RSS Media Studies Group 601

Last tuesday, we started our filming. After just managing to get to our location, we started getting shots for the beginning of our video. Mid shots of mine and ellen’s face. These are to establish the characters and to show the location. Also, we got a load of different angled shots of me walking. lol This is because we had to show me walking… obviously we dont want lots of walking shots but we felt this was necessary.

For our next lot of filming, we are arranging for some important and useful pictures to be processed for our video. This filming shall be done this sunday.

These are a few of the photo’s I took in Market Harborough the other day, they are just a few ideas of possible location for filming.

At the moment we have not used any of the locations I origianlly took photos of, however it was to get a general idea of the kind of location we were looking for. For our first set of filming we used a street that was similar to the photos above.

Today we spent a free period planning our filming, week by week. This has helped us sorting out what we are going to film and when, making it easier to plan our time.

Jamie Thraves is a music directior who has worked with artists such as, Radiohead, Coldplay, Blur and new band - Glasvagas. I originally found out about Jamie when I watched Just by Radiohead. I did some research on the internet about the video and the band and began to look futher into Jamie Thraves‘ work. I found some other work by him and watched the videos.

The more popular videos he has directed and work on are;

Just by Radiohead

Charmeless Man by Blur

The Scientist by Coldplay

God Put A Smile Upon My Face by Coldplay

Under The Weather by K T Tunstall

Daddy’s Gone by Glasvagas.

I have watched these videos and they have helped me with my undertanding of music videos. I know that different directors have different styles, these then vary slightly due to genre and the band they are working with. But what I do understand is that most directors have a set of criteria or ‘ingrediants’ that are always used.

We have chosen to base our narrative storyline on a situation between a ‘boy and girl ‘ relationship. We chose not to follow the lyrics as these didn’t mean anything to us, and didn’t give us any ideas that we could develop futher. The basic storyline is,

A boy/girl situation, there once was a previous relationship between them both. Throughout the video the girl is trying to be with him again, but he just doesn’t want to know. The boy is going to be played by Aaron and the girl is going to be played by Ellen.

Our video starts with, Aaron coming out of his house, flicking through random photos. He comes across one of him and Ellen. He rips it up and drops it, outside his house. Then by coincidence, Ellen comes round to talk to Aaron, but realises he is not there. Ellen finds the photo, and texts Aaron. He texts back to say, that he is getting a bus, and we are using the lyrics, ‘I never want to see you again.’ She runs to the bus stop, but he has already left. The audience then realise, that Aaron has moved on, and takes a different girl to a place he used to take Ellen. The video ends with Ellen giving up, and moving on herself.

In our video, we are also going to incorparate a stop motion part, which we will include throughout parts of our film. We want to show the relationship from end, back to where it started, using a technic similar to the one that i have blogged here.

Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved by small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion animations, known as claymation, for their ease of repositioning. These videos below have inspired me.

I’ve just been watching Radiohead’s “There there.” music video.  It’s bizarre and dreamlike, but also kind of fun, in a strange way.  It has got to be the ultimate use of stop-motion in a music video. I am going to take inspiration from this for our video.

We have made a cast list of the people we need to play characters in our narrative. In our video, there our two main characters, which are played by a guy and a girl. We will also need a second girl to play the boys new girlfriend, as well as someone to lip sync in the performance shots. The stop motion shots which we are also incorporating into our video, will also be played by the two main characters. Any other people we need as ‘extras’ will be played by our close friends.

Boy- Aaron Murphy.

Girl1- Ellen Ratcliffe.

Girl2 - Alice Bass.

Performance Act -

We had planned before half term that we would start to film during our week break. This turned out to be unrealistic, as we found that we were all busy with other commitments. Now we are back at school, we have planned to start filming as soon as possible, we have now planned to start filming this Sunday (02/11/08). On Sunday, we want to concentrate on our videos introduction.

We have also decided, that it will be easier if we start filming our video in Market Harborough, once we get going, we will develop our ideas. But, we defiantly want to use the locations that we have found in Leicester later on. After filming on Sunday, we will spend the next week transferring the data that we have filmed on to the MAC, and begin editing.

We have had to change our location for our filming to Market Harborough insted of our inital idea of Leicester. Even though this isn’t what we planned, it does make filming a lot easier in the long run!

We have moved to Market Harborough for various reasons; accessability, abilty to film, location and time.

It makes it a lot easier for all of us to meet up if we are filming in Harborough, we can all get there quicker than into Leicester and it makes filming in frees now an option. It makes filming easier to organise too, and we are more familiar with Market Harborough so we will be able to find specific locations and places to film quicker and easier than if we were in Leicester. The location is similar to Leicester and there are a lot of things that we planned that can be adapted to Harborough!

Thankfully this change wasn’t a negative and actually turned out to be a positive!!

I think it was inevitable that as a group we would come across some set backs and difficulties. From the outset we found it difficult to come up with a song, then we found it slightly hard to come up with ideas for the video.

However once we had done some serious thinking and put our final ideas into one we set our location. All things running slightly more smoothly we booked our camera and arranged to film in Leicester during the Half Term week.

Unfortunatly, due to circumstances out of our control we were unable to meet up at all throughout the week as planned.

After much discussion and serious deliberation we decided we would have to move our location. To make it easier for everyone in our group to get together, we have decided to change our filming to Market Harborough. This not only makes it easier for everyone to get together at the last minute (if needs be) but we can also just nip out school in our frees and film shorter parts. It makes easier, aswell, with the weather and the fact that after school there isn’t long until it starts to get dark. Thus making traveling to Leicester and filming pointless, because it would be too dark and useless for our video.

This was another problem, thankfully we found a way around it and fixed it, also it worked out better for us in the long run.

We shall get some photo’s up from our new location before we film!