Our final choice of song is The Love Club by Lorde. We chose this song as we felt like we could create a great video especially visually, especially focusing on the beat of the track. The lyrics also fit really well with the theme we are going for. Our themes being;
Love (hating it)
Growing up
Emotions – particularly anger
Relationships (hating it)
We are aiming for quite a performance based video as we have lots of effective ideas, but also want to communicate the message of hating love to our audience. We are going to use cool visual effects such as props to make a mockery out of a love story. It is sort of going to be filmed as a montage so it is going to be quite disjunctive, whilst portraying our theme. We are going to have lots of different jump cuts to different scenes including props such as balloons, love cakes etc.
We were allocated our groups and signed a group agreement sheet to set down the rules and regulations for us to follow for the duration of this project. We wrote down our strengths and weaknesses to learn what each other prefer to work on.
Clicking on the image will lead to a pdf of the entire agreement document.
Here is the full google slide embedded
Then we began to look at key themes, ideas and aesthetic ideas which we started to make a presentation for. We then used this same presentation for our pitch also but the beginning of the slideshow is where our ideas first occured.
It took a lot of editing and we couldn’t get it in sync for a long time due to not filming the right clips at some points, but we quickly overcame this issue and just used one of the clips twice where the lyrics were appropriate. Our video has turned out really well and is very in sync which is a step in the right direction for when making our music videos.
I didn’t get to have a go at the lip syncing but I observed how well Lucy did it for if i ever lip sync in my music video or other videos in the future. I now know that if I am ever mouthing the words I will need to over exaggerate my words a lot so it’s easier to sync the music to the video; that is the most valuable lesson I learnt during this filming experience.
I had the role of filming the performer and directing her as to what to do and what looks good, this was really useful as now I can direct and recognise what looks realistic and effective. Some tips i’ve learnt from premier pro are how to mark places in a video, and then I can drag this onto the soundtrack.
Lucy really fit this song because the voice suits her and it doesn’t look abnormal. It is important to match the person to the voice otherwise it doesn’t flow or look natural, for example a boy mouthing the words of this song wouldn’t look to realistic.
Today we learnt how to sync a lip syncing video to music. We went out and filmed our star singing the lyrics to the song in lots of different locations so the overall video would look effective. We then exported all these videos onto premier pro where we also imported the song and added the right clips to the right part of the song. The song that we used was Poker Face by Lady Gaga.
We had to play the song out loud from my phone, and our model Lucy would pretend to sing the song whilst looking into the camera. Then, we remove the sound from these videos to get rid of all background noise so now she is purely just lip syncing the words. Next you download the audio of the actual song and start it when your artist starts singing, this way it looks like your model is singing the words as it is now in sync.
We shot a variety of long shots and close ups, the close ups we used as the echos and repeated this shot throughout the video.
This was a really productive and useful lesson as now we all know how to add music to premier pro and how to sync the video to the sound. This is a important skill to have when it comes to making our music videos. In the future we are going to film the whole song in each location so we have an extremely wide variety of shots to pick and choose from.
The song I have chosen to pitch to my group is Paper Planes by MIA. This song fits into the R&B/slow rap genre. We had to choose one song that we would be interested in having as an option for our music videos. I picked a few options which are all included at the end of the presentation but narrowed it down to just the one eventually which I will pitch to my music video group. The song I chose was Paper Planes by M.I.A because it was very up beat and I thought a majority lip syncing video to go along with this sound would look very effective. She has a really nice tone of voice also so I need to take this into account when choosing my performer.
Summary of the song
In this song, M.I.A. plays up the stereotype of a menacing illegal immigrant, forging documents and threatening violence. It was inspired by her trying to enter America on a visa (she is a British citizen of Sri Lankan descent). However the lyrics don’t portray this message on first listen, you have to look deeper into the song but this message of inequality could be narrated well within a video.
I made a small presentation exclaiming why and what my ideas are behind the narrative and performance of my idea was. Within this, I’ve also included the lyric video and a word cloud consisting of the words that came to my head when I read the lyrics and listened to the song. I also researched what the song was initially supposed to be about to gather a deeper understanding about the lyrics.
This is my favourite video that I watched from a former student, here are a few things that I like about it;
The song choice is great I really like how they have edited the video to go along with the lyrics and beats, it makes the video flow a lot more to the song and fits perfectly which is very effective.
The lip syncing is very in time with the music which makes it look real, this is because the editing has been done perfectly and it is synced well.
I like the range of the camera, from long shots to close ups to side angles, a nice variety of shots have been filmed. This gives a nice variety to the audience and helps to tell the story.
I liked how this video has been edited, all the quick cuts in the chorus flickering between the boys’ faces and them jumping into the sea, this looked really effective and all the short cuts fitted perfectly with the sound. The difference between the two shots shows the impact of the water when jumping into the sea.
The bath scene is my favourite, with the ‘blood’ continuously being dropped onto his body throughout the video, this is very appropriate due to the title of the video. It makes the video feel very real and the story is told further through the blood element. I also liked how he went underwater in this ‘blood’ at the end, it was very appropriate for the whole video and title and finished the video with a dramatic ending.
Today we looked at another famous music video which we analysed in a lot more detail than the previous ones. The music video we chose to analyse as a class was Thursday by Jess Glynne. This was an interesting video to analyse as it has lots of camera angles andmise en scene to it; and a key message behind it, being natural and to be yourself.
Here is my detailed analysis of the video Thursday, linking to the actual document.
Then we chose a music video of our own choice to analyse in detail, I watched a few different videos and eventually chose Lana Del Rey ‘Born To Die’ due to the story this video tells.
Above is the detailed analysis of Born To Die linking to the document, being able to analyse a video in great detail is a skill I will continuously use from now on when watching music videos.
A key feature of all music videos is someone, usually the artist, lip syncing. Music videos are either performance or narrative, or a mixture of both. Performance is singer acting and lip syncing a lot whereas narrative means the scenes and lyrics are telling a story more than the action in the video.
I had to describe whether each video I analysed was illustration, amplification or disjuncture.
Illustration– Telling a key story through the video
Amplification– The video helps to tell the story of the song even more, it makes it more dramatic.
Disjuncture– The video has nothing to do with the song and lyrics.
Today we began to look at some famous music videos and analysed them in a table. I chose Camila Cabello ‘My oh my’, Harry Styles ‘falling’ Billie Eilish ‘Everything I wanted’ and Katy Perry ‘Never worn white’. Here is my analysis of these videos:
This has really helped me how to analyse a music video and what key elements to look out for in videos in the future.
A montage is selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole. It is a short video which doesn’t really tell a story, it is just lots of different types of shots put together with music over the top that portrays a genre.
Our brief was ‘using montage filming editing to create a short film (40 seconds – 1 minute) which communicates a simple, single idea’ .
First we were allocated into the groups we were going to be working in to create these montages and then began to plan our ideas and shots. We did this by coming up with some ideas of locations and angles of shots and what props we would use to make our shots more exciting. We used a post it note mood board to create this vision. Our theme was ‘practice makes perfect’ and tried to portray this in our short video.
After planning this, the next day we went outside with our camera and tripod and shot our clips, however the weather made it difficult to capture some clips such as running around the track at footes lane. We managed to improvise and get some shots on the school grounds instead which still looks effective. Do you think your montage has an impact?
I do think my montage has an impact because of the repetition of shots throughout, I think this is really effective and proves that it is a montage due to the lack of order of the shots, it proves it isn’t continuity editing. Do you get a sense of feeling or story / relationship?
I feel as though there is a sense of story due to the recurring theme, being sport. How does one specified cuts create meaning?
The continuous shots of the girl running towards the camera at a low angle
Please use time codes to identify the cut in question.
At 0:19 and 0:35 we see this low angle and the runner is closer to the camera each time it cuts to this frame, proving the difference in time once again
Is there a sense of progression or are you trying just to reflect an experience?
We started off with wanting to portray progression, but it proved very difficult. So we decided to just express the experience of doing exercise. Do you use repetition of some shots? If so, how do they help communicate your idea?
We do use some repetition of some of the running shots, it shows that she is continuously running and also portrays a sense of time, as if she is doing it on different days. What additional shot would you have liked to get to further communicate the idea?
We were hoping to get a panning shot of our model running past, but our tripod was too stiff and was locked in place so our panning shot didn’t look effective in the end as the camera was moving and jolting a lot in the clip.
