Landscape Shots

Landscape shots are a crucial element in our music video, so we're planning on using a vast variety of them. Our music video wants to portray a mixture of urban life and greenery, so a mixture such as these shots would be ideal for us to capture.

The middle shot inspires us the most, as it mixes the two most important elements of greenery and high rise buildings, so we'll definitely be finding out where this place is and shooting there! The downside of getting shots such as these are how busy they will be however, so we'll aim to be getting the shots early in the morning, hopefully getting a skyline such as the lower image.

Filming: Pt. 2

After having shot the outside running parts, we decided to momentarily move on and start shooting the inside gym scenes. We decided to set up our own studio in the corner of the school gym with a few lights and a plain backdrop, as we wanted to create a professional studio look. We used a variety of different gym equipment so the inside shots would look realistic, which we think we did successfully through the plain backdrop and expensive gym equipment (thanks PE department).
I'm not too enthralled by the shot's we've managed to get, so I think we'll be re-filming a few in the future, but for now we're just going to sift through what we've got and make them work.

As you can see, Janadhi looks completely exhausted by all of her extensive working out!

Digi-Pak

Today in class we started to look into Digi-Paks for our artist. We discussed the importance of them and how they benefit the artist, along with how they'd suit our own personal artist. Here's what we found out:

What is a Digi-Pak?

• A Digi-Pak is an album cover alternative to jewel case packaging.

What do we use them?

• Digi-Paks are an important asset when advertising and marketing an artist to sell a product. 

Benefits of using a Digi-Pak vs. Jewel case:

• More ecologically friendly.
• More compact, lighter and often sleeker.
• Less likely to break, almost 'shatterproof'.
• Larger space for graphics.
• Versatile, can accommodate a booklet.
• More panels available, can have 4, 6, 8+ panels.
• Looks more premium in comparison to regular jewel case.

Paper Storyboard

Here's the original storyboard that we first completed on paper! The images that we created weren't very good, but the description is a lot more detailed than our animatic storyboard so we will be using both of them (The animatic outside, the paper inside).

 

Animatic Storyboard

Here is our long awaited animatic storyboard. It took ages to complete but it's finally done and we're really happy with it! We think it's a lot more easier to understand than our paper storyboard and a lot more portable with all of us having mobile phones, so this is the story board we intend to use from now on while we're out filming.

Filming: Pt. 1

Last Friday my group and I decided to start filming our music video and travelled down to Kelly's area; Lea Valley. We spent around 4 hours travelling to the location, filming and generally running around, but it was all worth it as we got some pretty good shots! We've realised that filming a music video is going to be a lot more extensive and longer that filming last years 3 minute film but so far it's been pretty fun. Here's what we got up to!

Audience Feedback (again)

We're having to collect more audience feedback (questionnaire) so as to determine our audience (who we're targeting our music video at). My group and I have a pretty solid idea of who we're targeting, but holding audience feedback will help back up what we've already decided. By having more audience feedback, we're also observing a wider audience and potentially discovering more people to feed our product to. We're also hoping to find a pattern correlating between certain groups of people, which will hopefully be displayed through the questions we will ask.

The questions we're planning to ask are:

1. Age
2. Occupation
3. Gender
4. Ethnicity
5. Hobbies
6. Region

During class we researched different styles of questioning and the difference between open and closed questioning. Open questions are questions that lead to longer answers (What do you think about the weather today?), whereas closed questions generally create short yes or no answers (The weather's nice today, isn't it?). 

I'm not sure whether to conduct the questionnaire online or personally, but we'll figure it out soon.

Storyboarding

So storyboarding is taking a lot longer than we originally thought it would due to us constantly changing our mind about certain shots, along with the sheer amount of shots we actually want to create. Saying that, we're almost done now though, so we're organising our animatic and then storyboarding will be all done (Finally)!!

Exploring further ideas

Alongside the inspirational and feminist messages we're trying to portray in our music video, we're also trying to create a narrative to go with it. We're sticking with the army theme, but we're now also considering going down the path of exploring neglectful parents as well. The first thing I thought of that relates to what we're trying to portray is the British film Fish Tank, a film about a troubled 15 year old girl with a neglectful mother and no father. The film is also set around a run-down flat based in London, which is a set that we're also hoping to use for our video.

This Girl Can!

The National Lottery recently released a feel-good, woman empowering advert entitled This Girl Can, and it's everything that we want to portray in our music video. We really like how upbeat and inspirational the advert is, along with what it stands for. We plan on including a heavy sport theme throughout our own video, along with the message 'if you want something, go get it'. Here's the advert: