Thursday, 25 November 2010

rough cut of video and feed back

Feed back on rough cut

Now we have finished our rough cut and received some professional feed back we now have a good idea of the things that we should keep the same and the things we need to change. Some of the things we were advised to change or modify were to cut to the exact beat of the music to help the video flow better because some of the cuts are slightly out of time with the music. We need to take out our pan shots because most of our shots are just straight stills camera cuts but there is a sequence in the middle of our video where we have used some pan and tilt shots which we have been advised to remove and I agree because I do think that it gives the video a home movie look to it and it doesn’t tie in with our style of editing that we have used throughout the rest of the video. Another thing we need to change is to make the transition from the living room to the studio bigger and more theatrical. We plan to do this by placing a white screen shot in, in post production to emphasize that the room has truly transformed, because at the moment it is looking unprofessional and armature.

The things we have been advised to keep the same and assured are good is the structure of the video because the beginning end and middle are good there are just some odd shots in-between that don’t work. The wide shots hold the whole video together and are our strongest aspect of the video in my opinion. The stop motion shots were very strong and gave a large level of interest into the video as it is only in one location it needed a narrative away from the performance shots. The performance aspect is also very good and our singer looks good which is a relief because we had problems with our lead singer knowing his words and found finding good shots of him a difficulty.

Now we know what changes we have to make to our video we can begin our final cut and work in our after effects. Using the advice we have been given.



Thursday, 11 November 2010

letter to wildlife entertainment and reply

To Wildlife Entertainment

We are a group of A Level students working on an A Level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as part of this project:

Fluorescent Adolescent - Arctic Monkeys

With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.

The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.

Yours sincerely


Amy, Lainy and Chloe
Hurtwood House School

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Insert Geoff's reply from Lainy's Account

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Geoff

Thank you very much for the positive consideration of our request.

The video will form part of a portfolio of work put together as part of a unit focussing on marketing in the music industry. Our concept for the video is to chart the rise of an indie band through the changes in their environment. The video will be performance-based, but the set will change over the course of the video from teenage bedroom to recording studio. We wanted to use a track by the Arctic Monkeys because we felt their music and their story perfectly encapsulate the dreams of thousands of bedroom musicians. We intend to use actors from our school as the band members who will lip-synch the track, although if Alex and the boys would like to come and star in the video themselves, we would be delighted to welcome them for the day!

The video project and accompanying portfolio will be assessed by our teacher and the exam board, but we would be delighted to send you a copy when we have finished.

I hope this gives you the information you need. We can provide any further information or guarantees should you require them.

Best wishes

Lainy, Amy and Chloe

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Amy, do you have a number I can call you on please ?
Or you call me
Best Geoff

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After we recieved this email, we rang Geoff to ensure him that we would not be portraying the band as negative. He simply wanted to talk more about the concept of the video and gave us information about the bands background which gave us more material to work with.

Tuesday, 9 November 2010

acount of shoot day

This is our set as we started with it is simple and bear to suggest the band have just moved in. we have situated the band in casual positions because we wanted them to look casual.

This is a photo is from the last part of the shoot, we changed the room from black to white buy screwing off boards we had fixed on. We then brought in some huge marshal amp speakers, which we were very grateful to get hold of. We also added a microphone and stand two floor spot lights. This set up is when the room changes from student messy to big star artists and I think this studio set represents it perfectly.


The morning of the shoot day we arrived in the studio to our already prepared set. This was helpful as this meant we had a longer time for shooting. Costumes and makeup took much longer than expected and we did not start shooting until 11.30am. As we began shooting we found that following our storyboard was more difficult than expected and we had to simplify the overall all shots. we used three cameras to shoot our pop video, initially we intended to use two cameras, however on the day we found that using three would make it more efficient and also give us all more of an opportunity to get involved in specifically camera work but we also each had a chance to get involved in the track playback.

We feel that our shoot day was a great success because we completed our task of gaining all the footage which we need for our post production editing. This was an achievement because we started late and thought that we may not finish on time. This was heightened due to that our lead singer was unsure of the lyrics and timings. The band portrayed the correct image that we intended to present to our specific target audience and fitted the image created by the genre and fitted well together as a band. Although we had problems getting the band members in the costumes we wanted them to wear, due to a small conflict with the band, we were satisfied with the final look. The best thing about our day was that the sets looked great and we were really proud to have got the real amps, rather than use posters of amps as we expected.

The elements of the day that we would change having got the chance were being slightly more prepared in the morning with getting the cast into the costumes that we felt were appropriate for our video. We also wished that we could have achieved all of our shots faster than we did although we were very relieved that we managed to get all of the filming done in one day because at one point this didn’t seem possible. All in all I don’t think we would have changed very much about our shoot day because we thought that it was a success.




We made a lot of changes to our pre production plans such as the beginning. our first plan was to have a seven second silent intro to the song of the band walking in, we changed it to them walking in to the music and the position of the band we changed to formal band positions into very casual positions such as our lead singer laying on the floor. We didn’t really stick to the shots in our story board because we found that some shots were to hard to create and when we had the band visually in front of us we thought of new and more exiting ways of making the shots work. We changed the props around because aging the visual aspect of having the set and props in front of us showed us what looked best on screen and worked with the positions of the band. I am very happy with the changes that were made during shoot day as I think it made the over all result better and more visually interesting.