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.