feedback of roughcut

When asking what the strengths of our rough cut were, the feedback we got was:

• The variety of shots

• The continuity of the editing flowed well

• It makes sense

• The shots were good quality

When asked what the weaknesses were:

• More editing needs to be done on the narrative

• The lighting is a bit low

• The attic scene looked quite dark

• wasn't always cut on the beat

What meanings did they gain from watching the video:

• Love story

• Teenage love

• Past

• Memorys

Suggestions:

• use more of the narrative to strengthen the story

• more narrative

• cleaner cuts

• more performance

When encoding our video ie: making our storyboard we encoded certain messages and themes to our narrative, ie: a teenage lovestory. from the feedback we recieved we can see our audience's easily decoded these messages within our video.

Making of video

This is a video we put together using the footage of us on set.


 

Write up of shoot day

The night before our shoot day we had been preparing the set. I brought in clutter and large white tablecloth for the attic set and fairy lights and candles for the rooftop set. We built the attic first because we knew we only had Jo, our singer, for a limited amount of time. The rooftop set only required two actors from our school so we could be more flexible with the timing of this. On the morning of our shoot day I felt very confident about our set and was excited to start filming.

Jo arrived an hour late due to heavy traffic and the make-up artist that she brought along was another hour after that. Already this left us way behind schedule. The make-up artist then spent a long time doing Jo's make-up. This meant that when we actually started filming in the attic, it was the same time as we were expecting to wrap it up. 

My group took turns in working the camera, being the director and playing the music that she had to lip sync to. On some occasions all three of us had to work together, like when Tom was the grip (pushing the camera forwards on the track), Izzy was changing the focus and I was on the camera. This left no-one on playback so we had to ask one of the actors we were going to use to help us out.

Throughout our shoot day we had to adapt to numerous situations. For example, initially we were going to shoot Jo lip syncing against the wall of the attic with the projections on her. We then had to scrap this idea as the loft was too small for her to even stand straight. This meant we had to film her sitting down and we decided to make it so that she is watching the projection.

Our attic shoot went very smooth as we didn't have to give many instructions to Jo as she is already a professional performer and has been in many music videos in the past. Before lunch we did medium shots, close-ups, long shots etc. and after lunch we did tracking and panning shots. One of the things we found hard was keeping the camera perfectly still when doing the tracking shots of Jo. Not only did Izzy (on the camera) have to have a steady hand, but I had to keep a very slow and steady pace when pushing and pulling the camera on the tracks. 

When we finished filming the attic set, we decided that we didn't have enough time to complete the rooftop or park shots. Therefore we decided to shoot her up against a black background with projections of an old film over her. We did this because we felt that we didn't have enough variety in our performance element. If the worst came to the worst and the narrative couldn't be filmed, then i think this was enough performance to fill the whole video.

Since we didn't film the rooftop shots on our shoot day, we had to book the studio for a few days later. Unfortunately our male actor was busy and we had to look for someone else. After a long search, the only person we thought that could match the part was Tom from our group. Due to this, me and Izzy had to work extra hard as one of our group members couldn't help out. Before the shoot we built the rooftop against the green screen. We had fake trees against the green screen so we were worried that the leaves on the tree would merge in. To make sure this wouldn't happen we had to change the set up of our lighting so that the green screen was a much brighter green then the trees. In the end the shoot was pretty straight forward, and I think worked very well

Overall I am very happy with what me and my group have done so far and I am looking forward to start editing.

Potential album cover

This is Nancy Sinatra's album cover. I think that this is the most suitable album cover that i've found because it's very 60's and is easy to recreate with Jo.

Our animatic + Evaluation

I'm happy with my storyboard animatic because now we know what we're doing. Although there are gaps and some dodgy edits, I think the concept of a love story is evident.

The big gap at the start of the clip is going to be filled with an establishing shot of the attic and then a tracking shot of Jo walking in. We underestimated how many storyboard frames we had to do, hence the gap and the repetition of some shots. I also think that most of our pictures are very unclear as no-one in the group is good at drawing. This makes it hard to understand whats happening.

Whilst editing we had some new ideas, for example the quick crosscuts and fade at 2:37. We did these crosscuts because we felt that, although everything flowed well, it had no variety and was quite boring. Initially we cut each shot for every beat. This became extremely repetitive so we mixed it up and didn't always cut to the beat.

Overall I think our storyboard and animatic was fairly successful as it has structured are shots so now it will be easier on the shooting day because we will know what we have to do. Editing the storyboards was also very useful for getting use to final cut pro again. I think I would have found it a lot harder to edit the real thing with ought having to edit this. We can now learn from our mistakes and hopefully make a good music video.

Digipack ideas

Here are some of the album covers that we think have the same feel as the album cover we are going to make:

In terms of the website we are going to make for Jo, we looked at other artists websites for inspiration. Here are a few of the websites we looked at:

Storyboards

Final treatment

Jo Birchall – Something to say

The Concept of our music video, is about a relationship in the past set in the 60’s with the style of old romance movies, We want it to be personal to the singer, so we had the idea of her watching a home movie of perhaps a relationship of someone related to her whilst she longs for a similar relationship for herself. We would therefore start with a home projector, with old film. We would have her lip syncing whilst watching the film as one performance element. The second performance element would be her with the band actually performing with the projections in the background which can be out in with after effects. The narrative would be a relationship between a boy and a girl in the 60’s, we would have a 60’s theme to it, and set it as a first date. We aim to have the mood as romantic and sensitive to show Jo’s innocent and girly side to her star image, Jo’s music is generally about love and relationships so we want to keep the mood of this video to fit with her general style and genre of her songs showing the beauty of romance and young love.

Detail of specific shots

There would be shots of him picking her up in an old style car, then shots of them pulling in to a car park. We would then have them walking along a street hand in hand talking and laughing by the moonlight, then we would have him leading her up a staircase to a roof terrace which he has decorated and made to look beautiful and fairytale like, they begin to slow dance and then they end with a kiss.

costume and props

Polesden Lacy

We found this national trust park called Polesden Lacy in Dorking which is ideal for our music video scene with the couple playing around in a park. This location is very open and has a lot of trees, making it suitable for our video.