Preliminary Task

Outline

Our preliminary task for A2 Media was a class project which consisted of remaking a music video. The idea being, to give us a glimpse of what making our own music video throughout the year, would be like.

At first this sounded like it would be quite easy and fun, but when I realised we would be recreating the first eighty seconds of Britney Spears' '...Baby One More Time', I was a bit worried, not only because it seemed like more of a female-friendly task, but also because it is a very iconic video and it seemed like it would be hard to do it justice. The amount of shots and fast cutting within the segment we were reproducing also made it a challenging task.



Planning

The first step we took was to assign three of us (me, Zoran and Ben) to visit the YouTube page of the video and print screen each individual shot. This took a considerable amount of time as, like I've said, there are a significant number of quick shots, but this is typical of most music videos. We also made a note of how long each shot lasted when it came to editing, the process would be a lot easier. We then printed the screenshots off for filming.

For the next few days we began location scouting, which was not majorly difficult as the video is set in a school. We did, however have to find an area in the school that had lockers. The one place we could really use was outside our media room, but unfortunately it was a rather narrow space and we knew it would make filming more cramped and arduous.

We also spent this time practicing the dance routine, which had a lot of difficult choreography which made it hard to get the timing accurate. We worked it out in the end, though.

Costume was fairly easy to organise too. It was basically school uniform, but I planned to bring in a blazer and a tie, because that's what the 'jocks' in the video are wearing. Now, we were quite confident and were eager to start filming.

Filming

It was specified at the beginning of the task that everyone had to direct a portion of the video. Thankfully, having toyed with making short film in my spare, this came as a pleasant challenge. I filmed the opening sequence, minus the insert shots of the clock and the bell. I also directed part of the dance sequence, some of the lip synching, and set up the shots of the twirl which Zoran contributed, and where the jocks are dancing into the locker room out of a door. I quite enjoyed having the experience of directing a lot of people and having the professional lighting. It really gave me an insight into the production of music videos and I'm sure it will give me the experience I need to suceed in making my own music video this year.

To summarise, I believe my camera operating was generally efficient and accurate to the source material. It was hard to achieve this, however, as out first schoot, which was when we filmed the opening sequence in a classroom, was shot on a particularly hot day. Therefore, everyone was generally fed up because the costumes were uncomfortable, and it was hard to pick everyone up and get them focused, but we managed it all in the end.

Editing

We split ourselves into groups for editing, which was an efficient way of getting it done as fast as possible. We would be working on Adobe Premiere Pro, which was what most people used last year for their Thriller project, but I decided to use Sony Vegas as I was more comfortable with it then. However, this time around, I thought I may as well make myself familiar with Adobe Premiere as I thought it would make me a more diverse editor if I can use different pieces of software efficiently.

I worked with Daisy and we edited from the 1:00 to the 1:20 mark. I had edited before and thought that it was a strong point in my media product last year. The editing was significantly harder editing a music video together as the shots come and go faster. We uploaded the audio track into Adobe Premiere so we could match it to the original video and we were constantly switching back and forth to the original video to check the timing and order of the shots was correct. I believe that the practice of the speed of the editing will certainly help with the production of my own music video in the year.

As the latter stages of the process we realised we were missing some shots, so me and Zoran volunteered to do a reshoot and cover the shots we did not have. I set up the shot where Zoran does a twirl, and me and Zoran set up the shot where me, him and Tom walk out of a door dancing. We also had to film a close up of Zoran lip synching. We then put these shots into the film. When we felt we had all edited our different parts as best we could, we merged all the different segments together to make the final film.


Final Product




Evaluation

The quality of the acting, the set ups and the locations are not up to standard, but this is to be expected as it was the first I (not sure about anyone else) had attempted to make a music video through all the processes. I really enjoyed the experience of directing people, and the all the organisation to get the product finished.To summarise, while the overall quality of the product is fairly poor, the experience it gave of how the business works was very useful.