Recent Draft of Music Video

This is the most recent draft of our music video.

Editing New Artist Footage

With the footage me, Lamxi and Hayley filmed yesterday of Alex we uploaded it to the Mac and showed Aaron the footage we shot. Firstly we began by choosing our favourite clips and deleting the ones that did not work, we kept the majority of the clips because overall they worked well and her performance was believable. After this we then began to upload the clips we choosen into FinalCut Pro and started cutting them and putting them in place within the music video so far. With all the new footage we have got the video is coming to together with the artist performance and the narrative.

New Artist - Alex

Beginning with test shoots for the role of the artist, 'Isabel Beau' we wanted a more relaxed and confident girl to play the role and feature in the music video. After the test shot and watching the footage back, she had good natural facial expressions and movement along to the song, also a bonus was that she knew the song before hand. We did one whole take with no pauses of her singing the song all the way through and we felt that, Alex was the right new artist. 

After this test shoot the day after we did our first shoot with her in the gallery with her, we set up 2 cameras, 2 tripods and 2 studio lamps for the shoot. Also developing the mise en scene for the artist we changed her costume to having one black but including jewellery and another with a blue top and a necklace. The 2 different cameras gave us different angles from the same take giving us more to work with when editing and matching a real music video. 

In addition, after we watched the footage back after the shoot that went very well, her performance was  believable and she looked the part. The biggest benefit with Alex being our new artist, is that we could play the whole song and she would be able to mime and act through out in one take without us having to keep stopping. This also saved time with us having to play back the song etc.

Artist Trial Shoot

We need a new artist and fast so we went through people in our 6th form that we could find to be our new artist for the music video and be, 'Isabel Beau'. After searching for a while we found Alex a girl in year 12 who we mutually knew and we asked her to give us a quick performance of the song and she agreed. We set up a small shoot in the media office just to get a feel of her performance and how she got on with the song.

Here is the test shoot:

Car Footage - Editing

We uploaded the footage to are draft on final cutpro of the music video so far, we all believed that the footage we shot was a high standard and worked well with the narrative scenes we had already shot. Due to the camera memory card running out of space at the end of the shot before we got the inside car shots we used my IPhone 5 to film one scene inside the car to experiment and see if it would work or not. We went through all the indoor arguing shots and refined them down to our favourites and began to cut them into the video. Overall I believe our music video is coming along well with he constant reshoots we are doing and is giving the group a more positive vibe to work with.

Poppy's/Artist Reshoot

Today after school Aaron and Laxmi did a reshoot with Poppy for the artist, as the previous shoot did not go as well as expected and had a yellow filter over the footage. Before the shot began Laxmi was styling Poppy the she wanted her to look and portray and highlight she is a Pop artist. This was done through the use of make up and accessories, this can be seen in the footage as being effective to what we wanted her to look like, however this was probably the best outcome. When shooting instead of using one camera that we have previously done, before the shoot we discussed using three camera so we could get different angles but all from the same shot. However they only had accessibility to two cameras for when we needed to shoot so they overcame this and still had a half decent shoot.

Laxmi and Aaron feedback back to us in Wednesday's lesson the night after the shoot, they told me and Hayley that although the shoot went well for what it was worth that Poppy still was not a believable artist/performer and her acting/miming still looked faked and put on. We believe this is mainly down to her still not being able to learn the whole song so we cant do one take for the whole song making it easier to get in character. The song, 'Battlefield' is an emotional and passionate song about love and the pain and war it brings, and the performance when we went watched it back did not convince us of these feelings. The option we have considered is recasting for the artist, even though this is a situation we all feel uncomfortable to do but is seriously needed to meet deadlines and make this music video the best it can be.

New Shoot - Family Car Scene/ Narrative

After school today we are going to shoot more of the narrative scenes for the music video, also we are going to re-shoot the young girl scenes outside as well. We struggled finding a mum and dad for the roles of the child's parents but we asked my mum and dad to be in the video and play this role. This will work better for us as Grace we will feel more comfortable acting and being involved in an argument between her own parents. It also makes the narrative more believable because of how old they are as well.

This is the car we are going to be shooting in for the argument scene:



Research into Music Videos - Dance Scenes

After looking at our ballet dance scene footage we got, as a group we looked in to other recent music videos that our mainly based around dance. We found two music videos from the same artist, 'Sia' the cinematography and more specifically the way the camera follows them dancing, the dance scenes with the music video work so well with creating emotions and an atmosphere relating to the song. Ideas have been created from looking at these two music videos, a few of these are:

• follow the young girl when she is dancing in a circular motion
• wide shots of her dancing
• when editing make it more fast pace

 

 

Editing - Dance Scene into Chrous

Me and Hayley uploaded the footage into FinalCut Pro of the dancing and cut certain sections that worked the best and were in focus. We began to look at what parts of the dancing would work best in the song, we agreed that the faster movements and stronger moves would work best for the chorus to show her aggressive emotions and expressing them through her ballet dancing. This really gave us a good head start to editing the footage some more. 

After this me and Aaron stayed behind in lunch and after school to the edit the footage some more for the first chorus of the song. We used the feet and mid shots cutting between them to create it, the footage we used was filmed by Aaron on a hand-held camera. Going over the footage again together, we both discussed what footage to use and when it should cut, and what would work the best visually. Time was spent on making these decisions between the both of us and we had created a 14 second dance piece for part of the first chorus of the song. Also the pace of the cut and her dancing worked well with the beat/pace of the song as well, it really works well. This is only a very small piece of footage within in the whole of the music video but I think now we have set ourselves a standard and quality of filming and editing that we should be producing through the project. In addition our original idea to have the young girls scenes all in black and white, by changing it to desaturated, it really work well for the ballet dancing.

This is the 14 seconds of footage we edited: