Final Music Video

Aquiring Audience Feedback

I chose to mention my A2 media coursework in a recent video to get audience feedback on it, here's a clip from that video:



So far much of the feedback has been perhaps the video is a little slow, however as mentioned in the feedback this seems to be down more to the personal music preference of the audience.

Music video draft: audience feedback

The audience feedback overall was rather positive, one of the key parts people said was good, was the camera angles and shots.

one of the areas which was brought up, was the colour grading, whilst throughout the majority of the video, the colour grading was correct, giving a slight blue tint, in some places the colours looked very bleached out.

also brought up was how in one location the singer was both lip syncing and keeping his mouth closed when the track had vocals, someone suggested that perhaps to keep it more consistent and either have him lip syncing or not in the same location. I chose to keep this in as it helped to reinforce the subdued feel of the video and song.

Music Video: 3rd video shoot

On this final shooting weekend, I captured the footage of the hill scene, this was the complete performance part of the video with the entire band performing with equipment,

The shoot itself went reasonably well, I managed to capture all the required shots. Unfortunately however some of the shots cam out overexposed due to having to manually adjust the exposure for some shots, and forgetting to reset it.

I had some trouble acquiring a drum kit for this shoot, only locating one about an hour before the shoot, the first kit we planned on using was unavailable as, on the day I was told, someone else had it, and I unfortunately couldn't get hold of that person. luckily the bassist of the band had a brother who allowed us to borrow his.

The Edit

As I had already shot at two of my locations, I started editing the footage I had so far and used a photograph of my location to fill in where the shots on the hill would be.

overall the edit went well, the various ideas for the differing locations worked when they were put together even more so when I applied the colour grading.

Storyboard

Here are the Scanned in images of my Storyboard.

location 1- the hill scene where the whole band are performing with instruments.

location 2- the bridge with the entire band again but not performing with instruments.

Second Shooting Session

Originally I planned to film on Tuesday 11th, but although I had said to meet in one location two of the band members were waiting elsewhere, and the other member had said they were available but weren't so it was postponed to the next Wednesday.

In the end however postponing the filming was beneficial, I managed to get all the footage recorded and as I was filming it began to rain. Luckily we were filming in continuity so throughout the video, the band members will get progressively wetter, which I felt would give an interesting effect and tie in nicely with the conventions of the genre and themes/feel of the song.

First Shooting Weekend

On the Saturday of the weekend I had my first shooting day, the shooting was of the main performance of the band at my first location, the top of the hill. I set up the bands early in the morning so we could get the shots before the sun was too high in the sky. unfortunately though I had got some footage we had to end the filming prematurely as it started raining.

I would have continued but the band members' had expensive equipment which they understandably didn't want getting wet.

The Sunday however was far more fruitful, I managed to get all of the footage filmed at the new location(location 3) with just the singer of the band.

Location 3

The third and final location for my music video. this is the location for the section of the video with only the main singer. to juxtapose with the two other locations which were quite rural this is in a more urban environment as suggested in the audience feed back I had from my presentation.

Location 2

This is the second location which I will be using, this will be for the scene where the band is gathering without their instruments

Planning - Location 1

Having decided on what I wanted for one of my locations I went out and got some pictures. the actual shoot will hopefully have a more overcast day than this, as well as having a lot of colour grading.

this picture was taken as I would prefer to have this kind of shot where trees are not too visible.

Research- Music video task

The initial Genre I chose was Alternative rock however after further research I found that the more general but more accurate genre would simply be rock. many of the genre conventions used in alternative rock apply so the research I have gathered is still relevant, but by redefining the genre i should be able to more closely create a video which complies with the songs style and genre.

For the task I chose to look further into this song by Nirvana.



the genre of this music video is "Alternative Rock". I chose to look at it as it is representative of it's genre and displays elements such as Goodwin's theories very clearly, the key genre themes and conventions that I begun to pick up on when researching videos was the portrayal of the band as a whole, they weren't marketed as a singular person. this is clear through the use of a band name rather than the name of the singer.

As I was beginning to identify key themes and ideas of Rock videos and the kind of areas the songs and videos explored, such as the selling of the band and there music as the product rather than perfectly crafting a particular image, and also the common technical aspects used such as blur effects and having a wide usage of shot types thought primarily focusing on shots at the extremes of distance, I found this Prezzi slideshow, which perfectly outlined the ideas on conventions I had formed about the genre.

Indie/Alternative Rock Video Conventions on Prezi

Some of the information in there is not quite accurate for my genre as it focuses more heavily on indie music instead of Rock which is the genre I have chosen to investigate.



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Goodwin's characteristics of music videos on Prezi

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Technical aspects

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Research - reference video

Another video I found which closely matches the style I will be going for in my music video is Boston by the band Augustana, the use of different shot types from huge, wide angle shots, to close ups of the artists face, is exactly the style of camera usage I am aiming for in the outside locations of my video (perhaps inside but space constraints will limit this).

Also seen in this video is the use of a beach as a set, this is something I've thought about but would take some serious planning to achieve, as to have the shots I want an overcast day would be needed, when there are few people around, which for the beach means a very early start. this will be something I think about as the logistics of it may not be feasible.

This music video also has the same kind of lighting and colour filters I aim to use in my video, especially the very washed out,blue look. I may also incorporate the use of glare from the sun as seen in this video into my own. as this would be effective in establishing the right "feel" of the video.

Research- Mood board

Gathering reference images

Now that I had a few ideas in my head I decided to gather a collection of reference pictures, this is a technique I often use when attempting to get a clear grasp of what I want and turn ideas into something more cohesive and focused. I first went to Google, because they have a powerful and easy to use search engine.

Unfortunately Google image search didn't turn up a large amount of images that matched the ideas I had, despite a number of different search queries/settings.

So instead I turned to Deviantart, I hoped they would have more of the kind or images I was looking for rather than the promotional material Google search tended to show.

Mood-board

After finding a good selection of images I chose to make a mood-board, with the various ideas I was forming and the feel I was attempting to achieve I felt it would be a good way to collate what I had, plus it would give a clear indication of what I was trying to achieve.

I created the mood-board in a program called Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) a free to use, open source image editing software.