Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Account of the Prelim Task.

To prepare us for our music video task in September we carried out a Preliminary Task with an unsigned band called ‘Acres of Life’.  We were split up into groups of 4 or 5 and assigned a 30 second excerpt from the track, which is called ‘I like to make the pretty girls smile’.
The group I was put in was assigned the first 30 seconds of the song, it had a count in of 4 beats and stopped after our allotted time. After looking at other bands and music videos (see previous blog) we constructed a basic timeline and storyboard to support us on the day.
We arrived in the studio on Monday morning to find the set built and the band waiting to begin the shoot. Each group was given 25 minutes in which to shoot a minimum of 4 shots. Our group was up filming first and we took it in turns to play the part of the director, assistant, playback and cameraman. Our team worked well together and there weren't any major clashes between the members.

To cover our bases we shot wide, mid, close up and instrument shots, which didn't leave us much time to get our specific ideas. We set each shot up with the tripod and moved it between shots. The majority of the shots were basic but composed through the lens, however we did manage to get a shot up the neck of the bass which looked really efffective as the focus moved from the basists hand to the strings of the bass. I think in the real project we will have to be more realistic with timings. However we managed a good few to work with and after our 25 minutes were up we headed up to the editing suite to compile them all together.

We found that when editing music videos there are certain things you need to consider which aren’t so important with the thrillers. For example editing on the beat creates a much more flowing video and makes the cuts much less obvious.
The song we were filming was rocky with heavy guitar and drums and was quite fast paced. This meant that standard shots cutting at an average pace didn’t reflect the energy of the song, so we chopped up our original edit to make it a more upbeat.
To sync the music up with the video clips we set a marker on the second beat of the count in. All the videos were lined up above each other with the marker locking them into place, which meant that in general the instruments and vocals were roughly in sync


The target audience are teenage girls and boys who listen to bands like greenday and metro station, and we tried to reflect this with the fast cuts because we felt that it fits to the current trend of videos aimed at this target audience. The video was set in a grungy warehouse environment intended to appeal to the target audience as the grungy, grimy setting is used frequently in this rock/indie/punk genre of music.

Having seen the final video I think this task was carried off quite well. Whilst there are some minor style differences between the sections I think the overall effect is authentic and true to an actual media product.

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