot lists.


Finally, our last concern is editing. After researching, we have found many individual editing tehcniques and effects, some of which we may decide whilst editing to include in the video. EG the mirror effect. having somebodies reflection doing something different to their actions. This again will be something we finally decide after the footage is shot, so we can see the success, or failure of the effects on screen.
At present, these are the only things going on regarding changing our film planning, although if any more do occur we will blog to ensure we have kept a record of the changes

Test shots

These are a selection of still images we took of various scenes that will feature in our music video. We took these pictures to find out the general atmosphere and look of the shots to see if  they matched the genre and mood of the song. We also took pictures to gain a general idea of roughly how our film footage will look like and whether or not we needed to make any editions in relation to this.
Fortunately we found that these pictures were accurate to how we wanted our footage to look like and we had no surprises but are looking forward to expanding on these pictures and capturing some real footage and in the planned location.










Influences


This video captures the feel and atmosphere that we plan to create in our video. The grim locations featured are clearly in London because of the landmarks visible, areas like this are harder to come by in Cambridge but we have selected are well suited to what we need. The clothing worn in this video is the kind of thing we will all wear in our video to appear like the characters we are trying to play. We will also use some similar camera shots to this video as they also follow the subject of the video as our video does. However this video entirely revolves around lip-synching which ours will not and also does not feature a storyline which is what we plan to include.


This is a screen shot from the film 'Kidulthood'. These are the kind of clothes we will wear in our video to bring across similar character types to the film.


Our video does not follow the typical conventions of a music video as it follows a narrative like a short film accompanied by the music playing in a non - diagetic format. We took influence from auteur Jonathon Glazer who uses this technique to bring across a darker and less traditional atmosphere to his videos. We decided using this method would fit the feel of the song and would be more powerful than ,ore typical type music video. An example of a video that does the same thing is Chase & Status Let You Go which became a very successful song which shows that a non typical video can still attract a large audience. 


Friday 7 October 2011

Analysis of past student work

I have looked at Group 5's video and thought it was a very good piece of work. They have some kind of camera filter to give the video a 'vintage look' which works effectively with the style of music. The video is very simple featuring just one man and his guitar in and around Cambridge which also suits the folk genre well. I really like the shots on the punt as it

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Tuesday 4 October 2011

Health and Safety

During the filming of our video it is important that we work safely to ensure that no one is harmed. Some of the shots we intend to use will be filmed in Tyler's car so we must makes sure that we a particularly safe whilst filming these shots. We must all wear our seat belts and Tyler must pay close attention to the highway code while we are moving. Our video features a mugging scene so we must make sure that nobody is actually physically harmed while filming this but ensure that it is still realistic. We must also be aware that the public are not offended or harmed while we are filming the more graphic scenes of our video.