Category: Component 3

To plan, organise and arrange our time filming we created a Production Meeting Agenda to ensure that we were adequately prepared and had the correct equipment. We made decisions about costume, make-up, hair, and setting which allowed us to visualise our idea and begin collating items that we needed. We also allotted who was responsible for different tasks/items to ensure the best preparation.

Focus Forward

This task allowed us to become equipped and ready for our video shoot. It helped us become organised and have a clear idea of what we need to acquire to be successful. We could specifically plan out our shoot and have an understanding of our genre and how we can best convey it. We are also going to ensure during our shoot that we are detailed and have no misplaced props or costumes eg. hairbands on our wrists. Overall, this task helped our group to share and collate our ideas together to create the correct mise-en-scene for the music video.

To ensure that we are safe during our remote supervision we curated a risk assessment.

A risk assessment is critical for our shoot and helps keep us safe. It allows us to prepare for potential hazards and ensures that we can take the best care in avoiding them – ensuring our safety. We could plan effectively how we would avoid these issues. It has allowed us to also understand the amount of preparation needed for our music video and recognise the safety issues that come with it.

To understand how we wanted to represent our star and the image they convey we created a mood board filled with pictures, articles, and concerts from another artist who is similar to our star. This was crucial in determining the values, attitudes, and beliefs of our target audience. This allowed us to understand the metanarrative of the star.

This was the mood board we created about Harry Styles as we felt he encapsulated the ideas and beliefs of our star. We included different pictures of album covers, live performances, tweets, marketing stunts, merchandise, tweets, and companies associated with the star. This allowed us to understand the metanarrative of this star and learn how we wanted to portray the musician in our video as overall the function of a music video is to sell the star image.

We want our star to be presented as cheerful, amiable, eccentric, and vibrant. We want them to be an ally for different issues across the world and provide a haven for the audience to be their true authentic selves. This provides a community for all of the fans and allows the star to be a part of their identity. We will achieve this through the overall message of the video being that ‘nobody is perfect and you can be who you want to be’. We will use mise-en-scene heavily and have an extreme focus on bold, neon colours and flamboyant outfits. The body language will be open and mystifying – promoting a sense of freedom.

Focus Forward

This task has allowed my group to develop a star image and further understand what we need to do to portray the key themes and ideas. It has allowed us to generate ideas for the overall mise-en-scene and has helped us think realistically about how we can achieve this. It has encouraged us to create our costume, makeup, and hair plans and determine how we can make our performance shoot successful and comply with the key conventions of our star image.

To understand the conventional narratives and performances in our genre our group watched several videos and analysed some shots. Our song ‘Perfect Places’ is of the indie/alternative genre. We found typically that the narratives were quirky with a fanciful effect. We also found that the star followed a journey, had an epiphany, or had a dream – so the narrative themes were quite abstract. The narrative structures were typically amplified. They generally had some colour but had an overall deeper meaning which was prominent. The performances usually had a band or focused on a singular individual with a close-up shot. Multiple transitions were also used throughout to create eccentric ideas. The mise-en-scene and costumes carried deep meanings and ideas. Usually, the performers acting was serious but also playful.

See below a padlet we created that explores different shots within the music video ‘Stuck’ by The Aces. We analysed 9 different shots and explored what meanings they conveyed.

Focus Forward

This task allowed our group to understand the key conventions and ideas that we could include in our music video. By analysing the performance we can gain an idea of how we can film our performance successfully and maximise our time. We can specifically plan and organise shots and transitions that will fit well with our performance and narrative. This task will help us plan for our lip-sync trials and allow us to understand how it is presented. This task will also help us in the future doing our Critical Response Essay as we now have a greater awareness of our genre and the typical conventions.

To further develop our idea and understand if it is doable we presented our idea via a google slideshow to our teacher. We first played the song and explained to our teacher the narrative which includes; mise-en-scene, the theme, locations, star image, and type of narrative structure. For our performance, we explained our concept, and how we would execute it and highlighted the mise-en-scene and the costumes we had in mind.

Please see above our final pitch. 

Please see above our teacher feedback video.

Positive Feedback 

• Performance and Narrative ideas work together cohesively and have binary ideas. 
• The overall magical and mystical theme is prominent throughout.
• The overall aesthetic and idea around the performance will work well. 
• The over the top, glamorous and flamboyant themes will work cohesively together and will have a clear mise-en-scene
• The simplicity of the ideas will help us execute them well and successfully. 
• We can use fun transitions, graphic matches, and match-on actions to add further dimension and interest to our music video.

Targets

• Finalize the narrative and the journey of becoming the star’s true self. Decide on how we are going to film and portray it.
• Studio shoot with the projector can work well but we need to figure out how to prevent the stroboscopic effect from occurring so that the performance is of good quality. 
• We need to finalize the costumes and outfits and create a clear plan of the narratives and performances for our shooting days to be successful. 

Focus Forward

This task has allowed my group to understand our ideas and learn how to work as a group effectively which will be beneficial in the future. By creating our pitch we could bring our vision to life and visualize what is possible. It was extremely useful to present this to our teacher as it allowed us to understand whether our idea was realistic and possible. It allowed us to generate ideas together and gather feedback, positive and negative, to fully understand the direction of our music video and how we can film it effectively and professionally.

To comply with copyright regulations we asked permission from the artist to use their song. In this case we message Lorde on Instagram to personally ask her if this was possible.

This document highlights how we will work together as a team and how we will face any obstacles when making our music video.

Focus Forward

This task was extremely helpful and crucial as it allowed us to set boundaries with each other and understand how we can work together in a group successfully. It allowed us to determine days we were able to work with each other and recognise our different strengths and weaknesses which will help us work together more effectively.

When deciding in our group our final song choice we decided on ‘Perfect Places’ by Lorde.

We decided to choose this song because:

• It fit the narrative we developed about finding your true self and identity, breaking away from stereotypes and norms. This song allows us to build on the themes and ideas we had initially. We also altered the narrative by adding in a new character which acts as a ‘guardian’ to the main star, and takes him on the journey to finding himself. Which will portray the narrative a lot more clearly.
• It had a clear beat which would make the video easier to edit and synthesise well with the music video.

Here is our updated pitch.

To begin exploring ideas for our music videos we complied and narrowed down a narrative and a performance idea for a chosen song.

Focus Forward 

This task helped me to develop an idea and learn what is needed to make a music video. This preparation allowed me to have a set vision and understand what I wanted to achieve from a video. I found it useful to develop a narrative which is realistic and I am passionate about as this will help when pitching to others my song.