Plan Of Action

Improvements

Above is a photo of an action plan we intend to fulfill so that our video will be overall improved and hopefully look more professional. We decided to make adjustments on the following: 

• Remove the under-cranked shots of the London Eye and busy road near Westminster.
• Include more narrative shots of London, there is too much of Glenn singing the song.
• We need to film in more locations, to show the range of life in London.
• We also want to change his clothing, as the dark jacket looks dull.
• To make the lighting more effective we will need to film in daylight, because some of our shots were filmed in the dark.
• Regarding the locations we need to try and travel to different social classed areas, for example higher classed areas such as Chelsea which can contrast to lower class areas such as Bermondsey, South London.  
• Have Glenn learn how to play some of the song on the guitar, this will add more realism to the video, as in the rough cut he pretended to. 

We now need to re-group and find out dates for when Glenn is available to film during the coming weeks. This may pose problems as he has work loyalties so finding free time to film with us may prove difficult.

Making The Signs

During the planning stages for our music video we wanted to have our character (Glenn) holding signs during a rather long instrumental part of the song. The signs will have the words What A Life ? on them so that the song is promoted visually as well as during the lyrics, I volunteered to create these signs for the video as I had many paints and spare wood in the shed at home.

I began by opening a word document and typing out each word in a font called 'Stencil' which ironically was perfect for creating a stencil type font. I made each word large enough so that it would be easily read from a distance when filming and printed them out. Once I had each part of the question 'What A Life?' I began to cut the letters out with a Stanley knife so that I could spray over the stencil onto the boards of wood.


Below are the finished boards which Glenn will be using during the video. I took them to school the next day and the group and I were very pleased with the outcome, therefore making them a success!

Equipment We Need To Use

In order to actually film our music video we need to use a Sony Handycam. This is small enough to be easily carried around London and still has enough quality to record a high standard of footage. We will also store our footage on a recording tape, and then upload it to the computer from there. Using a tape is useful as we can simply rewind it and film over any shots we do not need or want.  

In order to film some shots without any jerky camera movements, we need to attach the camera to a tripod. The tripod allows the user to film shots which have no movement from human error, at different heights due to the retractable legs and have slow pans and vertical movement as the base of the attachment can move up and down and from side to side. Using a tripod in our group will certainly make our filming easier as we have many planned pans across the River Thames and long length shots of the London Eye and a busy road in Westminster.

The group and I will also need to use a music player of some sort. This is so Glenn can hear the music whilst lip syncing the correct lyrics at the right times. Matt suggested downloading the track 'What A Life' to his iPhone so that Glenn can simply have the music playing in his jacket pocket. This will aid Glenn in when to come into a certain lyric and how long to hold it for.  Our phones will obviously be useful when planning to film our video as we can call or text each other to arrange times and places to meet. 

We took still photos of each other whilst filming with my digital camera so we can show them on our blogs. This will also help show our stages of production as we can take photos of each stage as we continue with our filming of the music video.

Final Animatic

Here is the final animatic for our music video, the process of creating this video has given the group and I an insight to how to make the actual music video. This is because we had to edit the shots to the music and add effects in such as fades, the time it took to create the animatic has also given us an idea to how long the actual video will take, as editing film will be far more complex than editing still image.

We shall use this animatic to hopefully give us a clear guide to what shots we need to film for the video itself, and hopefully using this will save us time when actually filming the video.

Filming Schedule

Click Image To Enlarge

Risk Assessment

Before going to London to start filming the music video the group and I had to carry out a risk assessment for the day of shooting.

Story Boarding

During the past few weeks the group and I have been making a storyboard for our music video. This was a long process which needed many ideas and sketches for the video itself. Myself and Jay were in charge of creating the storyboard as Matt was editing the song as it was rather long and repetitive.

This is a photo of Jay and I creating the storyboard. This required listening to the song constantly so that we could illustrate our video to certain lyrics and timings. We often decided to take on certain stages of the song separately so we could complete it in the quickest time possible, we would then show each other our ideas and give feedback, this enabled us to change or keep certain points of the video we felt were necessary. The idea of using this storyboard is so that when filming we know exactly what we are going to film and where, which will save us time in the long run production of the music video.

This image is Matt editing our storyboard on Final Cut Express, this software allows the user to add transitions such as fades and decide how long each shot will be. Getting to grips with this software proved difficult to Jay and I so we thought Matt would be better suited as he was relatively comfortable using it. Although Matt was editing the majority of the storyboard, Jay and I also used it as we wanted to be familiar with the software in case Matt was unavailable to edit our work during the process of creating the video.

Here is an image of our storyboards once finished. As it shows there were many sketches drawn for each shot which was fairly time consuming. However the process was made slightly easier as in some parts of the song we intend to have the same type of shot, so we didn't need to draw each one as they were the same. The idea of creating a storyboard at first seemed unnecessary and just another complication, however now it is complete the group and I can see why doing it was worth it as it gives us a clear idea of what we need to do. It will also save us a huge amount of time when actually filming as we will know exactly what shots we need to create the music video.