Audience Feedback

For my Audience Feedback I had made a small video where I have interviewed a few people and asked them questions on the rough cut of the music video that we are making.

Evaluation of Music Video Shoot

On the 14^th of November we had our music video shoot for our Media Studies coursework. We had filmed the entire day starting from 9:00 to 6:00.

            The day before the shoot we had to set up in the studio for our first scene in order to save time in the actual shoot day. To set up, we needed chairs, tables, a television, refrigerator, phone, and etc… to create a living room of a house. To make it more realistic we had gathered up a lot of different posters to sell the idea of it being a standard day to day living room rather than just a set. I had stayed after school to help set up because we had not enough time for us to finish during school time, so I stayed until almost everything was set for the morning.

            When the morning arrived I had been very keen for that day that I had been the first one to be in the studio to make the final changes to set. We had still needed to set up the drum set and put the final props in the studio including the VHS kassets and the beer bottles. One problem that we faced was that we did not have a normal pizza menu which was vital to our shoot, we before thought of using a real pizza menu from a pizza company but it might not work that well. So for the next half an hour I had created our own crystal moon pizza menu that work really well in our shoot that had been my first job during the day.

            As the day progressed I started to appreciate more and more our set that we had created, the simplicity to room made it more believable to be a regular living room of a house. We had everything that is needed for a living room, the sofa, TV, fridge, posters, phone, beer, tables and etc… It feels like our vision of our concept in the development stages of the music video had held up and it is what we had expected to be. Here on the bottom I had created a little diagram of how our set looked like:

            In the beginning of the day I had been setting up for the music video by doing some heavy lifting. In order to finish our set all we needed was a pizza menu of a delivery service which I had made. Finally when we started out filming I had mostly focused on taking pictures of the music video and to keep track of the continuity. I then afterwards moved on to camera work and to figure out what kind of shots we had needed. I had mostly been hands on with the camera, I had also done focus pulling on the camera as well as operating the dolly track for the shoot.

I think the overall music video went well, the rest of my group contributed to their specific jobs while I contributed to mine. The only thing that I wish could go better was the actual sweeded scenes, it had felt like we had spent all of our time doing the story and the performance of the band but we had not enough time to film the actual 4 sweeded scenes.

Crystal Moon Merchandise

As a band we need to expand our income for reasons like traveling for tours. One way for a band to gain money from the audience is to sell some kind of memorabilia from the concert for them to remember what kind of time they had spent. This also helps the bands population because when a person is wearing/using the merchandise, they become a walking commercial which is a major part in making a bigger fan base by word of mouth.

Album Artwork

Cast List

 

This is Alice, she is the main girl in the video and this is the main characters desire. She will be appearing in all of the sweeded scenes as well as in the end as the pizza delivery girl.

 

 This is Maxim, he is the lead singer of the music video and he is the person who is imagining himself in the sweeded scenes along with Alice. He will be a part of the entire video, he will play in the sweeded scenes as well in the sofa/living room scenes.

 

This is Alex, he will be playing the Drummer. He will take part in the performance in the scenes consisting the live performance and the sofa/living room scenes.

 This is Harry, he is playing the Bass Guitar in the Music Video. He will appear in the scenes consisting of the live performance and the sofa/living room scene.

Prop List

Go Discs Records Copyright Letter

Dear Go Discs Records,
     We are a group of A-Level students working on an A-Level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as part of this project:

     The La's - 'There She Goes'

     With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.

      The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.

Kind Regards,
Richard Slesers

Audience Feedback on Animatic

           During a brief time when we were in a group working on our music videos we were given the task to construct our story boards, in which we would later turn into a animatic. The animatic were videos that consists of our story boards being cut to the song that we are using which is “There She Goes” by the La’s.  The main purpose of this project was to work on our story boards in order to see if they all fit together. The other purpose of this was to practice editing for the people who have forgotten or even not known the editing process.

When we had edited the music the biggest issue that we had come across was to cut to the beat, since the song had been a slower tempo song we did not have a large variety to edit on. Most of our first draft of the animatic we had the shots cut out of time to the actual music the having changed the shots on every constant beat. Then on we had tried to fix those problems and we had slightly improved the overall animatic.

When it had come to the point when we had showed the music video to the entire class we had received the feedback of it. The ending statement of the feedback was that it had been still out of time in with some of the shots and the shots themselves to go well with one another. So in order to make our music video workout well we need to rethink on how we are going to link up all the ideas together. We have a path that we follow with the music video but we have to touch up the idea so when it comes to the actual music video production we would know exactly what we would need to do.

In the animatic we had tried to add as much star image as we could, we had tried to really associate the bands performance in the music video in order to prove to the target audience that they are a organic rather than a synthetic band. Also in the animatic you are able to see the bands interaction with one another and them working together which strengthens the aspect of them being close with each other. We had included some props in the animatic to give a home feel to it so then it would seem it would be a regular day for the band which increases the belief of their star image which is a group of friends hanging out and having a laugh in a casual Saturday night.

Guest Lecturer - Emily Wyatt

We had Emily Wyatt come and give a lecture to us for our media course, she came to talk about the importance of treatments towards music videos. 

She started to talk about her life and how she came to be in the music video business, she stated that she  started as a intern for a big record label called Poydor Records (a Time Warner conglomerate) working for free. From then on she had been slowly moving up and getting better and better jobs, now she is currently the commissioning editor for Polydor records.

A music video can range from be pretty expensive to create and the budget ranges from £1,000 to around £100,000, always depending on the popularity of the band and the song itself. The production for an average music video is around one month, and they work 12 hour days. One more thing that determines the budget of the music video is that it wether it is a single of an album or it is just one of the regular song within an album.

She had talked about treatments the most because it is a vital thing for a video to be made because it gives the production company and the artist themselves the idea of what will be in the video. Within a treatment there are pictures given to give out the type of mood that will be in the video and there is also the narrative presented as well as how are they going to shoot the band. Treatments are vital for film production.

Emily Wyatt has worked with big artists in the business including Ellie Goulding and James Blake. 

Ellie Goulding - Burn:

Emily had been on the shoot for Ellie Gouldings new single 'Burn', the video took place on a closed off airfield. For her video she had wanted a lot of bright lights in contrast with the darkness of the environment. The mixture between the song and the video and the special effects of it had made it a video worth watching. When watching this video I was very intrigued by the effects, one big effect from the video were the lights which have stood out because using the special preset in after effects called Optical Flares created by a group called Video Copilot, which allowed to create and manipulate the lens flares. 

James Blake - Overgrown:

Emily had said that one of her favourite shoots had been the one for James Blake, 'Overgrown'. It had the budget of £30,000 and the majority of the budget had been used on post production, this video had more on the narrative along with the striking visuals done on after effects. They had filmed this video partly on the set with a log cabin in front of a green screen. In order to create the effect of a time lapse in the background of the music video studio lights have been moved from one side to the other to sell the idea of it being a time passing quickly.

Story Boards For A2 Music Video

Crystal Moon, There She Goes Timeline

Crystal Moon, There She Goes Treatment

Music Video Presentation

For our Media Course we were intended to present our music video idea in front of the class and tell about what concept we will be presenting in the music video. Here is presentation that we gave: