In my group task, I had to create a music Video with David Hutchings. We had everything planned out and tried our best to make the video as efficiently as possible.
Week 1: Research and Planning
We took heavy inspiration from David Bowie, I waned to use a song that could be up for interpretation and contain a video with surreal or strange imagery. My original Idea was to use Hurt by Nine inch Nails as our music video. We began planning and I wanted the video to touch upon heavier subjects such as depression to separate us from the other groups. However we developed this from an upsetting theme to a dream like theme. We looked at different videos and I decided we should change our song to one by David Bowie, This is because his music videos were similar to what I had in mind, they contained dream like sequences and had an emphasis on editing. I decided the best song to use was The Man Who Sold The World, which was a personal favorite of mine and could be interpreted in different ways.
I looked at different music videos for inspiration and was most interested in videos by David Bowie and Kanye West, as well as some parts of films that suited the themes of the video.
A song from David Bowie I took inspiration from was Lazarus. The nightmarish and surreal themes contains different connotations such as death, if viewers read between the lines, and I wanted to follow this trend in my video.
We then designed storyboards which would be further developed as we continued to film.
Week 2: Filming begins
Thursday 16th November: Me and David went to Yewtree cemetery and began to film a number of basic shots. We filmed establishing shots of the scenery and close ups of some of the statues. We also filmed a lip sync of David in the cemetery. I chose the line "I gazed a gazelle stare at all the millions here" because it could be linked with the cemetery setting.
Week 3:
Saturday 25th November: I decided, to keep with the psychedelic theme of Bowie's style, and the style we wanted to follow, I wanted to create a shot where David stares into the mirror and I was his reflection. So I brought David to my house and used green fabric to cover the mirror which we would then transform into a green screen in Sony Vegas. We also shot a closeup of me lip syncing and I wanted to use this as a stop motion animation.
Week 4:
Monday 4th December: I wanted to have shots of us standing still whilst distorted images, we created, are used as backgrounds. This followed the animation and surreal theme I wanted to follow. We went down to the green screen room and took several different shots which could be placed in front of scenic shots that we have taken.
Saturday 9th December: I wanted to get more scenic shots with duller weather, to keep with the theme of the video, as well as re shoot the mirror shots, this is because they were too shaky whilst editing and we couldn't keep them in the same place, this is because we shot this by hand and without a tripod. We fixed this by attaching my phone to the only tripod we had available with hair bobbles. we also placed them on boxes and used a better mirror.
Then we went back to the cemetery where we previously filmed with the bad weather (Snow and hail) I wanted to re shoot some shots because I believed it would suit the theme of the video better and shows how we have developed our video over time.
Then we went to town to take some shots of crowds and more stills of the weather in a crowded area.
Week 5: Editing
In this week we began editing the music video, I focused mostly on the editing side of things; like creating the stop motion sequence and special effects. While David focused mostly on the group blog and paperwork; such as storyboards and planning.
For the stop motion sequence I created an effect in Sony Vegas that would cover the still of me lip syncing. I chose the style of a VHS tape, I did this to follow the gritty and surreal theme of the rest music video. I asked David to take a close up shot of him putting in a VHS tape, just to give this shot a narrative and to make this sequence make more sense. I took an image off the internet of a generic static effect, from a VHS tape, and cut out a piece of it in Photoshop, I then used a combination of green screen and animation too make it pan in front of the stills in the background.
Week 6: Presentation
Monday 18th December: I finally finished Editing our first version of the music video. I included extra shots involving green screen and added Noise to certain shots to follow the surreal, VHS theme in the video. The add noise tool makes any shot look grainy or fuzzy, looking similar to a VHS tape. The audio The audio we created for our music video was in terrible quality. This is because the audio I recorded was done by using the recorder tool on the school computer, with a YouTube video of the song playing on full volume. The internal speakers gave the song a low quality and vibrating sound throughout the song, because of the internal speakers. So I decided, when I got home, to use an mp3 converter instead, to get a higher quality, on my own PC then bring the audio file in on a pen drive the next morning then Re-render the video for our presentation.Music Video Planning part 2
http://group-b-david-james-g324.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/second-storyboard.html
