Finding Location for our set

As we settled on narrative, now we had to decide where to film it.

Our narrative is about a guy who works in boxing club , and he is fed us with his work , the way he was treated , etc. , therefore my task was to find a boxing club relatively near our school (in the same county), so we would not waste time on travelling to and back from locaion .

So, while I was involved in casting musicians for our performane, and Jackie was writing the treatment , Anya was investigating  various locations, using Google (especially Goggle Maps), and found  six different boxing clubs:

Crawley Boxing Club

Guildford City Boxing Club

Like2box gym (in Redhill)

Surbition Amateur Boxing club

Ultimate fitness boxing (in Leatherhead)

Anna also attached some photos of boxing clubs nearby, which she found on their website.

Further research into our ideas

In todays lesson in order to get more done and focus on individual tasks which will allow us to focus more easily, Jacky, Anya and I split the tasks to each other which we worked on in the lesson. Some of the jobs were:

Timeline

Casting

Rehearsals

Finding location/ set design

Test Video - planning and filming

Treatment

My task was to focus on casting and choosing people for the band members and performance element of our video and what image and style we were looking for with the completed look:

Our teacher Phil sent us an email of different links based on different jobs of which we can look at for the idea of the performance element in the video matching the lyrics and tone of the song:

Anna was looking at these links and decided that she really liked the first website Phil sent us and then proceeded to short list the ones she found most interesting and liked:

- The punching bag  - The job where you have to face complaining customers , but you have no ability to fix it , such as waiter or call centre worker.

-  The walking dead -  The job that requires sleep deprivation e.g. security guard on a night shift

- The Cog - endless, mindless repetition that could just as easily be accomplished by the machine  e.g.  a factory worker

Looking and analysing all these different jobs and ideas in our group near the end of the lesson, Jacky came up with the idea of boxing in a gym with the performance and narrative element following a trainer and cleaner. The main character would be the cleaner in the boxing gym who also helps other members of the gym to train with the job being very downgrading due to mopping the floors, cleaning the equipment, holding the spit bucket and listening to all the complaints made by the members resulting in him to finally snap.

Since finishing and finalising our basic idea we then could move on to focusing on our other tasks resulting with me going on to casting people for the band members, Anna researching for the shooting locations and Jacky making the treatment for our idea.

Ollie Allgrove Talk from Passion Pictures

In todays lesson we had the executive producer Ollie Allgrove come in and give us a talk based on helping us and giving us information and advice for our music video tasks and how the process can be made easier and much more affective for a better result at the end. This is  some of what we learnt:

Ollie Allgrove (background):

• featured in many films
• music videos
• commercials
• worked way up from runner on set to assistant manager to executive producer resulting in making independent prize winner film "passion pictures"

WORK:

• Tv commercials
• Nature Documents
• Occasional music video
• Tell Stories though animation, live action, design and visual effects

DIRECTOR - HOW DOES THIS ROLE FIT INTO THIS BUSINESS:

• Offers unique visual voice
• Offers creative point of view
• Organizes and sorts out all jobs and who to take them

WHY MAKE A POP VIDEO AND WHO MAKES THE CALL?:

• Nowadays they are much more relevant than ever
• Dead way to sell defunct format
• With social elements more modernised now with youtube and facebook the videos will be much more easily advertised globally so the industry is far from dead yet
• The person who makes the call is the COMMISIONER who go out, find different film directors and the band etc

WHAT DOES THE ARTIST WANT?:

• Hits
• Controversy
• Noise
• Impact
• Collaboration/artist and director share ideas
• Start with the brief : "who the audience are" "where want the video seen" "what lyrics match the type of song"
• Genre to match the lyrics

TREATMENT:

• How we respond and get ideas down on paper
• How the song effected you
• Visually represent the idea
• Start of process of selling the label and everything needed in document

THE SHOOT:

• The fun part of the process but also most stressful
• Storyboard
• Cameraman
• Shot list
• Making sure everything works
• Being efficient
• Getting everything done

THE EDIT:

• Very important part and crafting of the final piece and choose what the audience sees and feels during watching the video
• Want options from the shoot with what the camera has shot

WHO HE HAS WORKED WITH AND DONE:

• "Goldfrapp" - made lots of albums in course of two years
• "Joe Lean" - Young indie rock band 2006-7

Music Video Convention Genre Research : Imagine Dragons "I'm so sorry" music video research

Comparison : Muse "Supermassive Black Hole":

• The song has a strong beat to the lyrics an is very powerful to listen to which matches with the song we are using
• Mainly focuses on the performance side of the music video with the band playing the song in a very dramatic stylised way using guitars, vocals etc
• The element with the band links to how dark and powerful we are aiming for our video with the band performing so that the song doesn't overpower the video on screen

MUSE: how it links to idea:

(Both bands have a similar rock band genre with their songs tending to be very powerful and upbeat to get their lyrics across to the audience)

• Both use quite dark imagery with their music such as black and white showing that they mainly want their music to come across stronger than the narrative
• The editing between scenes in their music video for "Supermassive Black Hole" is very quick and clean to contrast between the band members to give a dark edgy feel to the video
• The narrative is slightly different to what we are planning due to it being different and slightly confusing to what is going on

Two Door Cinema Club: "Changing of the Seasons"

• Two door cinema is a similar rock band to Imagine Dragons. Their music is very powerful and upbeat similar to "I'm so sorry"
• Elements - Performance, storyline, lip sync
• Camera work - Many close up shots on the band members, wide angled shots on the main narrative, wide angles shot to show the whole band when they are performing
• Editing - The editing is quick, keep cutting between the main narrative to the band members
• The lighting is very dark and the colour of the video is fairly grey, showing the video in a dark imagery
• The narrative is similar to our idea from some perspectives, mainly with the idea of how we can use some of the ideas such as when everyone is going crazy and smashing things

Artic Monkeys Research Similarities:

The image of both bands is quite similar - they represent the alternative rock genre

Focusing on our Music Video Ideas and how can improve

In todays lesson we all sat down in our groups to discuss and develop on our music video ideas and talk about improvements we can make from our feedback with Luke:

Key Pieces of Feedback:

• We need to focus on the narrative to be based on one character in the video
• Liked the song "I'm so sorry" by Imagine Dragons
• Warehouse location, would be hard to access location recommended studio due to problems with hiring out areas
• Due to the song being so aggressive we have to be careful that it doesn't over power the narrative side of the video
• Recommended a third element to be added to our idea to make more interesting and appealing on screen 

How to respond and develop these points:

• We need to pick on individual character and job scenarios to develop and focus on for our overall narrative idea: i.e waitressing? doctor?
• See if can access a large space area then add effects with lights and smoke to make the video more authentic and visually appealing on camera
• Make sure narrative and tone and idea matches the highly aggressive lyrics and powerful video
• Third idea? - factory worker?/ issue of practicality etc however Jackie's auntie might be able to access

Next steps to take:

• Agree on the original narrative story with the character and job
• Go through and discuss what happens scene by scene from beginning to end
• Find location accessibility for video
• Find band, ideas for which people between ages 18-20
• Research different ideas on videos to gain ideas from



Developing our main concept of the video

Focusing on our main idea with the song "I'm so sorry" we looked at developing the idea further by researching other music videos with a similar concept of what we are thinking to involve:

• A boy band between ages 18-20
• Different job scenarios i.e doctors, hair dressers or waitressing
• A big warehouse location for the band to sing and present the song to match the very energetic song beat
• Different working locations for the narrative story linking with the band and lyrics

My group had the basic idea of the theme of not caring anymore and walking away of a difficult situation i.e a bad job with a mean boss.  We very much liked the song so focused on the lyrics which say "I'm so sorry" but in a sarcastic tone, from which we focused on that idea to create a good idea for a music video. In the video I thought the idea of a narrative with the I don't care attitude matched the song well which will be sung by a boy band in a dark warehouse switching from the narrative to  the band in the video. Due to the singer in the song having a deep mature voice, we would need the lead singer to be between ages 18-20 in order for the vocals to look realistically sung by the band.

Feedback of our Idea:

We showed  a presentation of our main idea to Luke and the class in order to gain feedback and comments of improvements and ideas we can add to it to make it more practical and effective on the day of shooting.

Planning for our music video ideas

In my group with Jackie and Anna, we each picked our favourite idea we had planned from our own video ideas and analysed them each using A3 paper with post it posts to help consider each idea. My favourite idea was mainly focused on my gothic mental asylum video with the song "Disturbia" due to the practicality being much more easy to use and make on the day of the shooting.

My Idea #1:




Another idea we looked at thinking was a good possibility option for our music video was Anna's idea of a more arty type music video with less of a narrative feel, but more focused on the lyrics and visual impact on the screen.


Anna's Idea #2:






Final Conclusion of an Idea #3:


Finally after analysing all of our different ideas and thoughts for our final music video project we all finally agreed on a song of "I'm so sorry by Imagine Dragons which is a very upbeat and highly energetic feel to the song meaning that our video will have to be very strong so that it does not overlap the narrative story. Our next task was to think of an idea for the video to go with the song after looking at our original ideas and discussing what we liked and disliked and the practicality of our choices.