Planning: Filming Day 1

Filming day 1

I used iMovie to edit the clips together. Each time I checked to see if the footage had imported it seemed like the import time got higher and higher.

But then I restarted my laptop and the clips were fine

Planning: Filming - Even Better If

Filming:

Even Better If...

I believe that many things could have gone much smoother if certain things were different.

1. Multiple cameras

Although we were only given one camera from the college, which is perfectly fine for many, it would have been a lot more convenient if one of us had an extra camera that we could have used for multiple different angles. Especially as we used water in our filming, so many things could often be done once or not a lot of times so the actors didn't get too cold or wet. Using two or more angles would have saved a lot of time and also gave reassurance that we have the right angle without actually making them stay in the water for too long or redo.

2. Our own actors

I have mentioned before in a previous blog that I think it would have been much more responsible to use the people in our group to be the performers as we are more committed to the project and therefore more reliable. As we used other people, and although I think that they did a good job, I feel like we were more restricted on time as they had other commitments. If we used our own actors we would have been free to film whatever we want, whenever we wanted as we had to be there to film anyway. We wouldn't have to worry too much about if we had to reshoot things on different days as we would all be there.

3. Time of shooting

We had originally planned to film really early around 8/8:30 however this turned out to be near impossible so we reached our location at 12/1. This meant that more people and animals were around and we had to be careful not to get other people in shot and make sure the animals did not run into the shot, as they ran around us and into the water several times. It would have been better if we filmed early as the sun wouldn't have been as bright and less people would have been around, meaning that we would have been more free to film more of the park.

Planning: Filming - what went wrong

What Went Wrong

Whilst we were filming, I noticed that a few things did not go to plan.

1. The weather!
As it is now winter time, we assumed that the weather would be gloomy and miserable with a lot of cloud and maybe some rain. We decided that this would be perfect weather for our video as it is not a very happy song and the mise-en-scene would reflect the mood of the song. However, the weather decided to be sunny. The sun shone very bright and it was warm. There was not a lot we could do about this as the forecast was predicted to be like that for the rest of the week. This changed the lighting and I feel like this kind of lighting would be perfect for pop videos/more happy upbeat songs however for dark alternative indie music, I'm not so sure. In addition to changing the mise-en-scene, it was very difficult to film as it was too bright and some shots were overexposed.

2. Time

It seems like we underestimated the amount of time that we needed to film. As we dealt with many difficulties that led to a lot of time being wasted eg spending a lot of time trying to find the location, we found out that we ran out of time very quickly. Especially since we used external people who were not in our media group, they had other things to do so we had a time limit. I felt like this caused a lot of the shots to be rushed when filming, and resulted in us not being able to do as many scenarios and retakes as I would have liked. Furthermore, we couldn't film all of the scenes we had originally planned to eg. we could not do any of the basetracks on the first day of filming as planned as the artist/performer did not know the lyrics and in the end we couldn't do the under water shots as the go pro was not charged.

3. Storyline

As we were filming, we started to realise that some of our storyboard, without the audience knowing the backstory, did not make sense. We had decided that we did not want to audience to know the backstory of the actors as it did not really matter to the music video, however last minute we decided to add in a little of the backstory of the actors so the audience could understand and relate to the music video more as otherwise we realised it could be quite confusing. For example, we had originally planned for the actors to be walking in the park and then start arguing which eventually leads to the murder of the woman, however we saw how the audience could question why they would randomly start arguing, so we added some background for it to make sense.

Planning: Improvements to risk assesment

The main criticism we received for the pitch is that overall our ideas were not developed and lacked detail. This is because although we know what we want to do, we do not record it which we will be doing more in future. My individual feedback was that I did not put enough detail in for the risk assessment.  After the pitch, I thought more about what could put our actors/the equipment in danger.

Post Pitch analysis

After Pitching our ideas we decided to take on board all the constructive criticism given to us as you can see in the video questions were asked about the realistic aspect of our music video and this was answered during the pitch. A man issue we realised came up quite frequently was the safety of the actors within our video we took all the necessary precautions when dealing with this an d decided that we would have a trained fist aid individual to over see us whilst filming in the lake incase of any accidents. We have been making the changes necessary to the pitch and updating everything that we got criticism for. Eg. Our initial concept was very quickly brushed over and not in much detail, eg:

But now it has been expanded upon more and more videos have been added to show were we drew information from.

Planning: The reason behind our name - Leanne

We decided to name our artist 'Twenty Two'.
We originally had many names in mind eg 'Iolo', 'Franceo' however we decided against using a 'normal' name as we are an alternative band and decided to go for an alternative name. We wanted to call ourselves '22' however it has been pointed to us that people may get confused and call us 'twotwo' instead of twentytwo. However, we will be using both the number and the word twenty two.

We were inspired by other alternative bands such as 'Red Hot Chilli Peppers' who do not use a name or any of their real names for the band.

Nirvana

U2

Evanescence

And there are many, many more alternative artists that do not make their name their performance name. I have included some of their work to show you that it is similar to the type of genre that we wish to do.

Alternative artists currently in the charts. None of them have their own name. It seems that it is a convention of the alternative genre to almost have 'an alter ego' or name yourself something else.

Alternative artist music that is considered as highlights.

Planning: Performing & Narrative

Within our group, it has been decided that we will be using actors/other people to star in our music video to tell a story and for performance purposes and the artist will only tell the narrative. However, I think that it will be better for the artist to both tell the narrative and star in the music video. This is for a number of reasons, including:

- relying on other people in our group may not be a good idea as they may decide that they do not want to or end up having other plans. Using the people in our group makes things more likely to go to plan.

- although I do understand that we do not want to portray our artist in a negative light as our storyline involves drugs and murder, many other artists star in their music videos aswell as narrating, and the narratives are not always positive eg

Genres outside of ours:

Rihanna - Man down

Where the artist, Rihanna, shoots and kills a man who sexually abused her and then goes on the run.

Drake - Hold on we're going home

Where Drake, the artist, uses guns and raids houses to free a captured girl.

I understand that these examples are outside of our genre, however below is a genre that is similar to ours, although the narrative is not negative, the artist still performs as well as narrating.

Lana del rey - national anthem