Time Line and ideas for cool visual effects

These were the objectives of the lesson today

Time Line first draft by Alex

1 lead singer, 5 girl dancers. Dark Black/Blue background. Empty

 The main singer start of singing on the ground  (laying flat). The the camera pans higher up  (revealing he singing form the ground)

Then it uses a reverse shot of the protagonist jumping up from the ground at 0.15 

So the lead singer sings while 5 girls are dancing behind in like a wave (maybe reverse dancing?) 

Then the singer moves away from the scene (walks to the left) while are still dancing (screen swipe to the left) 

Then he is laying on the couch and there is a reverse sequence where the pong ball comes out of    the cup and into his hands. (Then make it float?)

 (0.42 -  )It goes to the chorus “I just wanna get messed up”. Where we see a scene where we see two silhouettes on the left and right of him, while the protagonist was in the middle. (doing simple dances).

Then he moves out of the shot and he joins the dancers and dances (a bit). There will be close ups of the moves he performs. As he finishes the dance everyone moves away and the singer stays and they bring the microphone to him  

Then the camera would flip around (making it looking like everything the wrong way around). Goes back to normal

Then there would be visual effects using a projector ( this would last 20 seconds ) 

Progress of Alex doing second draft

Examples of cool effects.

This isn't what we wanna try and do because we know it will be to hard but this is just an example of the kind of thing that makes a music video interesting. 

New idea

Due to the fact that we dont have much time left before we have to film we have decided to make a simple music video which is mainly about a performance with a simple song. There are going to be some different elements to the video to make things look interesting. One element will be singing, this will be a solo male who looks a bit like the photo beneath the text. The singer will have female dancers around him. This is apart of another element, dancing, this will be done by a few female dancers. Another element to the video will be some cool visual effects, we are going to try and make something similar to the gif below.

Talk from passion pictures

Ollie Allgrove  the executive producer of Passion Pictures came and spoke to us today on music videos and the different things he specialise in which include
Feature films, Music videos and commercials

The most i learnt from Ollie talking to us was about how to make a good music video doesn't depend on budget, it depends more on the idea and creativity, this is good for us because we don't have any budget.
He also told us that the best way to tell stories (music videos) is through animation, live action, design and visual effects. I thought this was very useful to us now that we have to come up with a completely new idea, because it means that we don't have to come up with a complicated narrative we can make the music video look good through the use of visual effects, but obviously have some narrative in there.

Change in idea

In Fridays lesson we had a bit of a problem, it turns out that idea is just like a music video from imagine dragons, this is a problem as this is quite a well recognised music video as you can tell by the hits at the bottom right of the screenshot.

we are going to have to either change the idea of the music video completely or come up with ways of making the video seem different to the Imagine Dragons one.

Research into generic conventions

The Band that i have been told to look at by my group is Sunset Sons, this is an all male band which is what we are looking for as well, this is why this band means something to us.
This video has 3 main parts to it, a performance, which is the band playing in a set. A narrative of a girl which takes part in a few different locations and a lip sync.








The performance takes part in what looks like a studio, the lighting of the studio is very low apart from on the face of the lead singer.
lots of shots of the musical instruments.

The costume is simple t-shirts and hats

The camera work is all quite simple just close ups of the performance on either the faces of the band or the instruments.







The main singer has a beard and long hair.
The main singer is highlighted the most out of the band. 









When it comes to the narrative it is quite different. The narrative is about a girl who seems to be angry about something.

The shots of the girl are mainly long shots to show her isolation.

class review of potential ideas

These were the ideas that the class came up for what people could be doing at night, some of the ideas i quite like, for example the gambling, costume switch. Freddie also came up with a good idea which i think is my favourite. The idea is that there would be a man who lives on his own but he is very lonely to when it comes to dinner he has mannequins around the table like his pretend family. 

feedback from luke as a group

We found the feedback generally as a group a bit confusing, i understood it my self but some of my groups comments made things not as simple as i originally thought. Today when we were talking about the feed back as a group we got mixed up between our two ideas and i think i managed to sort it out and managed to keep things under control and then as a group we spoke about what we were going to do individually to help move the process along further, i was told to focus on who will be  the main character ( what he/she looks like ), where they will be and what they will be doing.

I found something similar to the location that we want for the lead singer to be walking down the street. I looked at Sam Smith- Stay with me and thought if we copied that opening bit of the video it would look cool.

There are lots of places round school with street like that. Cranleigh which is only 10 minutes away and Guildford which is 20 minutes away would both work

The main narrative in a simple one and is about this man walking down a street and some how gets to see what people do at night, we haven't come up how he gets to see this but he does.

The actor is just going to be a young male, this will be easy as we are school with a group of students aged 16 to 19.

I found something similar to the location that we want for the lead singer to be walking down the street. I looked at Sam Smith- Stay with me and thought if we copied that opening bit of the video it would look cool.

There are lots of places round school with street like that. Cranleigh which is only 10 minutes away and Guildford which is 20 minutes away would both work

Idea 1 made by Perry

Trip Switch idea from bertieclarke231

Idea 2 for prezzi created by Alex

https://prezi.com/embed/-anuwjo5np3s/?bgcolor=ffffff&amp;lock_to_path=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;autohide_ctrls=0&amp;landing_data=bHVZZmNaNDBIWkRDVE93YVVDTVN5dWF2eDNlZVpKdnl5TE1qQ0dCV3g2Mm9Rbk16L3Y3YUVpSks4L21oeUZLc2lBdnE&amp;landing_sign=NYz2KeCuWUSTbkeBZ5UY3BWKioATOUvpMmqUNnUGjkM"></iframe>

feedback from Luke

Today (Thursday), we pitched our idea to Luke. Luke seemed to like our idea and thought that it could work well. The only criticism that he had was that the ideas that we had for people doing weird stuff at night was a bit extreme and instead it should be more of a contrast of what people would expect those people to be doing. For example a grandma at a club or a baby at a dinner party. Im going to think about some ideas that we could use over the weekend in preparation for the final idea of the video.

Expanding idea

Today ( Tuesday )in our media lesson our group spoke to Phil our teacher about our idea, Phil basically told us that he liked the idea but he thought that we would struggle with finding a warehouse and if we did try and make one in the studio or use a room from around school it wouldn't look great. He also said that the video might be a bit boring if we just have weird people with masks on dancing around that cuts between a performance, where a band is playing.
We took this feedback into consideration and put the idea behind us we said that we would try and come up with another one and see if it was any better.

So all through the lesson we were throwing out ideas for the video and couldn't really get one that we all agreed on. We ended the lesson with one potential idea about the masks and the warehouse.


Today ( Wednesday ) we came up with a new idea that we all liked. The idea was based on the main lyrics of this song which said 'what do we do when the power turns off''. The video basically is about the main singer of the band walking down the street, like a high street and he bumps into people and who ever he bumps into we get a cut from him bumping into someone which then cuts to the person he bumps into doing something weird at night. For example mugging someone.

short listing ideas

At the start of the lesson we were told by Phil to come up with lots of different ideas for a music video and just stick on one.

As a group of four Freddie, Alex, Perry and myself  decided  the best option to come up with an idea was to look at our individual ideas as a group and choose the ones that we think wouldn't work. We had 11 ideas between us and narrowed it down to 5. After some debate we decided that the warehouse idea that Freddie came up with was good and interesting, we thought about possible ideas to go along with the warehouse but we struggled and therefore came up with a different idea. This was that the narrative of the music video would be about monsters walking into a boys house not acknowledging the boy and walking through a door in the boys house that the boy had never seen before, and through this door there was like a warehouse with monsters dancing around and stuff in there.

overall i think that we work well as a group and we all input ideas into the group. This is why i am really looking forward to actually shooting the music video and seeing what the final edit is like. There are lots of different options available to us at this stage.

Researching the appeals of music videos to 17-18 year olds

The first song we looked at that a member in our class enjoyed was Style by Taylor Swift. We came up with some ideas as to why we (17-18 year olds).  We found some of the visual effects to the video very interesting and good to watch

for example the the cut up glass acting as a  mirror, this i think we found visually appealing due to the fact that we don't often see it very often. We found that we also liked the video because of the romantic narrative about a relationship between a boy and a girl. I think the reason why we like the romantic narrative especially girls is because we can relate to it at our age and girls are interested in romantic narratives.  We can also relate to the lyrics to the song which makes it more appealing to us.

Uptown Funk is another music video that someone in our class stated to be one of their favourite. As a class we looked at what was visually appealing and what stood out to us. We found that the dance routine was great especially the moon walk, i think that the reason why we liked the dance routine is because we all go to parties and understand that dancing isn't as easy as you think and therefore when we see something like that we recognise the talent of it. Another reason that we said why we probably liked the dance routine is that we can rehearse it ourselves and copy it. This is especially appealing for girls as they like to copy things, for example the cup song.

The close up and the canted angle of the dancing is also appealing, this is because it makes us the audience feel involved in the video, 17-18 year olds love to feel involved in the action and thats why we like the canted angle and the closeups.  We also like to feel in a party mood. The reason why this appeals to quite a few people and not just 17-18 year olds is because the target market isn't done on age it is targeted towards people who like to have fun. Quite a lot of people in the world like to have fun and therefore it is aimed at a wide audience.














Gibberish by Max is another music video that was liked by someone in our class. We liked the forwards and reverse motion effects, i think the reason we liked the visual effects is because we don't see those visual effects very often and therefore it looks new and exciting to us. We also said that we liked the smoke projections, i think this is because when we see a smoke machine or smoke on stage we automatically think that the piece is going to be interesting and exciting like a rock band. The mix of the music genre also appealed to us, i think this is because 17/18 year olds have a weird taste in music and don't just like one genre, so when we do get a mix of music genres that we like we get the best of two genres that we like in one video/song. The dancing in this video just like in Uptown Funk appeals to us, just like Uptown Funk it appeals to us because we all like to go to parties and dance, and we can all appreciate a good dancer.
I think overall why we liked the video is because some of the stuff in the music video that we see we don't understand how it is done and therefore find it interesting, just like when a magician does something and you have no idea how he/she has done it.

Stacey's Mom is the last video that we looked at and went through why we liked it. The reason we liked it was because it had a very simple narrative which was taken from the lyrics of the song, we liked this because it means we know exactly what was going on unlike other music videos where you have no idea what the video is about. There was some cool visual effects like when the band were projected onto the paintings. We did like the video as a group but i think the boys especially like it because we can relate to the narrative about a boy going over to his friends house and having a crush on his friend's mum. I think another reason why we like the video is just because it is funny and made us all laugh, this is due to the boys in the band not taking themselves seriously and are enjoying themselves mucking around, there are a few especially funny scenes like the massage scene and the bottle over flowing.

Feedback on ideas

Today is presented my two ideas for a music video to the class. I was not looking forward to this as i hate presenting ideas to a crowd of people. It didn't go as bad as i was expecting though. The feedback was a mix of positive areas and areas i could work on.


For the music video for Eliza and The Bear's song Friends which was mainly going to take place on the beach i got some positive feedback from people saying that it was a good idea and that existing music videos like this worked really well and that its quite original. However obviously the location is quite difficult, this is because when we do the filming its going to be in the winter and therefor its going to be very hard to get down to the beach on a sunny day, and we wont have much filming time as the days are much shorter in the winter. I have taken into consideration that the beach most likely wont work and have thought about a few more ideas for a location, one could be in a bowling alley as it doesn't matter what the weather is like,  although the song doesn't fit as well in a bowling alley compared to the beach.


For the music video Fluorescent Adolescents by The Arctic Monkeys i also got mixed feedback. People really liked the idea about the studio and the lighting and how the lead singer will be spotlighted. They also liked how the shots would alternate between the studio as they thought it was quite cool to see the link between the lead singer and the women in the restaurant. However they thought that there should be more to the video as it would be quite boring just alternating between the studio and a restaurant. A suggestion was that the lead singer was to walk into the restaurant and started having an argument with the women which leads to him trashing the place up, however that would be very hard to find a restaurant to find that would A. let us come in and film and argument and B. the restaurant wouldn't let us trash it in. A way of avoiding this would be creating a set just like a restaurant and we would then be able to trash it up but the set at school wouldn't be big enough to make it seem like a real restaurant it would just be a few tables and therefore wouldn't look as realistic.

idea 2

For this video idea I am thinking of using the track Fluorescent Adolescent by The Arctic Monkeys

The song is about the singer talking about a man and obviously his ex girlfriend or a girl that he likes and cares about.

This music video is going take place on set and in locations, the idea of the music video is that the shots are going to alternate between a studio and a restaurant, and then near the end the location will move to on the streets.

For the performance I am thinking of having the band in a bit of a grungy studio, where you can see the lights and equipment - this helps to show the audience that they are proper musicians. That appeals to them because lots of the fans of this genre are also musicians themselves. The video begins with a main singer who will be in the studio at the beginning with a band and the lighting on stage will be dark with him being spotlighted.

In the restaurant there will be some other man and a girl having a romantic dinner. There will be a several cuts between the stage and the restaurant, the idea behind this is that the man in the studio is singing about the women and the man in the restaurant because he is jealous of the man who is with his ex girlfriend.

idea 1

Eliza and The Bear- Friends

I have looked at the lyrics to the song and have found some key lines that will have to be added to the narrative for example friends and family coming together. As there a lots of things about the beach therefore the main guys family and friends could all head down to the beach in camper vans and splash around in the water and go surfing, obviously this cant last the whole of the video as this would be extremely boring, so towards the end when the lyrics change to cut me down and calve our names, I was thinking that it would be dark on the beach and there could be a fire with everyone around it eating and drinking.

There would also be a performance, to follow on with the beach theme the band could be performing on the coast