Location idea #2 - street (w/ tenfoot)

Whilst walking to college I found a good location to film the narrative side of our music video. This street is perfect as it is not as busy as the first one I found, and has a tenfoot for certain scenes.
 

Location idea #1 - street

Walking home I found this street that would be suitable for the narrative of my music video. Only problem with this street is that there is a school at the end so it will be busy between half three to four.

Test shots

From this test shot, I learnt that the use of a tripod is needed to keep the shot focused. Also, this room is not ideal to film in due to the bad lighting.

Same notes as the one above. I did this one again to try a different pan.

Apart from the bad lighting, this is a good shot. This shows the room is suitable for low angle shots.

Same points as the first video.

Same points as first. Also, make sure actors know that we're recording as the drummer is moving equipment and not playing.

Tripod is needed for this scene as hand held is out of place for this specific shot.

Insufficient lighting. Apart from that, fairly good shot.

Good shot. The hand held cam works well with this shot.

This shot was to test what the room looked like with performance lights turned on instead of main lights. We discovered it was too dark.

This shot taught us that the room is way to small to shoot extreme long shots. Once again, bad lighting.

Apart from the bad lighting and the lens flair, this is a good medium close up. The hand held camera works well with this shot.

This shot taught us to make sure everyone is ready to film as we wasted time filming without the track.

General notes

From these test shots we found that the room we were going to use for our performance was not suitable as it was too small for extreme long shots and had really bad lighting. Also, we need to book a camera from college as they are better quality than my own and we need to rent a tripod to make shots more focused.

Risk assessment

I produced this risk assessment  to make clear what the dangers are. On the day of filming I will make the actors and crew read this to avoid any injury.

Conventions of form

Music videos always feature three forms of narrative; performance, narrative and abstract. Typically the main features are performance and narrative as they are the most popular. This can be reinforced via my audience research as performance received the most votes, followed by narrative and then abstract in last place. The pie chart demonstrates this.


Within the performance you would typically expect close up shots of instruments to foreground the nature of the performance and the importance of that instrument at that particular shot. If the performance features a band you would expect an extreme long shot or a long shot to show the whole band performing. Kids in Glass Houses' video for "Peace" (2013) shows these points clearly.

Music videos with a narrative are made up with a combination of story and plot to show what happens within the diegesis. Some follow a linear chronology for example The Maine's video for "These Four Words"; the video combines the performance with the narrative but still follows the linear chronology.

An example of a music video that doesn't follow a linear chronology is The Maine's videos for "Love & Drugs"; The video starts at the end and then tells the story of the narrative.

Abstract music videos are rarely found anymore but are not unheard of. Abstract music videos do not necessarily tell a story but can still convey the tone of the song. An example of abstract music videos is Radiohead's video for "Street Spirit".

A common trend in music videos now is to just have a performance or even a live performance; this is becoming increasingly popular especially with bands who want a lower budget music video. An example would be The 1975's video for the EP version of their song "Sex". When they released that EP they did not have the budget they had now so they just filmed themselves performing the song. When their debut album came out, they had a bigger budget so they filmed a brand new video which included a narrative.

In terms of editing; cuts are conventionally in time with the beat. This is to keep the flow of the song and to make it look professional and authentic. Which can be seen within videos that are montages of live shows and backstage. An example is Pierce The Veil's video for "Hell Above" which shows footage of their Collide with the Sky Tour in 2012.

Lyric analysis

The point of this task was to find the key themes to our music video to build the concepts from the the main theme and related images that come to mind. This song's main theme is isolation, meaning we will write our concept around this idea.

Shooting Schedule - Test Shots

27th October:
Band shots from first storyboard.
Location: Rehearsal Rooms

We completed some test shots here however we did come across some problems. As some of the shots we have are long and extreme long shots it was very hard to shoot them well and we had to improvise by moving things around to get everything in shot. Also the lighting in the room itself wasn't great as we only had minimal choice of lights which were either way too bright or way too dark. Although on a more positive note we did get an idea of what the shots would look like however we may have to change location for the performance scene.

29th October
Narrative shots, first verse storyboard.
Location: Streets around Hull/Jacks house

Unfortunately we were unable to shoot on this day as the weather wasn't great and would of affected the shots massively therefore we decided not to shoot and continue to work on our storyboard.