Changes For Our Music Video

After our evaluation, we decided to make certain changes for our music video based on the feedback we were given by our class and teachers.

For the performance, we will swap the entire band, because we were told that they didn't fit in and that the mise en scene didn't work. Our band didn't play the instruments correctly and it made them look unprofessional and sloppy, particularly when the camera was zoomed in on their instruments.

We will change aspects of the narrative to help show the development of the relationship of the couple. In the rough cut video, our narrative was rushed and the relationship breaking down didn't make sense to our class when they watched our rough cut. To fix this, we are going to add more scenes of the couple together, in shorter takes, so when the couple breaks up later in the video, it will have a greater effect on the audience,  and will make sense to our viewers.

We are going to use other locations to shoot our narrative such as: a bookshop/library, a park, a house and a field. Each location will have scenes of the couple having a good time together, and this will create more chemistry and a better dynamic on screen. We are going to use the bookshop/library as the location where they meet for the first time. We will film the couple in the park spending time together, and the field as an area for a picnic date. These locations will help establish a stronger relationship between the couple, and this will make the viewer feel more empathy for the protagonist.

Rough Cut Class Feedback: 5 words you relate to our video

This is a word cloud of the words that people wrote about our music video.

Whilst it would appear that at least some of our narrative was clearly portrayed (breakup was the most common word), other words that were popular like rushed, shaky and confusing suggest that we need to make our narrative more obvious- as a lot of people are getting confused as to what our video is actually about.

To make sure that this does not happen for our final cut, we need to use our storyboards, and create shorter shorts- to ensure our narrative is clear and concise.

Rough Cut Class Feedback 4: If our narrative was a movie, what genre would it be?

We wanted our narrative to emulate a drama/ romance storyline, so we asked this question to get a general idea of whether our rough cut had portrayed this.

This suggests to us that our narrative was not clear enough, as some people wrote that it felt more like a soap opera, or just didn't answer the question. When we reshoot, we will have to follow our storyboard exactly to ensure that there is no confusion when it comes to narrative and what we are trying to portray with it.

Rough Cut Class Feedback 3: Does the band match our genre?

We had already decided to change some of the members of our band, and this data confirms our decision. However, the fact that the largest category is 'yes' gives us some idea that the look of our band matches the genre. This means that we could use similar mise-en-scene, but change some of our actors, and direct them to be more energetic.

Rough Cut Class Feedback 2: Lighting/Colouring in our performance

When we first filmed our performance, we used a blue light to shine on the front of our band, and a red light on the back. We thought that this created a purple look to the video, and we liked the fact that the two clashing colours created a contrast of two moods- the blue created a certain 'coolness', and the red clashed with it, with its connotations of anger and love. This battle of feelings is something we wanted to relate to our narrative.

This graph tells us that 100% of our peers liked the lighting in the performance.

      We will definitely use this lighting when we re shoot our performance.
   
We originally chose this to create a contrast, and to follow Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposites theory (the connotations of red is the opposite of the connotations of blue, which links to the opposing forces from the protagoist (blue/male) and the antagonist (red/female).l

Rough Cut Class Feedback 1: Percentage

This graph tells us that the majority of our peers think that we are 20-30% completed- and this is something we need to rectify. By the time we hand our final cut in, our video should look 90-100% completed.

We will achieve this goal by doing a total reshoot, and film more footage- so that we have more media to work with and edit, which should make our video look more professional and importantly- complete.

props

For part of the narrative of our blog, we needed a clock to represent both time and their relationship

Throughout the song, the clock will appear o be more smashed like the relationship.  We did this because of the line "when the lines match up on the 24 hour clock" which repeaters its self a lot during the song specifically at the end of the song.  For our finial cut we need to improve how the clock looks, for our rough cut we just drew cracks on the clock which didn't look good at all so for the finial cut we are going to smash the clock and make time times different for every shot.  This will represent the length of the relationship and how it keeps breaking.

Our Self Evaluation of our Rough Cut

For obvious reasons, we are not happy with our rough cut and have a number of improvements to make before we are satisfied with the final product.

To ensure that we improve our video and increase the standard for our final cut, we have created an Action Plan.

• Do a 100% reshoot
• Use new locations for narrative
• IMPORTANT: more footage
• New members for band
• Shorter shots
• Get a singer who actually sings/ band that can actually play their instruments
• Mid shot/ close up of guitar
• Use equipment (tripod/dolly/crane)
• Make drum skin
• Some side angles on singer
• Aerial Shot on drummer
• Camera movement ALL THE TIME

Music Video Theory: Tzvetan Todorov

Music Video Theory: Tzvetan Torodov
Torodov suggests that there are three parts to any narrative.

The Beginning: A state of equilibrium or balance

This is definitely true in the case of our music video, as the music video starts with our male character alone, and slightly sad about it.

The Middle: Disruption of the equilibrium 

Again, our narrative follows the pattern- the female character enters the man's life, changes it completely, making it a lot better. However, there is then another change- she starts making his life worse and he returns to a state of sadness.

The End: Reinstating of the equilibrium

Our video follows this step to an extent- our protagonist ends up alone, just like at the start of the video- but this time around he is content, and has realised it is better to be alone and be happy than being with someone and being miserable.

Music Video Theory: Andrew Goodwin

To make our video look conventional, we decided to look up music video theorists,and research the main features of music videos that they have identified, then use them in our own music video.

The first theorist I found was Andrew Goodwin. He has identified five main, key features of conventional music videos, two of which we want to use in our own video. The others were good, but we feel that we should defy convention slightly, rather than following every video that we have watched.

1-Thought Beats (seeing the sound)
              We liked the idea of the narrative's visual matching the song's audio, so we have planned to match some of the actions in our video to the sound. For example, we have planned a shot where a girl bangs on the door, and this will match to a drum beat in the song.

2-Narrative and Performance
               This was pretty much a given,as we have been told to do a 50:50 split between performance and narrative anyway, so we will definitely be using this convention in our video.


         

Claude Levi-Strauss: Binary Opposites

When looking at our music video narrative. we can see that it fits Levi Strauss's Binary Opposites theory, in which the narrative is organised around a conflict between binary opposites, such as 'Good vs Evil', 'Human vs Nature', 'Humanity vs Technology' and 'Protagonist vs Antagonist'.

Our narrative fits within the Binary Opposites theory, with the boyfriend as the protagonist and the girlfriend as the antagonist, because they argue with each other frequently throughout the video, and the contrast and conflict between them grows as the song progresses. Our narrative also follows the 'Man vs Woman' trope as our two characters are a man, and a woman, who repeatedly sabotage their relationship then refuse to admit that they were wrong. If our narrative goes well, this will lead the audience to think that the characters shouldn't be together.   

Equipment: Editing

Editing
We are using Adobe Premier Pro to edit our music video. In our rough cut we have included many effects, such as 'ghosting', time lapses and a fade to black. It is useful for us to use this program as we had already learned the basics last year, whilst doing our preliminary task.

We have mainly been using EDIT 01 and EDIT 09, and so far, we have really enjoyed the editing process.

Places to film narative

We have thought of some places to film such as the backtracks close to us for the narrative as they look dark and mysterious at nigh-time ish.  We could also film down in Tynemouth on the cannon and Collingwood's monument.  There are other places top film in Tynemouth such as the streets along the coastal areas which look pretty.  There is also the lighthouse to film as a pretty location and all along the beach.  

Equipment: How we film

Equipment
The Dolly
To film our performance,we used one of the school's dollys. It looks slightly different to the one in the picture- it is three wheels, that you have to mount a tripod on top of.
      It was very useful to use because we could get still shots when we wanted to, but we could also move around our band and pan out when the zoom on the camera was fully out.

The Mount
We used a shoulder mount to get accurate and sharp camera movements during performance filming. This made our footage look more interesting as we could have smaller movements than the ones we got when we were using the dolly.

Feedback Sheet

Our rough cut is due in two days, on October 18th, and after ths deadline our class will be viewing our music video (so far!) and giving us feedback on it. To prepare for this peer evaluation, I created a feedback sheet for our classmates to use. It includes questions about the narrative, the performance, the look and the feel of the video, and improvements that we need to make.

I used the question: 'If our narrative was a movie, what genre would it be?' to see if our message has come across in our video.

I also included 'Write down 5 words that first come to mind when you think of our video?' to see if our mood of the video is what we are aiming for.

Feedback planning

We are planning our feedback sheet to give for our rough cut.  We have our rough cut deadline on Wednesday which is the 18/10/17 which is quite close as we still need to film some narrative which David is doing tonight.  He will be using the same person that we used in our performance for now because we aren't good with time management and there is limited equipment.  We will be re-doing the narrative and some performance after the rough cut but for now we just need to fill up the timeline.
When we present our rough cut, we would like it if some people would complete a feedback sheet for us as this would help with both audience research as help us generally.

Rough Cut finished

This is our finial product for our rough cut.  We will be presenting them to the class soon to get feedback from them and find out what they think needs improved as part of our audience research to get feedback.  This won't be very demographic as it just shows 17-18year olds form Newcastle's opinion of our music video so we will ask other people what they think we should improve as well

Rough Cut Deadline

So far we've been filming and editing for our rough cut music video, which the deadline is the 18th of October at 4:30pm . Our rough cut must have no gaps in between the music video as the time line has to be filled completely as if we are missing footage we have to the fill the gap with other footage either from narrative or performance depending which section we lack footage.

An example could be having a lack of narrative footage we would fill in the gaps with performance footage.

So after this deadline for the rough cut the next one is the final cut deadline with the finished music video complete which is the 28th of November.

Finishing our rough cut

The deadline for our rough cut was the 18th of October, 2017. 

We have filled the timeline with footage, and even though there are some improvements to be made, our rough cut is finished!

Own improvments

After exporting our music video as a product.  We released some of the problems and small mistakes we made along the way:
We need to change the performance as the main singer is the protagonist,
We need to be better at time management,
We a better location for our performance,
We need more locations for our narrative and can't film in school as much.

Rough cut deadline

We have our rough cut deadline today and we are quite calm about it for now.  We haven't got too much to stress about at the moment because we are on track.  For now all we need to do is fill gaps and make it flow chronologically.  We don't need any new footage for now as i would stress us out trying to film last minute so we will make use of what we have.  We have Jaclyn as our main editor as shes very good at it.

Filming narrative part 1:

We have started to film our narrative, we started a bit last minute but it will be enough for the rough cut.  We have used our main singer as the lead role in the narrative but we will re-shoot the performance so it works better because it doesn't look good having the main singer and the protagonist.  This is our main girl for our narrative.  We will need to film more narrative but it looks good for now

editing

For part of our music video, we found an aesthetically pleasing editing technique that looks good for our video.  It's called ghosting and makes the girl in the background look like shes a ghost going around the man in an eerie way. We are planning on putting this in towards then end of the video when they have broken up but she is still always around him.

Rough cut performance footage

As we have been rushed to try and get our rough cut finished for the Wednesday of this week, we've had to spend a lot of time editing the performance footage. So, having spent at least 5/6 hours overall, the performance footage is all finally edited and completed. We are now focusing on the filming of the narrative footage and this will eventually be blogged about as well as edited.

Anamatic finally finished

after Finally finishing our times and story boards for the anamatic, we have eventually finished it and have a full timeline for the video finished now so we can start to film properly now.

new storyboards

after finding a few mistakes with our storyboard and anamatic, we decided to re-do the narative storyboards to ake it flow better and so that the times would work better.  We had to re-do the storyboards quite fast so they aren't to the sam quality as the others bu we can still see what the narative is and what it is showing.  We also did some of the performance storyboards again because some of the takes were a bit long.  We just need o add these new storyboards to our video and it will be all good.

clock stages

These our the stages of the clock which we will show throughout the video representing the stages of the relationship.  We were initially going to smash the clock but got scared we would smash it too much and have to continuously buy the clock so we drew on it for now but for the finial cut, we may smash it up.

Music Video Theory: Roland Barthes

The Semantic Code

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic.

He introduced the theory of The Semantic Code-which is effectively the voice of the person. It is normally a moment within the narrative that points out a lyric in the song, that suggests a particular meaning, connotation or concept.

We have used the convention in our video numerous times. The lyrics 'when the zeroes line up on the 24 hour clock,' matches up with a visual of a clock, which ends up being a metaphor for the character's relationship, and the fact that they are running out of time. The clock eventually ends up smashing. By having this effect, we have matched a line or lyric to an entire concept that weaves throughout our video, just like Barthes observed. 

Storyboard timings updated

As we were going through the process of doing the storyboard animatics, we discovered a problem along the way. We found that when checking through the times to see if we had footage for every second of the song, we didn't. So to resolve this problem, we went back through and double checked the timings and added  9 more frames which were at least 2 to 3 seconds long in order to fill these gaps.

 These are our new storyboard frames that have been added.

Storyboard Animatics

Before we can start editing for our music video, we have to animate our storyboards so that it's in a video format. This just means that when it comes to editing the actual music video, it's a lot easier to edit so we know what frame goes where and what timings it is. Having the storyboards in a video format means that we can get a clear vision of what our music video will turn out like.

Filming for Performance

We filmed our performance in the drama studio we have at our school.  We played with the lighting to get more of an ambiance.  We decided to go for a red and blue theme.  The red would show the love which is portrayed in the song and the blue shows the contrast and how there is something else which isn't love but the darker/colder side.  The song hits at the fact there is love but there is also breakups throughout the song.   

Here are some photos of us preparing to film for our performance side of our music video.           

                                                                                     

Filming for Performance

Here are some photos of us preparing to film the performance side of our music video. We are just setting up the props for the band such as the drums, guitars and microphone stands ready so that it's in position ready to be filmed. 

Anamatics

We have started to create our anamatic for our music video.  This will help us see if we are missing anything or if our takes our too long/short.  We are creating it on Adobe Premier and have to scan the photos into a computer and then crop them to just have the picture, then add them to the timeline on adobe.  This is along and slow process but will help us in the long term. Once we have created the anamatic,we can really start to film.  Here are some of the snapshots form our anamatic.