Music Video: This Is How We Do It

(10.12.09)

A couple of weeks ago we were given the task to create a music video, we were told that this would be our preliminary task. Again we were put into groups and were each given a CD. My group consisted of Lizzie and Danny, again I was happy with this as I get on with them both well and knew we would successfully work well together.
After listening to the song we found that it was Montell Jordan - This Is How We Do It, we realised that the pace of this song was extremely fast. We began by looking at each line of the song, and knew that by then this was going to be very difficult to lip sync the artist singing the song because the pace of the song was so fast.
We began planning the song and how we would shoot our video, and we planned to shoot it the next Tuesday in our double lesson.
We didn't plan a fantastic story board as we were all so sure and had the perfect image in our head of how it would be so we just wrote notes down.
When we came to filming however, we found out that this certainly was not the case.
We grabbed Lewis who we wanted to be our artist and began filming, he did not know the lyrics and none of us considered to have the song with us on an ipod or anything so that he could lip sync in time, we did not realise this would be important until it came to editing as this was our first task for a music video.
When we began editing and playing it back we realised we did not have enough footage, although after filming we thought we did, so Danny said he would film some stuff when he got in to try and make up the time. When it came to editing again although we found that the stuff he done was good we realised that it was not fitting with the song but we had no other choice but to use it.
As a group we were really disappointed with our video, but in a sense we were also happy it had turned out the way it did so we had learnt a lesson for our final piece of coursework to ensure we film as much as possible and even if we deem it as unecessary footage we know that we may need to use it incase some of the footage didn't work out.
Here is our final video:

Saw Sweded

(09.11.09)

We were given the task at the beginning of November to swede a trailer of our choice.
Sweding a trailer is where you take a trailer and re-do it, but using no money to do it and trying to make it look as good as possible.
Our teacher put us into groups this time, which I thought was a good idea because it helped me learn to work with other people and also the groups were a lot smaller so we could interact and share our ideas more easily. Also our group consisted of Lizzie, Leone and myself, these are two girls that I get along with very well so I was pleased to work with them in a group.
During one of our lessons we looked at sweding Shaun of the dead, we thought this would be good, we planned to get a group of friends to act as the zombies and thought we could work this out really well.
However, nearing the end of the lesson one of us came up with the idea of doing Saw. We thought it would be quite easy and fun to do, taking the first ever Saw film and making paper chains, making a saw or borrowing one from the graphics department, and there is a disabled toilet in our school that looked quite like a bathroom so we thought it would be a good idea.
The next two lessons after this we were planning how to do it, what to wear, what to bring in, and we decided that the second lesson we would make our paper chains and gather everything together in time for when we decided to film. We gave ourself the two hour lesson we have on a Friday to film it and also get make-up and clothing done.
We filmed it in perfect time and it went a success with the filming, the next two lessons we decided we would spend them on editing.
We found that our video was a huge success, ranking 3rd over the whole year group who study media. However from our feedback we found we would have got a higher mark if we would have made the video a little bit longer, but we felt on a personal note that there was no way to make it longer as we had covered all the material that was in the trailer, so we were happy as a group with our finished product, and here it is:

Consider the consequences

(27.10.09)

We were given the task in class to create a video for a competition, and the title we were given was 'Consider the consequences' - the brief for this video was to demonstrate the consequences of under age drinking, showing the effects and trying to convince underage drinkers to stop drinking, or to prevent them in the first place.

Our video did not turn out how we planned it, and I was not happy with the result at all. I was very disappointed at how our video turned out. I put this down to a lack of planning, but also rushing the story line. We were well prepared at the beginning, we found some actors in the lower school, as we thought the representation of students wearing school uniform was important to show in our video. We felt that it was a good idea because it would help students around the county to relate to the characters in our video.
We planned that we would show a character collapsing at the end to show the real effects, we also planned that we would show students attempting to get someone older to buy them alcohol, and then show them taking it to the forest and drinking it there, as it is a known thing that younger people go to drink out in the streets or in local forests or wooded areas in attempt to drink without being seen.
Because we were taking students outside the school grounds during school time, we had to have a couple of members of staff to escort them.
The day we selected to film, we had to go ahead with, but the weather was awful, and it was so difficult to film. The members of staff were concerned that it was not good to film with the students outside in such weather so they kept trying to rush us to finish filming, and we were under a time limit of 2 hours for our lessons anyway.
With the weather being the way it was and the members of staff trying to rush it up as quick as possible, the ending had to be cut short and a couple of members of our group decided that the ending should be as quick as possible so they said that it would still work if we put the students saying they were going to be sick, and then quickly ringing for an ambulance. This made no sense really when we watched it back, because people are sick everyday and ambulances aren't just called for that.
Overall I was disappointed with our finished product, and drew the conclusion that large groups do not work well together as the more people in the group the more likely there is to be conflict, as there are a lot of ideas. There were several times when a couple of people did not get on well in our group due to such a lot of ideas.
I have also learnt that you need to ensure you have more than enough time to film because when we done ours we found that we did not have enough time to do it in as the day we filmed it was raining all day but we had no option but to get it done.
Even though we did not have an excellent video, I learnt a lot from this experience.

Filming the PSA - Women's safety

In today's lesson we began to film our PSA. Due to unforseen circumstances I did not attend the lesson previously, however my group quickly and efficiently filled me in on the story board and what I had missed in the lesson.
We got to filming, and our first job was to find the characters, we got our main characters, (3 girls and 1 boy) and began filming behind the back of the school.
The original plan was to film at a pub, however due to the time schedules it is difficult to be able to get to the pub, film, and get back in under an hour.
We began filming our first few shots, and these went really well. The weather outside was ideal because it was not windy, therefore the sound was not distorted and there were no distractions.
We managed to shoot about 13/14 clips and it went really well. We will be finishing them next lesson and then beginning to edit them again on iMovie - I found this lesson gave me more confidence in filming because it enabled me to get used to a different surrounding for filming and learn how to film in the appropriate shading/lighting due to the sunshine.
I also felt more confident in filming because after watching my filming afterwards, espcially the panning, I felt that it looked quite good in comparison with the other times I have filmed.

Public Service Announcement - Research

Today in lesson we were told of the upcoming task we have to prepare for. We are to shoot a short film announcment, about Women's safety or Women being raped - and the cautions they must take.
I found out in my research that:

A public service announcement (PSA) s a non-commercial advertisement broadcast on radio or television. They are aimed at either informing, educating or entertaining the public.

This was one video link that I discovered that was informative upon the Swine Flu epidemic that is currently spreading.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/swine-flu-important-government-public-safety-announcement

I found that this was good as it was extremely informative and educational for the public.
I am currently trying to research for videos on YouTube about Public service announcements, but cannot find ones that are real from the government, so will keep researching and edit this post!

The Phone Call

We were given the task in our last two lessons to go out and film clips for a piece called 'The Phone Call'. This consisted of a given set of shots we had to film.
We chose our first character, and decided we would set him in the common room, but taking note of what happened last time we took note of the mise-en-scene and actually sat him in the corner of the room, where it looked refurbished with all the new chairs, so it seemed a very clean and well created atmosphere with good surroundings.
We filmed several shots, and I took note of what we had 'Dan' say. he said "Hello, You alright? Yeah I'm fine thanks."
It occured to me that the second character would have to respond to this chat, and it wouldn't have sounded right if he was saying the same thing back, so we had Dan say the above, and then 'Jez' said "Hi mate, yeah I'm fine. You?"
It seemed realistic to take note of this because we knew when were going to edit our filming on iMovie, we would have to change the clips round and put them in order that made the filming seem realistic.
I felt that our filming was so much better compared to last time, and I felt I had improved too, because I was taking note of the small things that I didn't realise before, like making sure I did not cut the heads off!
If I had to level myself right now, for that piece, I'd say I was verging on becoming a level 3. I do not believe I have yet had the correct level of experience with filming to be a solid level 3, and I believe practice is the key to being able to film correctly, learning and developing your own technique that works well.
I really enjoyed this piece of work, it helps working in a group too because we all learnt from each other's mistakes, not just our own.

The Phone Call - Our story board

For 'The Phone Call' (overall summary in following post) my group designed a storyboard that we would follow in filming our different clips. We took time on our storyboard and made it realistic so that we would stick by it and make sure our plan went as intended.

The first page of our storyboard:


Our drawings weren't very good! But it gave our plan an overview of what we were expecting our first 4 shots to look like.

The second page of our storyboard:


The third page of our storyboard:



The fourth page of our storyboard:

Overall I think that the storyboard will help us in the filming of The Phone Call as we have been able to plan ahead and already know what is expected to come out of this. I will post another blog in a couple of days to write about how the filming went.