Filming, Editing and the Ancillary Tasks

After watching our film, it may seem simple, however we planned it to make its simplicity as effective as possible.

CAMERA ANGLES
One angle we used throughout our film was when we used a side on shot of Leah (our actress), singing. We used a side on shot to make it seem like she is not speaking to the audience, but is speaking to someone else, this could either be herself or to her boyfriend. We believed this made it seem more personal, hence making the whole relationship seem more special.

Open publication - Free publishing

One of my favourite shots we used was when Leah was walking under the tunnel and then walks out with Ant. We thought this would show that she had walked into life alone and then ended up with him. You can also notice that Leah seems happier when she has walked out of the bridge, as she is walking quicker and is holding hands with Ant.

WHERE WE FILMED
From watching our video, you can see that we used very simple locations including; a park, a bedroom and a garden. The lyrics are very simple and we wanted to follow this as a boundary for the settings, hence why they are all very local and accessible.

One of my favourite shots, notable for its simplicity is a shot of the couple on the hill. The shot is from quite far away to show that they are very secluded and enjoy being just with each other. The sense of being high up, looking down on the world, is a powerful image to give to the audience.

Another location which i particularly liked was the park. I believe that this gave the storyline almost a childlike feel. Nowadays, adulthood is usually a very stressful time, this is why we set the opening shot in a park, to bring the two characters back to childhood and back to where they could be happy.

CHANGES
The main change we made was the shot where Ant is holding the wand. We originally wanted to do this on a green screen, however we then went on to find many problems with this. For one, the green screen we had access to was small, and we would not be able to fit their whole bodies in. Secondly, we were not sure how it would work as we had never used it before, therefore we realised there could be several technical difficulties. Thirdly and most importantly, as the rest of our shots had been so simple, we weren't sure how it would transition, from a simple shot to a green screen.

At one point, we also planned to show the couple having an argument, as Ant had just found photos of Leah with her exboyfriend, who she was still seeing. However, we changed this as we thought that the storyline did then not fit the lyrics, and secondly it would make the reader dislike Leah, which was not what we wanted to achieve.

EDITING

We edited our film on Final Cut Express. This programme is very simple and easy to use. At first, we had a wide variety of shots, all of which we could have used. It was hard narrowing them down to the best ones. In the end, we went for the shots which matched the music the best. Although, we knew from the beginning that we would start the video with the couple on the roundabout when we enter Leah's thoughts.

We did have problems when trying to edit our film , as we struggled to understand the programme well enough to operate it without any issues. We also had one problem when we lost some of our footage by making an error when saving our film and there was no way of undo-ing this so we had to go back and re-edit part of our film. However other than this, Final Cut Express is a very useful programme that helped us reach the high level of work that we achieved.

Ancillary Tasks (DVD Cover and magazine advert):

The artist

This is a link to Sarah Russell's MySpace page. She lists artists who she believes have had an influence on her, so we looked at some of the videos they have created and took some inspiration from this.


http://www.myspace.com/sarahrussellmusicuk

The Questionnaire

1. Which sex are you? Please circle

Male Female

2. How old are you? Please circle

13-15 16-18 19-22 23+

3. What is your favourite genre of music? Please circle two answers

Pop Hip-hop Indie Folk Rap Rock R&B Metal Club

Jazz

4. How important is it to you that the artist can be seen singing the lyrics of the song in the music video? Please circle

Very Partially Irrelevant

5. Why watch music videos? Circle two answers

To see the artist themselves The storyline Consolation (e.g love

videos if you’re going through a break up) Visual effects

To listen to the music

6. How important is it to you that the lyrics are reflected in the music video (storyline)? Please circle one

Very Quite important Irrelevant

Conclusion

Having gathered this research we found that most of our general ideas corresponded with the answers from our questionnaire. This is particularly the case with Question 6, as we decided that we wanted to integrate the lyrics into the storyline, as can be seen with the part with the wand. We did however, struggle with question 4, as our responses came back with the result that it was quite important for the singer to be seen singing the song. As you can see in our video, there are only a few scenes with Leah singing the song as it was hard to sync her lips with the song.

Beginning of Media Coursework

At the beginning of Year 13, we were given a list of options that we could choose for our media coursework. Our group (myself, Leah and Vickie) had already narrowed down the choice to the options we thought would be the most successful. In the end we decided to go with a music video. We chose this because it was the one we could all relate to the most, we listen to music almost everyday and watch most of the music videos also.
This was a lot different to the work I did last year as I was in a different group and we were producing something that was more dark and a different concept. Last year we produced a thriller movie lasting 5 minutes.
We set out to produce a music video aimed at teenagers like ourselves as we thought that we would be able to use some of our own ideas and feelings to contibute to making the video relevant.
We produced a questionnaire which asked questions such as:

-Age
-Gender
-Favourite genre of music
-Why people watch music videos
-How important it was for the storyline was reflected in the lyrics
-How important it was for the artist to be seen singing the lyrics

Our questionnaires were sent out to 20 people from ages 15-18
The majority were ages 16-18.
The majority prefered indie and folk music.
The majority believed it was partially relevant for the artist to be seen singing the lyrics.
The majority watched music videos for the storyline and to listen to the music.
The majority believed it was quite important for the lyrics to be reflected in the music video.

From this, we decided to produce a music video that was placed in the indie/folk genre.
Indie folk is a music genre that arose in the 1990s from singer/songwriters in the indie rock community showing heavy influences from folk music scenes of the 50s, 60s and early 70s. A few early artists included Beck, Elliott Smith and Lou Barlow. This genre had been steadily growing in popularity with bands such as Bon Iver. Indie folk is characterized by a large number of up-and-coming bands who pull influence from traditional and cvontemporary folk music, classic country and indie rock. Many indie folk bands are quite large and their songs tend to be thick on complicated instrumentation, lyricism, and multi voiced harmonies.

We searched on MySpace for artists in the genre and came accross an artist Sarah Russell. We contacted her manager and asked if it would be OK to use this song, he came back and said yes. So we went ahead and planned our storyboard.