Narrative filming..

Last week on Tuesday, Me and Michael got our actors together and filmed the majority of our narrative. We filmed it in two parts, one during the night-time, which is our first setting (The first attack), and one in the day-time which is the second of the attacks.  The shoot was a success and we got pretty much all of the shots we needed. We filmed the day part of our music video before the night part so that we could get it done in one day. This assisted us in making the most of our time aswell.

The actors, Amy and Jay were great and put forward ideas to what would look better etc. This was great and helped us a lot as we had a second opinion from people that were experienced. Pretty much everything went perfectly, although it began to rain later on in the shoot which was a bit of a restriction. However we filmed under a moterway bridge which was dry and seemed to work better than our origional idea.
The fact that we got it all done in one day was great as the actors were not available any other time, before we filmed this was restricting, although now we have all of the shots we need, it does not affect us.

Item list for filming...

2x  cars for lighting
1x  item list
2x  cameras (if we can get them)
2x  tripods
1x Dolly
2x  SD cards
costumes for actors
1x storyboard
2x actors
1x  smashed bottle

Some filming done!

At the weekend me and michael filmed our establishing shot. We went down to a local motorway bridge in elsenham at arouns 8:00pm(when it was dark) and filmed the traffic. We filmed it from 2 different angles, one low and one high. We spent half an hour on each shot because the idea is that we speed it up a considerable amount so that the lights merge and create a few seconds of interesting effect. This will also fit in with our horizontal intertextual reference "All of the Lights" and aswell as that it will set the urban scene we are trying to establish.

Shots

We have spoken to some of the employees at a local shop, about a shot regarding the CCTV television, this will be a very effective shot for our music video to get a varied amount of shots and interesting one. This shot will also help connote the whole "watching" aspect to our film and help the audience understand the narrative more. We have asked if we could film the TV rather than getting the actual footage as it will be easier for them and for us to film.

Another place we will be asking to film in is an industrial estate in elsenham that has a lot of urban mise en scene for example skips, propane tanks, CCTV cameras etc that we could use to our advantage to build up the setting of a more urban place rather than a rural one.

Weather...

The weather is very good for wednesday and I am happy that the shoot for the narrative will go okay. Although the weather for Thursday is rain all day, this doesnt matter as we are filming the performance part of our video with Emma Jenkins in the pit, during the day. This essential for the lighting we need.

Problem!!!

The male actor for our narrative (Martin Baldwin) is not able to film on wednesday, so i have planned to ask another friend of mine who is also a drama student called Jay Kahtri, we are hoping he will say yes as he is also a good actor and will take it more seriously.

This is martin who will not be able to act in our shoot due to problems with availability.

This is Jay Khatri who will be replacing Martin Baldwin for availability reasons.

Filming>Shot list..

We are thinking of filming our performance on Thursday, so we will be booking -
-2 HD Cameras,
-2 Tripods,
-1 dolly.

Luckily we have looked at the pit timetable and it is free afterschool. We have spoken to the site team and they have said that it is fine for us to film on Thursday after school. Although we may have to wait until 4 o clock as there is a pit gig at lunchtime and they will have to tidy away. Although we have to wait, we are going to ask the lighting people to stay and help us, also there are going to be projections on two screens, so it will hopefully look proffessional. Also, it will look like a conventional performance as the set up for the pit gig is set up for a performance within our Drum and Bass Genre.

Shot list - Performance

- Close ups with handheld camera
- High angle shots with tripod
- Medium and long range shots with tripod
- Close ups and pan/tracking shots on dolly
- Low angle shots on tripod
- Sillouette shots on tripod.

We will be filming the narrative part of our music video tommorow, so we will need the actors and costumes ready so that we can get straight on with it and have enough time to get to the specific locations so that we can aim to finish it in one day. I have checked out the weather also and it looks good for filming.

We will also be booking out -
-2 HD Cameras
-2 Tripods
-1 Dolly.

Shot list for Narrative -

- Close ups with handheld camera
- High angle shots with tripod
- Medium and long range shots with tripod
- Close ups and pan/tracking shots on dolly
- Low angle shots on tripod
- Tracking shots following actors on dolly

Narrative codes

To show my understanding of Roland Barthes' Narrative codes I have applied them to popular music videos and films. This is also to help me include some of the codes into my production.

Enigma Code - Offers a puzzle and delays the answer - For the Enigma code I feel that a good example would be Eminems' "Not Afraid", this is because he is standing at the top of a building and the audience doesnt know whether he is going to jump off or not, however this is revealed at the end when he steps down from the ledge.

Action Code - An event having a series of logical consequences which helps the audience understand the narrative better - For this code I have chosen "The Taking of Pelham 123", which is a crime thriller film that I used to reference my AS production from, In this film the 'crime film' conventions are apparent. For example first the train is taken, then people are taken hostage, negociated with and then a happy ending. Much like that of "Phone Booth".

Semic Code - The connotations suggested by the characters, settings and props. In Kanye Wests' "all of the lights, the little girl is wearing a white jacket connoting innocence and vaunrability, this is also connted through the age of the girl.

Symbolic Code - The idea of narratives being based around opposing forces.

Cultural Code - The knowledge that audience's have to bring to a video to fully understand it. A member of my class found a really good example of this which was "Moves like Jagger" by Maroon 5. The audience would have to know his dances to understand the narrative of the video although clips of Mick Jagger are shown throughout.

Intertextuality...





In a previous lesson we were taught about vertical and horizontal intertextuality, in this lesson we discussed the two aspects and i picked up on it and understood it fairly fast. Vertical intertextuality meaning a source from a different type of text e.g. CD cover to film, and horizontal intertextuality meaning a source from a text that is the same type e.g. Film to Film.

The album shot on the left is an idea that we have thought about for our lead singer, having the face in haf-light seems like a much more interesting shot than just a plain close-up. We will be using this for our vertical intertextual reference.



For our horizontal intertextual reference we will be using text that will pop up and be consistant throughout our video. Much like that of Kanye West and Rhianna's "All of the Lights". Although getting the quality that the editors of this music video do will be difficult, we will try and get it as best we can, with the software that is available to us.

Lead singer...

We have found a lead singer for our production. Emma Jenkins is a fellow art student of mine and is a very talented singer. She is a good friend of mine and is a very talkative, loud person so will be fun to work with, and will have no problem in performing. Although she is only mimeing, the experience of singing will help her with that.

Our ideal personnel was a good looking girl that could sing or mime well and she seemed to fit the bill, I feel that she was a good choice and I am looking forward to working with her.

Above is a picture of Emma Jenkins...

costumes...

For the males costume (the abuser) he will be using dark clothing and be wearing a hoody etc. to make him look more daunting and intimidating. This will assist the audience in predicting what is going to happen before it actually does. This will create tension and keep the audience grasped during the narrative section of our music video.

For the females clothing it will be casual clothes as she needs to look innocent, this is vital so that the narrative of our production makes sense. casual clothes are key so that the audience realise that she is innocent and isn't drawing any attention to herself. This will assist in the understanding of the narrative to the audience.

Characters - For Narrative

We have found a male and female actor from the A2 drama class at our school. We have decided to choose people from this as they will take it seriously and have had experience acting. Amy Mcgregor and Martin Baldwin are the people we have chosen as we are friends with them so they will be easy to work with.

They both seemed to be interested in working with myself and michael, and this is because it will look good for them and possibly boost their grade.

still need to add pictures of them....                        

Confirmed...

Below is the correspondence between myself and MTA Records. We have permission!


Hi Michael

Thanks for your email.

Providing that it is not for public domain and you will not be exploiting
the recording of Nero 'Innocence' in a public performance or earning any
revenue from such performances in any way, we are happy to grant one off use
on this occasion.

Good luck!

Thanks

Sophie




I am extremely pleased that we have recieved this confirmation e-mail, as the majority of people that send e-mails to record companies do not get a reply. Also, to be wished good luck by Chase and Status Records was really appreciated aswell.

On 10/10/2011 17:34, "Michael JARVIS" <05JARVIS_Mi@swchs.net> wrote:

> To whom it may concern
> 
> My name is Michael Jarvis. I am writing on behalf of myself and Frank James.
> We are both Year 13 students at Saffron Walden County High School, currently
> taking a Media Studies A-level.
> 
> For part of our A-level we are required to produce a music video. I am writing
> to ask for permission to use Nero's track 'Innocence' for our's. The track
> would be used solely to examine myself and Frank's ability to construct a
> music video.
> 
> I do hope this proposition is acceptable.
> 
> Many thanks for your time
> 
> Michael Jarvis

Song selection..

For  my a2 media production I have decided to work with Michael Jarvis. I thought that this was a good choice as we worked together in the AS opening to a film work. I found it really easy to work with him as i knew him previously to coming to Saffron Walden, so explaining ideas and getting each others points across was easy. Also, I thought that our AS work was a great success although we had a few problems throughout.

As me and Michael listen to similar music, the genre of music wasn't a hard decision to make. We chose dub step/drum and bass as our genre as i has recently gone mainstream. This made it easier for us to choose artists and get hold of companies such as Chase and Status records to get permission for our video.

We are also looking for intertextual sources for our film from all different mediums so that we can have vertical intertextuality as well as horizontal. I feel that this will help us relate to the audience and help them understand the narrative of our music video.

We have decided to go ahead with the Nero - Innocence song and have had an idea in our head for the narrative ever since we heard it. The original video is cartoon which will make it harder for us to reference, although we can use some of the ideas used in the original.

Although the lyrics are very repetitive, I really like the song, which gives us a lot to work with when the song drops etc.

Repesentation research...

This low angle shot on the antagonist connotes male dominance as the shot is making him appear larger than he actually is, also the silhouette effect portrays him as a threat. This all changes when the protagonists unite and take him on, this switches the dominant gender to female as fear is shown through the shots and actions of the antagonist.

This, i found a particularly interesting shot as it shows the gender combining as one through the antagonists eyes. This is established using a pan/tracking shot through bushes so it looks like he i spying almost.

Art Lecture

On Friday the 11th of November, my art class andI went to the University of London to listen to 4 artists talk about their life and what they do. I was unaware that there was going to be two music video animators there that have done work for Radiohead, Blur, Coldplay and more big name bands. They were very talented and showed me videos of the work they had done,  was really taken back as they spoke about budgets for example one of theres was £150 000. They also said that they do the majority of the work themselves but have to pay some people to do really technical work as the machines to handle the software would be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

www.shynola.com

This is Coldplay - Strawberry Swing they made this using photoshop, adobe after effects and other advanced programs.

This is my second favourite of their work following strawberry swing. This is a song by Queens of the Stone age.

If I Found Love - The Strangers

I found the video for this song very clever as they had sped up the video a lot to make it more interesting, if we were going to make a narrative for this song we was going to strap a camera to my car and use the same idea, however with performance footage jumping in and out consistently to make it more interesting. This was because as a group we thought that it was fairly boring towards the middle.

This is the song that we filmed for our live performance music video. We got some rally nice shots and footage, however a technical error with the dolly camera left us with only two camera angles to edit with. This has made it hard so far but we are willing to persevere with it and try our best to get it to fit well and look visually pleasing. Also, we have noticed that they performed a different version of the song and this made it extremely difficult to lip sync to the track we have.

3rd January - I have come back to this post, to say that we will be using the "sped up" idea for our establishing shot, however it will be on a motorway rather than a train track, and the shot is fixed on a motorway bridge rather than mounted on a vehicle so that when we speed it up, the lights will be blured to give a sense of movement and set the scene.

The Strangers - It was a sin...

This is probably my favourite song from "The Strangers" - however i do like some of there other songs so we may ask them to perform a different son for us to record for our live performance experience. I am really looking forward to working with them as i feel that it will help me with my A2 media task which is a music video.

The Strangers Visit SWCHS!

On Wednsday the 9th of November a band came into school called "The Strangers". They are a small time band who consist of a keyboard player, a drummer and a singer. Due to Mr canning meeting the band, they were kind enough to come in and let us film them so that we could gain some experience for our music video. I am happy with how our filming went, and although time was a contraint we seemed to get the shots we needed in one take. Also, the lighing made the video look great and emphasize the shots further. After we had filmed, they done a gig in the pit that was open to the whole school, even though it wasn't a great turn out, the people that came seemed to enjoy them selves and it was a laugh. I am glad that we got to film them, especially for the experience as I learned a lot. For example when using multiple cameras it was hard to angle and set up the shots so that other people filming weren't in your shots etc. Overall I am pleased with the shots we got and i look forward to editing the footage.

Nero - Innocence

This is a possible choice for our music video, although the video here is in animation we feel that the song has a very good and easy message to understand and take in, for this reason we feel that it is a good choice for our final video. This music video would be a challenge to persue as for this song there is no visuals to refer from that can relate to what we wan't to do, however on the upside, if we were to do this song, it would be a blank canvas ao we could do whatever we wanted (within reason). We would definately have to refer to other Nero videos, and or music videos from our chosen genre as an intertextual reference as well as vertical intertextual references from other media's.

Example - Stay Awake

This is Examples "Stay Awake"- I really like the devide between performance and narrative used in this music video. Also the range of shots used would fit in with our genre although this isnt the same as our chosen genre.

Labarynth - Earthquake

This is a possible idea for our video, although not in the same genre as we origionally anticipated, I still really like the song and i think that it would be quite interesting to try and create this music video in our own way. From this video i would find it interesting and exciting to create my own version of it because i am a fan of this genre of music. Also, i know people who are good friends of mine that can create CGI  which is what Labarynth's "Earthquake" music video is all about. The variety of shots that are used are also interesting, for example the extreme long shots connote lonlyness, however this is contrasted with medium shots of him with people dressed in cloaks, which further connotes togetherness and that he is part of a group. The clothing that is worn in this is casual, although us (the audience) can still tell that he is the main character from the shirt he is wearing. This is very clever as we still know he is the protagonist although there are other singers featured in the video. Another clothing related connotation would be him in a cloak as well as the others, further showing that he is part of a group or society.

I really liked the fact that this video was futuristic and the narrative of it. This seems to occur in each of Neros videos and I really like that. Most of Neros songs are about love and I think that he represents this in a very unique way.

Video Research - Nero - Crush on you

As we wanted to do a drum and bass/ dubstep genre for our music video we thought that nero would be a good choice for an artst as they are mainstream. I find their songs and videos very interesting and I feel that it would be fun to create one of our own for Nero.

Finding the setting and where to film...

We discussed this aspect of the music video for a while and thought that because there was no narrative allowed, and it had to be all performance, the setting had to be interesting to help engage the audience. Harrison, a member of my group suggested a place in Elmden that had a view of over 30 miles and sounded great, other suggestions were his garden or his photography studio. However we still chose the interesting one and i think that it linked in with the song quite well.

Obtaining people for the Radar Love Video

Findng people to do the radar love video wasn't too hard. However to find people that could actually play the instruments and play in time was very hard. But i think that the people we found were definately adequate for the job and when we played around with editing etc it seemed to fit well.

Golden Earing - Radar Love 30 second video

This is our 30 second music video opening for the Golden earing song - Radar Love. This was quite a challenge as the genre of music was unconventional for people our age. However after watching the origional music video , we were able to obtain and find out what shots and tequniques are conventional for this style of music. Although we did add in some of our own tequniques such as the split screen. I feel that maybe a medium distance shot of the whole band after they are introduced would look a bit better and make more sense. Overall i am happy with the final outcome, but i believe with a little tweaking on the editing it would fit in better with the genre.

Although i have had experience in editing before this project in AS and out-side of school, i believe that the editing in this project has helped me get back in the swing of things for media at A2, ready for the main music video project.

Test Shots for the 'Radar Love' video...

This is a shot of the drummer from above, Personally i would like to have this shot from above of the whole band after each member of the band has been introduced.


We obtained this idea from Alien Ant Farm's version of smooth Criminal.













This is a shot of the drummer pressing the bass pedal.


This is personally my favourite shot that we tested, I really like how close it is to the drum pedal so you can see the action. We will be incorporating this shot in time with the music so that it is matched visually to the audio, when the drums come in at the beginning of the video.


Also we have framed it so that the centre focus point is the part hitting the drum we will be carrying this out throughout for example with the microphone.





This is a shot of the drummer playing the symbol with the camera shot running along the horizontal positional of it.


 I would prefer the shot if the symbol was at the very bottom of the shot so that you can see more of the drummer, However i am not sure because i like how it is framed so that the middle part of the symbol and the drummers hand are the centre focal points.

The establishing shot is an extreme long shot which gives the audience at home an idea of how large the crowd and the festival as a whole, is. Other shots involve close ups of the crowd to show the experience from their point of view, also this may relate to the audience at home because they may have been to a festival and experienced it themselves. P.O.V shots are used to enhance this so that the energy from the crowd is influencing those at home.
Close ups of the band members are used to introduce them, also a specific order is used so that it makes sense, in this case as the instruments come in so do the band members.
The audience is positioned down low in relation to the stage so that the band performing look more important, almost like hero's.
The framing on the lead singer is also crucial for example the ball of the mic is right in the middle, with his head in  there aswell.

Generic conventions

In our AS production film "The Betrayal" we found that because of our genre 'Crime Thriller' we had only one recent, up-to-date film to refer to and that was "The Taking of Pelham 123" as it was the only film we could find within our genre.

The establishing shot in the film is a shot across the city with the sunset showing through the buildings. We tried to apply this to our production although in ours it was shining through the bushes due to the setting we have chosen. This worked really well and as you can see by the screenshots below, they are very similar.