Shoot day 1

To depict the narrative of the girlfriend character being in the mean, popular girl group who are shunning Jay as he isn't popular, we planned to film them in school by the lockers. We told our actors where and when to meet a few days before, and so we were organised in advance instead of having to organise it on the day. The animatic helped as it meant that we knew what we wanted to show in the shots and we also knew how much footage we needed to film. However, we could have thought about the different shots we wanted to film beforehand as we could have had a wider range of shots, and we found ourselves deciding what shots we wanted to film while we were filming, The filming, therefore, became slightly disorganised. Although we managed the actors well, we found that when acting the specific scenes their acting didn't seem as good as previously and became a bit stale. The location also formed a problem since we were filming in school at lunchtime, since this was when the actors were available. This meant that there were students roaming the corridors and wanting to pass us while we were filming which would get in the way and interfere with the shot. We overcame this by asking politely if they would wait till we finished filming a specific shot, and then they could pass, where we would continue filming afterwards. Unfortunately we couldn't stop all interruptions as people would also come from the other side of the corridor and therefore it would already be too late and they would be in shot. We managed our time well as we were able to film the scenes all at lunch, although this made us feel slightly rushed. Additionally, we worked well as a group as we would take turns with the camera, telling the actors what to do and we would come up with decisions of what to film once we all agreed. Personally, I was in control of the camera for some of the shoot and I gave my ideas for camera angles that we could film from. I also played an important role in preventing passers by from entering the shots.

Day plan

We have decided to film our music video over the course of a couple of days. We have split the shoot into days depending on the location, for example, we want to film from the view point and the lake on the same day because they are close together. As we want to film part of our music video in school because this will help us demonstrate our narrative, we need to be in school to do this, therefore, we will do all of this on a separate day.

In order to ensure that we know exactly what we are doing and that we work efficiently, we have put together a plan for the day. We have made one for the days that we will shoot outside of school and one for the days when we will film in school.

TIMINGS FOR OUT OF SCHOOL FILMING

9:30 - Group arrives and goes over what we want to do in the day, check that we have everything we need for that day

10:30 - Cast arrives and group tells them what we are going to do

10:45 - Costumes, hair and make-up

11:30 - Go to location 1, run through, then film

13:00 - Lunch

14:00 - Go over what we need to do in the afternoon

14:15 - Go to location 2, run through, then film

15:45 - Review footage

TIMINGS FOR IN SCHOOL FILMING

When we film in school, we will need to be considerate of the fact that other students will be around, and may even be in lesson. This means that we may have to keep the noise down as well as the fact that certain parts of the school may not be suitable to use at specific times of the day.  We will also have lessons during the day, the members in our group will all have different lesson times and so will the members of the cast. This therefore means that we will need to find a time that is convenient for everyone, this means we may have to film during lunch time.

We will film during lunch time or during free periods, therefore we will not have a full length day plan for this. Instead, we will meet the cast and quickly discuss what needs to be done, we will then make sure they are in their costumes. Following this, we will begin by doing a run through and then start filming.

Closer to the day we will devise a more accurate plan for the filming in school.

Experimenting with the footage

Our artist's practice performance

Questioning our artist

Our perfect audience member

This is Max Saunders. He is our ideal audience member. He is 21 years old and so is a young adult who fits into the demographic of Jay’s target audience. From his profile picture, we can see someone who could be regarded as ‘indie’ since he is wearing clothing which is comfortable, rather than particularly fashion trendy. In addition, the silly nature of the photo demonstrates that he doesn’t care about image, and just wants to be himself, which is similar to the star image of Jay.

Max clearly enjoys listening to indie music and understands what it means to be an organic artist as he plays his own instrument which is a ukulele and so appreciates authentic music.

At the moment, Max is studying at university which again matches the young adult demographic of Jay’s target audience and also conforms to the expected VALS of Jay’s fans, as he is studying Business Management to develop skills, wanting to make his mark in society and showing that he is an innovator.

Max’s choice in films also indicates that he is in Jay’s target audience as he enjoys some films of an indie genre, like how Jay is a singer in the indie genre. This signifies that Max values passion and originality in different media forms, and so can be seen to admire Jay as an organic artist rather than just due to liking his songs.

From Max’s music choices, it is evident that he is part of Jay’s target audience as he enjoys music by artists similar to Jay such as Hozier, George Ezra and Tom Odell who are also indie artists. They are all organic which implies that he doesn’t like music by synthetic artists and so doesn’t like artists who are constructed, and prefers them to be more down-to-earth. This insinuates that Max is quite casual and relaxed like Jay, and so his music should appeal to him.

As Max is Jay’s perfect audience member, we would expect him to share Jay’s products and posts from his social media to help spread word-of-mouth and promote him in order to increase Jay’s fan-base made up of other people from his target audience.

Analysis of the casting

From testing people to be in our music video, we saw that finding the right people would be more challenging than we initially thought.

 

When watching this footage back, we saw that all the girls, apart from the one with the short red hair seemed quite nervous in front of the camera. It is important that the girls don't look nervous and aren't camera shy because they will be playing the part of the popular, slightly mean girls at the school. To portray this effectively, the people who we will cast need to be confident in order to play the part convincingly. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will cast any of these people as they either don't have the right look, or are not confident enough to be able to play the part in the way that we want it to be done. This has helped us in seeing what we should be looking for in terms of acting ability as well as what the cast need to look like.

 

We could only get a couple of boys to appear in this casting video, however, this still allowed us to see what we needed in terms of look and lip-syncing/acting ability. While the boy in the blue top seemed to be a bit shy and unsure of himself, the other boy in the tartan shirt was over acting. We saw the importance of the fact that the boy knows the lyrics to the song, particularly as he is the artist and should know the lyrics to his own song. This is because without knowing the lyrics properly, it isn't possible for the boy to give a convincing performance and make the audience believe that he is passionate about his music. Neither of the boys seemed to have good musicality which is important because they need to be able to say the lyrics in time with the music to lip-sync, therefore using the music as a guide. Additionally, neither of the boys had the look we want our artist to have as the boy in the blue looks too young and the other boy simply doesn't have what we were looking for. Neither of the boys are able to play the guitar which is a problem as to highlight that our artist is organic, this is something we feel as though we should show in the video, especially because you can hear the guitar in the song.

 

Following this, it is clear that we need to re-evaluate what we are looking for. We need to ensure that whoever we cast as the girlfriend and her friends are confident in front of the camera to be able to portray their characters effectively. For the boy, it is evident that we need to have someone with good musicality, and can play the guitar. We can also see that the boy needs to be able to learn the lyrics and be able to lip-sync well as well as accurately.

 

The next thing we will need to do is screen test some other people who we think would be able to play their parts more accurately. We will use what we have learnt from this to help us do this.

Casting for our music video

Use of the forest in indie music videos

Shots inspired by music videos

Our editing timeline

Analysing the results of our survey

Analysing the results of our survey from SamMullerMedia

Feedback on our idea

Our animatic

Analysis of our storyboard

From doing the storyboard, we structured and planned our music video by looking intricately at each shot and composing and drawing it to make it clear.

The storyboard was a moderately hard thing to develop to get all the ideas onto many pages through drawing. The storyboard was composed through the timeline, which was made at around the same time as the storyboard. The changes in the timeline ensured the storyboard would have to be tweaked. This resulted having to re-draw certain frames to make sense and flow as a storyboard.

The storyboard is going to be the most useful when it comes to editing to get what we had in our initial vision and also helped us realise as a group the importance of the studio shots and how we will compose the artist in the studio with the lighting. The storyboard had to be drawn with 60 shots and the idea of paying close attention to shots, such as close-ups of the guitar and close-ups of the artist being key.

The storyboard overall allowed the music video to come together and united all the ideas into pictures to give a visual idea. The storyboard helped us think about issues where our group debated things such as whether we should have the singer singing in other locations or just in the studio. This became clear from other indie music videos and fitted well in the storyboard where memories of dates are shown whilst the performance element is closely tied within the storyboard through the studio.

The storyboard will not link to the way we will film. This is because on shoot day we will film a various range of shots which we may come up with on the day. This means that we will not follow the storyboard exactly when editing as it won’t be totally precise. However, the storyboard has given us a good solid foundation to help us get started. 

Our storyboard