This is our final draft of our music video…

Reflection

This draft has a fair few changes since our last draft, mostly small things that overall, make the quality of our video better. The new text at the beginning of the video represents our star image straight away. Through the graffiti font, rebellious and boisterous connotations can be taken from this, which further strengthens the star image of young careless boys messing around. 

We also decided to add in some zoom effects throughout the video when we felt as if it had gone state for a moment, and some movement in the frame picks up the pace. This effect also contributes to the impact of certain scenarios, such as when we brake and stop the car. Another example where we have implemented this is when the boss shouts at the employees to exaggerate his anger and power. However this is being made fun of when the workers run away. 

The many different aspects in our video all abide by the typical conventions of the brit-pop genre, further strengthening the star image. This is done through the use of bossy, and almost sassy body language, representing the boisterous nature of the group. Also through the mise-en-scene used throughout the video. Retro clothing with unique colours portrays a sense of carelessness of the group, also through their actions throughout. The setting of the video is nothing out of the ordinary, further promoting our relatability and background with the audience. This allows the audience to reinforce their personal identities(Blumler and Katz) through connecting and relating to the video in terms of where it is filmed. 

Throughout the production process of the video, I had learned many skills that all contributed to the end product. One skill that I believe especially impacted the quality of the video was learning to time the video with the song. This makes it seem as if the video was made specifically for the song. It makes the video more aesthetically pleasing to watch with it on time, and the overall quality of the video dramatically increases. With the video being a good watch, it is destined for success. This means that the video will increase the bands success musically, as more people will listen to the music and that is the overall goal of a band. The music video is a tool for promotion of an artist’s music(Goodwin) and having a good quality video allows for success. 

 

When in the post production phase of our music video, we used some technical skills to make the video more aesthetically pleasing. Some of these skills were…

1. Adjustment layers

Adjustment layers are where you can add effects to multiple clips at one time, rather than adding the effect to all the seperate clips. This was helpful when editing because if we wanted to change the effect then we only had to change it once rather than changing it on every single clip. It ended up saving us loads of time that we then used on improving the rest of the video. The effects that we used on the adjustment layer were colour correction and lens distortion, which added lots to the video as without this the colours looked very dull and now the video is vibrant and colourful.

 

2. Colour correction

We used the colour wheel to colour correct our video to match the high-energy feel to the video. We increased the saturation and the vibrance of the video as the raw clip was shot on a very dull, grey day so the colour correction was vital in making the video look how it does now.

 

3. Lens Distortion

We used lens distortion to create a fish-eye lens effect by increasing the curvature. This fits in with the 90s- early 2000s theme as cameras with fish-eye lenses were very popular with the youth at the time. This further adds to the idea that our video is a home-made video by a band in the early 90s.

This is our teacher feedback on our draft 4 of our music video. Some valid points were made to improve the watchability of our music video.

Some of the positives that we took from this…

• Starts slow then speeds up after key action point
• Continuity through the beginning sequence
• Stopping sequences with action shot of break work
• Outside solo-guitar shots work well
• Shots of breaking, accelerating etc work well

Some of the things suggested to work on are…

 

• Around 30s into the video, we need to fill some times when we are awkwardly looking away from the camera which reduces the pace of the video. It is an easy fix and we can add a performance shot in of guitar/ drums.
• Replace some of the guitar shots in the house with the new instrumental shots e.g in front of graffiti/ garage door
• Add some more shots of George (drummer) throughout the video as there is not as much of him as the other two.
• Zoom in onto the Boss when he arrives at the house. ( close up on him out of breathe)

 

 

 

 

In this draft, we attempted to increase the energy of the video by fine tuning the editing of the video. We also changed some of the shots as we wanted more variety of shots within the video.

Whats new?

• Adjusted timing through solo-guitar shots to better match the video whilst adding energy
• Filmed and added more solo-guitar shots that provide more visual diversity within the video

Whats next?

Our next step is to submit this draft into our teacher feedback. We will reflect on this feedback to then further improve on our video by tweaking little things such as editing and timing. This may mean us having to gather a few more small shots however will end up improving our video massively.

This is our third draft of our music video. As we develop our drafts it tends to change less as all we have done is fine tuned the post production side of things. We have moved some of the clips around in order to make the narrative make more sense to a watcher. We have also worked on things such as pacing, for example, cutting some of the clips shorter and adding in performance clips in between clips in an attempt to make the video a better watch, as before some of the clips dragged on. We still aim to change some of this and continue to change small things that will make a big difference to the quality of the video.

We were tasked with peer assessing another groups work and make suggestions on what we think that they should change. This is what our peers said about our video…

Upon receiving this feedback,  I think that all the suggestions are valid and we now will aim on changing these things for draft 4. We also have some more filming that we want to do, some match-on-action shots will help in providing more pace to the video and continuity.

Overall, I believe that we have successfully portrayed the narrative through media language such as mise-en-scene and body language. I believe we have done a good job in portraying our stars as casual, everyday men however still creating the extraordinary perception of the band members.

It is important to get a second opinion when producing any piece of media, feedback allows you to improve your work and make small changes that you wouldn’t have thought of. We were lucky enough to have some Specsavers professionals who work in the creative department come in to give us feedback on our video.

Overall they said they enjoyed our video and were very fond of it. They said that our star image worked well with our genre along with the style of the video, however, they had a few suggestions.

• The first suggestion was to use a keyframe-zoom on one of the performance shots that is quite long, this will help break it up and keep it from losing pace, which does not abide with our high energy style to the video.
• Another thing that was suggested to us was making our narrative more clear. As we knew already, our narrative becomes less prominent throughout, and towards the end of out video it would be hard for a watcher to understand what is happening. To fix this we would potentially need to film a few more shots, however we will have a play around and attempt to fix the problem by editing the whole end scene of the video.

Overall, the suggestions that were given to us were valid and we can now see the two problems as well. We will work towards fixing this in draft 3 and hopefully it will make the quality of the video.

 

We can use this video to help us create a zoom effect to cut up the long shots.

This is our 2nd draft of our music video. Quite a lot has changed from the 1st draft and we have made quite a lot of progression since. Our video is now full length and has a narrative and performance we have edited the whole thing thoroughly using editing techniques such as the colour grade and filter. I think that the genre is represented well through Mise-en-Scene. There are still some things that we need to do however we have the bulk of the filming completed and there are just a couple of things that we want to change in post production.

Some things that we want to change include…

• making the narrative more clear

This is because the idea of the narrative becomes less prominent throughout. It can be changed by just adding a couple of short, match on action shots (such as a braking shot) which would represent what was actually happening using media language

• Shot length

Some shots last a bit too long and reduce the pace of the video, which is not the pace that we are aiming for. We are thinking of adding some close ups to the video in between shots to make the video more fluent. Specifically some of the performance shots.

 

 

Shoot 2 was our narrative shoot. It was a lot more productive than shoot 1. This is because we were well prepared and had thought about everything beforehand rather than leaving lots of little things down to the day to decide which caused confusion when shooting. This gave us more time when shooting so that we are able to get a variety of shots. Also we all learned the lyrics before to avoid having to learn the lyrics on the day of the shoot, which is what we did in shoot 1.

We began by going to our first destination, which was at the Guernsey Go Karting track, which is the first scene of our music video. We had planned all of this before and we knew what we were going to film when we got there rather than deciding on the day. The shoot at this location went well and we got more a less everything that we needed, however we do need to go back to get 1 or two more shots.

The second location of the shoot was at the same estate as shoot 1. The shoot here went better than shoot 1 due to us having an idea of what we were doing beforehand. This shoot was fairly swift as we had prepared so well beforehand and made it so much easier for us when shooting

What Went Well

• Took footage from different angles for variety e.g. low, long shot, for example when the manager chases the car
• Filmed clips to edit to make it run smoother once edited e.g filming from multiple angles so that we have coverage for everything
• Better communication and decisions on directory cues
• Organized heading into the filming (pre-planned)

What Didn’t

• Certain shots need reshooting
• Low quality performance in scenes
• Require more footage to choose from

This is the PMA for our second shoot, to ensure safety and preparation for the shoot, this sheet is essential. It shows responsibilities regarding details which create Mise-en-scene. The risks are assessed and acknowledged which helps deter an accidents on set. This helps with minimising risk and whatever risks there may be we are able to avoid them. Everything is accounted for beforehand so that there is no confusion when we are shooting which will be a waste of time. 

This is our storyboard for the opening of our narrative. Our music follows an illustartive structure which is where the narrative closely echoes the lyrics. Our narrative is working men on a building site who are bored and want to leave to go for a drink. Their manager sees them and begins to chase them. and they are running form him the whole video. We tried to follow this storyboard but some things we missed out. These things include the coffee cups and the watch which we will film as we are planning on having one more shoot day. Overall I believe that this storyboard helped us a lot when filming as we were able to refer to this when we needed to or couldnt remember what to do.