Target Audience

For my target audience, I filmed myself writing a mindmap of certain things to consider when creating my music video. 

I also conducted a survey asking people things like age, gender, social media, favourite books/movies/music and hobbies/occupation. I managed to get several diverse responses due to twitter, people from America and Scotland, but the majority coming from England and Wales. 

Overall, from my research, it is clear that this audience's majority is female, between the ages of 15-18, who are probably middle class due to the social media access, and have a high interest in pop culture and music, the hobbies/occupations being fairly small compared to tv/books/music. 

Playing with Lighting

In our class, we were learning about different types of lighting. We watched films such as Schindler's List with silhouetted lighting, Road to Perdition with bokeh lighting and Terminator, which uses side lighting to light up the human side of his face vs the robotic side, as seen here.

We tried our own shots in class. We tried to side lighting, which was our favourite. We shone the light from the side, and used a torch to create a softer light on the front of his face.

We also tried using the flash from the lighting equipment, but the camera I was using didn't pick it up. However, in the coloured photo, you can see that his whole face is lit up, which was the effect of using the umbrella and taking a photo facing Eddie.

We also tried using the light as they use it in Schindler's List, from behind, to create a silhouette and also to make features stand out, as you can see by Eddie's hair etc.

Last Hope Moodboard

I have created a moodboard for my music video. I decided to collect photos of nature, fireworks, bonfires and bedrooms, because these are the kinds of things that I want to have in the mise en scene. I hope to use some of these shots as inspiration for my video; particularly the nature shots because I want the video to have a fresh feeling, like turning over a new leaf. I also aimed for bright colours to represent the spark in humanity, also in the song "it's just a spark" is my main focus, so the bright colours help to portray happiness and new beginnings.

Click on the image to view my moodboard!

Narrative Theorists

Preliminary Task

WHAT DID I DO:

Me and two other media students decided to copy the video for Bastille's 'Pompeii', which was quite a challenging task but we are overall really impressed with what we managed to create. There were several things we could have done to improve it, but for a first try we think it was really impressive.

We went out at night time to the town, to the locations that we had chosen from watching the video. Originally we had wanted to film at Exeter St David's station, but had to have special permission to enter and therefore had to find new places to film, although they were not exactly what we wanted. We had a difficult time trying to get shots of our character riding a bike on a quiet road, because cars kept coming. But we managed to get these shots. We were able to use a car to get the a pan of our singer cycling, and we really liked these shots as we coordinated the facial expression and movement with the light and so we were able to see his face a lot better.

This was using the headlights to create a silhouetted shot of our singer, and was used very cleverly in the actual music video by Bastille. It helped to outline features and create the impression of darkness and a struggle.

 WHAT I HAVE LEARNT:

Overall, the whole experience helped me to see the difficulties of filming. What consists of a 1 minute long video actually took roughly three hours to film, and even longer to prepare, never mind the editing. We were lucky as I was able to bring my Canon camera, my tripod, three torches for the shots of the singers' face, and my bike, and all this helped to create our first music video fairly quickly, rather than having to make do with a phone and shaky filming. However, I will take into consideration time management, as this is a key area in filming. Shots that I may not be happy with may be hard to go back and film, which is something we found with this. So when I film my music video I hope to get a lot of footage so I will be able to use plenty of shots when editing.

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY:

We have also made a Directors Commentary to go with it. We found this was necessary so that we could point out the things that we did wrong and could improve on, as well as things that we liked and were impressed with.

Pitch

I did a pitch with my friend Maddie. Our final idea is now Paramore's 'Last Hope', which we pitched to my class. It went down well, and we even got further advice...

The feedback was mainly positive. They liked that there was a clear structure and a strong narrative. They also thought that it was cliche but that it was fine as it is a popular connotation of music videos. It is also an idea that fits the genre very well.

The criticism was that our idea needed to be stronger at the beginning. We need to make sure that we don't stall with lots of unnecessary shots and make sure that every shot is fuelling the storyline.
They also said for us to watch out for risks such as weather as we are filming outside. We are also going to have to be aware of health and safety as we will be filming a lot of it outside by a bonfire.