Preliminary Task 2 – Mini music video

Planning

during our group planning we had decided on a happy and sad theme throughout our music video, we had to do some trial and error by listening to many different songs, but we had settled on the song “Everybody wants to rule the world” – by Tears for Fears. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGCdLKXNF3w

The reason for this happy and sad theme for the song creates a unique style to our music video, in our plan below, it shows how it goes from a upbeat happy vibe planning volleyball with friends during a late evening, then into a darker low level lighting scene of being alone, therefore making our music video distinct compared to the original.

What my initial ideas for the camera techniques would be for low level lighting in the individual lonely scenes to convey sorrow, and to have a higher level lighting in cheerful scenes

Production

We have decided to create a performative/narrative style of music video, because that is what our group have decided on creating as it best reflects the song we are creating using the song “Everyone wants to rule the world – Tears for Fears”

This is going to be achieved through the use of;

Illustrative: The visuals directly represent the lyrics and meaning of the song.
Amplifying: The visuals add new layers of meaning to the lyrics, expanding on the song’s themes.
Disjuncture: The story completely detaches from the song’s literal meaning to create a new, often abstract, interpretation.

Dynamic camera movement: Use of – handheld cameras, pans, and tilts to create energy and excitement.

Lighting and Color Grading: Low-key lighting for moody, dramatic, or rock-themed videos, or bright, saturated colors for pop music.

For our production we needed to choose a location, the theme of what music video had best correlated with my home town at the beach with a volleyball court, this place is located at Milford beach or more specifically, at the end of craig road

This is the location of the recording spot.

Unfortunately, during our filming, due to New Zealand having maritime climate and in addition with global warming the weather was quite wild, for our joyful living life scene was a negative, but can be seen as a positive for our gloomy scenes as it adds as an affect to the somber towards the weather.

Moodboard

This has been created by our group member Alina

Filming and production roles

Personally, I have in addition with my group member Maddison, we had created our filming plan of action, I have included evidence of this above, we had made this in our free time during a study period due to us originally forgetting to photograph and take evidence of doing it originally.

Throughout the filming process, I was tasked with being the main actor, being in all key scenes. This gave me a good understanding of how all shots were being filmed, for the final shots that we filmed I was independently filming whilst acting simultaneously. Meaning I was working closely with camerawork, so I had to stay consistent with my performance as I was the star in the filming, since I was involved in every scene meant that sometimes planning doesn’t always follow accordingly, I was able to make on-the-spot decision-making to benefit our filming.

During our brainstorming, we thought up of the idea of a binary opposition style of music video, as the lyrics go from “Everybody wants to rule the World” as for actually living and enjoying life, then to the opposite side of the spectrum being melancholic.

As seen here, this paper copy of our brainstorm was wrote by Sean and collaborated with the whole group as we had conversated about what we wanted to do, going from different themes of life and death but then ruled it out down to joy and somber. The common theme of songs we had ruled out were songs all pre-2000s as they had suited our taste the best.

Mini-Music video filming

What were some challenges and successes? To begin, our greatest challenge was our videographer deciding to put many of our important filming frames into portrait and landscape rather then the generic and singular landscape which resulted in many of our clips being useless and unusable for our editor Malachy’s standards. Another of our group challenges that we overcame was the ghastly wind at our filming location. However some successes we had achieved were genuine acting by ignoring the camera at all time and having true emotion within the mini-music video. Throughout my personal experience, the challenges of staying in character under pressure on set, and the pride in how natural the performance came out.

Mini-Music Video Final Outcome and Reflection