Rehearsal

Today we tried to have a rehearsal in the studio at school, unfortunately this wasn't great as 2 out of the three of our band turned up

Organising rehearsal for the cast

Talking to the set designer

Today in the lesson we spoke to the set designer Jacqueline and to the lighting guy Jack. We showed them how we would like the set to look like in the studio. They understood clearly what the theme of the set should be like, we are going for a sort of grungy basement sort of set with pipes on the wall behind the band, Jacqueline said that this could be done, but she was wondering whether this would actually be on the set or would it be done by green screen, we hadn't really thought that out but we concluded that it should be already on the set to make it seem more realistic. There is a problem with this however because there is another group in the year that want this type of set, so we need to sort of make it look a bit different otherwise it will look like we have copied them and put no effort into the design. Talking to Jacqueline has helped me realise that the set is going to look really good due to the fact that we have a real set designer to help us with it. We would struggle on our own to create the set because none of us do art or design.
Jack the lighting guy said that doing the spotlights for the band would be easy but there are two different types of spotlights that we could have, we could either have a really strong one where the audience can identify clearly that the individual band members are being spotlighted, or we could have a weaker spotlight that comes of more natural. We didn't really know which one would be best so we asked for his advice and he said that the more natural spotlight would be better as it fits better with the theme of the video.
For the police lighting he said that if we got an actual police light it wouldn't show up very well because it is quite small, he suggested that we use actual blue and red lighting to show it, we didn't really understand how this would be done because we don't really understand how lighting works, so he said that he would be able to do it pretty easily and that we don't have to worry about it. This is nice for us as it allows us to leave it to an expert and not have to worry about it, which allows us to focus on other things.

Monday the 19th of october

In todays lesson we put the final props that we require for the music video together and went through who was gonna get which prop and what props we could get off school, there were quite a lot of props that we need that the school have. This process took quite a lot of time and taught me that you need a lot of props to make what you are trying to pull of realistic. After we got the props together we decided to get the costume together, this was initially set out for Perry to do but he struggled with the task as he didn't really understand the image that we wanted so i helped him out by looking at Alternative American rock bands on the internet. This i thought was quite an easy process to do because it is all online, you just have to know what the image is that you want.  We have decided to either go with all black or a chequered shirt.

The ending for the music video hasn't been decided so today we looked at the possibilities for it. I am not to sure on the ideas though so i am going to try and come up with some other ones to give ideas to the group. I am going to try and do this by listening to the lyrics of the song and imagining what would work well. By looking at a variety of music videos i have learnt that a good ending to the music video isn't vital so if we could come up with a simple one i think it would be alright.

Alex also started to draw out the shot list for the video but we haven't gone very far with it but he is finishing it over night hopefully.

6

Talking to Luke

In yesterdays lesson we spoke to Luke about the small narrative to the video, this is about the security guards and he did like it initially but came up with a better idea for us. He told us that a band playing in a car park seems to portray breaking of the rules in a away and therefore we should have some blue flashing lights and police car syrons to build suspension of the band playing on the roof of the car park. I was happy with the idea of the security guards to be honest but he obviously knows more about music videos as he has been doing them for the last 20 years so i am happy to change the narrative a little bit. It is frustrating for us as a group as we think we have come up with good ideas and just as we are finalising them we are told than we can do better.

This is what i thought that Luke mean about the flashing lights and the siren.

Thursday the 15th of October

In todays lesson as a group we gave each other tasks to do. I was told to do the prop list and help Freddie out with the cast list. This was quite an easy task to do because i had the props imagined in my head and so i just went through the video in my head and thought what we needed and when. I had to also divide up the props that we as a group would get and the props that we needed to either borrow off the school. Most of the props that we need the school have so we just need to ask to borrow them. The only props that we actually need to get is a sandwich and maybe a torch light and a walkie talkie.

Test shoot + Rehearsals

Today we had both our test shoot and a rehearsal all in one, the reason we did this was because we are running out of time a little bit and thought it would be best to do tasks in one go. I thought that it went really well and when the band were all there together they worked well together. The photo beneath is the band minus the drummer Tom, but Tom is in the video. I think that Max is giving off the right image for our lead singer,  and our guitarist Thomas could be playing any instrument on stage as he has got the look for it all. I am very pleased that we have finally got this done as it has taken a long 3 weeks to come up with this final idea and i think the real thing is going to be amazing. I think the reason why the band look good together is because there hair styles are quite similar, they have all got quite long hair that flops around, this fits with the tone of the song which is quite grungy. They might not be creating this sort of vibe when they are off camera. They are all confident on camera which makes it much easier for us to film because they know what they need to do. I really hope that we can have all three of them in our final piece.

Polydor Records talk

The talk we had from Polydor Records was by two employees of the business. There jobs within Polydor were video commissioners, there main purpose was to make sure after an idea was brought out that everyone was on the same page of the idea. They work with different directors who all have different ideas for music videos, ranging from narrative music videos to performance videos and animated videos. They said that they liked to work with new directors who are willing to take risks, this is because the ones who take risks generally come up with the better ideas. 

The talk today from Polydor records has taught me a few things when making music videos. 

The treatment to the music video should be short and sweat and also visually impressive, this is because if the treatment is just text than its going to bore the person you are pitching it to, you wanna give the best impression possible on the idea. 

They also said that the best ideas in a way are the simplest ones, this i was happy about because our group has had lots of ideas in the last 3 weeks that were all quite complicated and our new idea is very simple 

Order of events in the car park:

• band carrying instruments into car park
• stumbles upon guard, who thinks nothing of it
• goes onto the roof, sets up instruments, starts playing
• guard on duty starts to hear noise, follows sound
• finds amp lead, follows it
• finds band playing on roof, playing it to the world
• Goes to small band member orders him to stop, big band member then intimidates guard and tells him to go away
• retreats, calls in backup with walkies talkie 
• sees colleges doing clean habits e.g doing tie up, drinking cup of tea, looking at the cctv casually
• they go up to roof
• start listening to music, 'let their hair down'  
• Each band member is individually dragged away - guitarist dragged while still playing and pianist too, and are taken away. We don't see where
• Drummer is taken away, and his drum sticks maybe broken in front of him?
• Singer is left alone, still singing, then dragged away and thrown off the roof of the car park.

Finalising the idea

In todays lesson we were trying to think of ways to make the video look more visually appealing. I came up with an idea that seems to of pleased Freddie and Alex but i don't think Perry is too keen on it but seems to be ok with it as its about the group not individual ideas. The idea of the video is set in a location which is on the roof of a car park and in a studio. In the studio there will be a band and to make things look interesting the band members are going to be on different levels for example one member will be on the floor and then another will be on a block higher up and another will be higher up than that and as the song goes on they will alternate positions. There will also be projections on the wall of a jungle, this is significant as the main lyrics to the song are 'into the jungle'. The car park scene is about the band setting up to play when a security guard comes and stops them but the band pays no attention to the security guard so he has to cool back up and eventually the security guards all end up enjoying themselves, this is shown by them dancing around with each other.

 This is what i can imagine the security guard and car park looking like in my head. The security guard needs to be quite big and look quite old. He needs to have a security jacket on and have a walkie talkie

Looking at other performances

As a group we got 3 ideas of band sets that we liked each, the one that i liked the most was my own and this was one with flashing lights going off in the background. I think i liked this the most because it looks quite easy to do, for example it can probably be done in after affects, it also looks visually interesting; I spoke to the group and they thought that this could be done, another element to the performance that i liked was by Green Day and its on my blog, they made the performance visually appealing because the guitarist was moving around the set and jumping up in the air. Another element o the performance was there was like an explosion of paint.

Back to Basics

we had a bit of a problem today, as a group and from the feedback from Phil and Luke we have decided that the smashing stuff up (narrative of our music video) isn't going to work. This has lead us to the option of just doing a performance.

This was the lesson plan for us

These are examples of different things to make the performance more exciting 

Finishing off with Luke

Luke said that the song that we have chosen (Sail) is too well known and the fact that it has a music video makes it harder for us because we have to try and compete with that music video which we cant do because if you compare the budgets, they are too different. The song we have chosen as a back up is

X Ambassadors, Jamie N Commons - Jungle

The reason for this is because it has the same meaning to Sail, this is good for us because it means that we don't have to change anything else of the video.

Filling in the time line that Alex started

Another Pitch to Luke

We pitched what we thought our final idea was to Luke who understood the concept of the idea about it being in reverse and he loved the song. The criticisms he did have was that for the smashing up scenes he thought they wouldn't last very long, this means that we would have to have loads of things in a room to smash up, because A, it wont look like a room without lots of stuff in and B. because otherwise we wont have enough visual image in the video to fill out the 3 minutes 15 seconds. Phil also said that we didn't have to make the narrative interesting and didn't have to worry about linking it up. 

Luke made us have a look in the studio to see if there would be enough space for 4 back up dancers and a main singer in there, The picture below is of the studio and we though that there was enough space. The picture doesn't represent all of the space available.

For the performance of the video we were told by Luke to draw on A3 sheet like you can see in the picture exactly where everything is going to be. In our case it is where the singer will be, where the drummer and the drum kit will be and where the pianist and the piano are going to be. We hadn't thought that through yet but i presumed it to be like a diamond formation where the leader will be at the top and the piano and drum kit in line with each other behind.











I think that we wouldn't need to have a narrative, this is because the song is so good that we can do so many interesting things on camera that we can make up enough time for the whole video. For example the dancing and the cool things done in reverse.

Looking at girlfriend and boy friend fighting in the car park

What we learnt from this is that we can get lots of really cool shots. This has encouraged us that the idea can be filmed very well. The pushing and the shoving looks visually appealing to the audience. If we are going to have a couple fighting then this is what we want it to look like.

Final idea

This is our final idea and we are not gonna change it. The idea contains of three strands one being a lip sync where we will just have the main actor who is Freddie's brother singing into a microphone in a studio or either singing in the rain, this might be hard as the cameras could get damaged. Another strand is the main singer singing with like 4 girl dancers around him in the studio. The 3rd strand is cool things in reverse like what i have posted in the previous blog post. The main theme of the video will be that it is played backwards starting with a man rising up out of bed to him seeing a smashed room and we show how he smashed the room up in reverse with cuts from the lip sync and the dance along with other cool things done in reverse. The video ends with the main singer burning up a letter which will be reversed as well. The significance of the letter being burnt is because that letter is the reason why the man has ended up smashing up the room but we don't know what is in the letter.

Things that look good in reverse

Ideas for cool things to do in front of the carmera

We have decided that the third element to the video is to reverse stuff, we came up with an idea of pouring paint out in a mixture of different colours and reversing it, this will look very visually appealing. Another thing that looked cool when reversed is pouring some liquid into a glass, this is because when it is reversed the liquid in the bottle will gain more volume and the volume in the glass will get smaller.