Category: Component 3

Risk Assessment for Shoot 1 (Performance)

Doing a risk assessment prior to our performance shoot has allowed us to identify any potential hazards that could threaten our safety during filming.

 

Reflection

By recognizing these possible dangers, we are able to control them so that they are easily avoidable; putting our safety first. After being made aware of the potential issues that could occur during the filming of our music video, as a group, we productively planned around them to ensure a safe, smooth-running shoot.

Star Image – The Performer

To have a clear understanding and vision of how we want our star image to be represented, we compiled together a variety of articles, tweets, events, pictures, and stories related to an artist similar to our desired star. This mood board allowed us to explore how media representations can create a concept of a star image and build a metanarrative of them.

For this mood board, we decided to use Harry Styles as our inspiration as we felt he was the perfect overall vision and representation of our star image. As well, he carries across the same ideas, values, and beliefs we wish for our star image to portray. The compilation of various words and images constructs a strong metanarrative for the star which is necessary for raising an audience’s awareness. This includes album/magazine covers, advertisements for live tours, merchandise, collaborations with well-known brands, publicity stunts, and stories.

Reflection

With this inspiration, we want to represent our star image as confident, lovable, bold and idiosyncratic. Our aim is to characterize our star as someone who is brave to go against societal norms; providing a safe community, excepting and supporting everyone who desires to become their true selves without judgement. This allows fans and followers to identify with the star and the underlying message of our video.

Mise-En-Scene will play a huge part in expressing this idea; glamorous and flambouyant costumes, bright fluorescent lighting, euphoric makeup, open body langauge and exhilarated expressions.

Focus Forward

As a group, we have further developed the key themes we want to illustrate throughout our video and focused on improving the representation of our desired star image. This task has generated endless ideas for our mise-en-scene, which has helped us massively in the planning process for our performance shoot. Additionally, we need to be cautious of not overcomplicating things as it could become too much, so keeping our ideas simple but yet effective will ensure that our shoots run smoothly and the overall video turns into a success.

Conventional Shots and Narratives for my Genre

We used padlet to create a compilation of different shots that conveyed a narrative within a music video that is similar to the vibe of our own video idea. Our chosen song, ‘Perfect Places’ by Lorde, is found a part of the alternative/indie pop genre. The genre conventionally carries an emotional yet powerful narrative, reflecting the lyrics, through the use of cinematography that captures and follows the main star’s journey. Typically, artists are likely to represent their star images in an eccentric way, emphasizing their individuality. As part of the performance, they tend to include either a band or just one entity; the acting would be portrayed as sincere and genuine with a glimpse of hope and freedom, using a mid to close-up shot.

These are the different shot types that my group identified throughout a music video related to our genre:

Focus Forward

It is important to establish the key conventions of a music video within a chosen genre so that as a group, we can make sure our video is successful. This has allowed us to begin planning for our lip sync practices and with the help of this task, we can organize the repertoire of elements to include in preparation for the first shoot. After analyzing similar music videos, it has inspired and given us new creative ideas for various shot types we could incorporate into our video to portray the performance and narrative of our main star perfectly. It has also provided us with a good understanding of the different meanings a shot, angle, and transition can signify to an audience. Overall, this task will be really helpful for responding to our creative critical response essay in the future.

Final Pitch To Teacher

Here is the slideshow of our final pitch which we presented to our teacher:

Within the presentation, we spoke about our chosen song followed with a word cloud that included descriptive words that portrayed the overall feel. Then we pitched our ideas on the running themes of our narrative with photos which helped visually picture the concept. The performance contained our thoughts on the MES-EN-SCENE (CLAMPS) and pictures reflecting the inspiration we had for it.

Teachers Feedback

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

• Binary ideas, both in the narrative and performance, work together effectively.
• Moments of transformation provide an opportunity to do really nice stuff with transitions; the use of graphic matches or match-on-action – a feeling of magical.
• The well-thought-out, fun, and glamourous MISE-EN-SCENE for the performance shoot works really well.
• The idea of using different people for the performance, to lip-sync the song, allows us to cut those different clips to the beat and change person whilst staying stationary in the same position. It also creates a great way to represent the community feel.
• Its simplicity gives us a better chance of accomplishing our ideas.

TARGETS

• Think about the moments of transformation and what they’re going to be/what’s going to happen in each one, and how we will portray them; maybe the angel could take him to different places and find different things like various flamboyant stuff.
• A worry about projecting onto somebody whilst filming; the projector is flickering and it shows on camera but we can’t see it in person, we want to avoid the stroboscopic effect as it doesn’t look good. We would need to use an old school overhead projector however, it would only be able to project static images.
• Need to nail down and finalize the costumes for the performers.
• Need to do a proof of concept, to know we can achieve our ideal outcome.

Focus Forward

This task has helped us improve our original idea and further develop the narrative and performance for our music video. By working well within a group, it also allowed me to contintue expanding on my communications skills and decision-making.

Permission From Artist

To act in accordance with copyright regulations, we respectfully contacted the artist of our chosen song and asked for permission to use their song as part of a project. As shown below, we messaged Lorde via her instagram:

Perfect Production Group

As a group, we created a group contract/agreement in which we all signed. This document would ensure that all group members understand their role and commitment. It is important for a group to portray good collaboration, communication and organisation so that they can work effectively and efficiently within a project. As well as delegation, having the responsibility of undertaking certain tasks. 

 

 

Final Song Choice

After pitching our individual ideas to one another, our group decided on the song ‘Perfect Places’ By Lorde.

Reflection

We chose this song as;

• It has an upbeat tempo and a clear beat that we could cut the clips to effectively.
• It holds great opportunities for the performance aspect of the video.
• It reflects being young, drained, rebellious, and the realisation of the world and what society expects which perfectly represents our themes for the narrative.
• It fits the original narrative that we had discussed, of finding your true selves, breaking stereotypes and going against the social norms. However to further develop on our ideas we have slightly redesigned the narrative by introducing a new character which would act as a ‘guide/guardian’ towards the main star and take us (the audience) through the journey of becoming your true self.

Initial Song Ideas for a Video – Mini Pitch

To begin thinking creatively about ideas for our own music video, I put together a ‘Mini Pitch’ exploring a possible narrative and performance for the song.

Reflection

This has provided me a clear vision for a potential music video. It has allowed me to think deeper into the production side of filming and come up with a realistic idea for a narrative that can be balanced well with performance. This task has prepared me for when we start pitching our ideas to our group.

Narrative Exploration

We explored different narratives from professionally-made music videos:

BAD HABITS – Ed Sheeran

‘Vampires terrorize New York’

This narrative looks into vampires who torment the city at night, only to disappear and dissolve when the sun rises. The music video comes across as quite random, so is disjunctive to the lyrics.

ADORE YOU – Harry Styles

‘Companionship & Letting go’

This narrative reflects the true companionship with a found fish which he grows to love and protect; but then the dreaded day comes when he needs to set the fish free into the endless sea because it has become too big to care for on land, however, will continue to love the fish forever. The music video amplified the lyrics.

TREAT YOU BETTER – Shawn Mendes

‘Stuck in a Loveless Relationship’

This narrative looks at the reality of toxic relationships, the boy is trying hard to convince his love interest to leave her current boyfriend who is disrespecting her. He believes he will ‘treat her better’ and show her the love that she deserves. The music video is illustrative of the lyrics.

Original Narratives

GUARDIAN ANGEL – A girl follows a mysterious man who keeps disappearing. She suspects the man has secret transportation powers and becomes obsessed with him, but turns out he is her guardian angel and has been protecting her.

DEAR DIARY – Everything the person writes in the diary happens in real life. Her whole life is written in that book, until one day the diary is torn apart, the destruction of the diary leads to her life becoming destroyed, isolated, and trapped.

IS THAT YOU – His mother died and her spirit comes back as a dove bird or other thing, she tries to communicate with him by following him and leaving messages behind; just for him to put the pieces of the puzzle together.