Choosing jewellerly

In our research into similar products we found out that jewellerly is a very important convention in pop genre. Artist usually changes it in every set when the costume changes. It usually a bit extraordinary fancy earrings or rings. To follow this convention I searched for something we could use in my collection and send than them to my group so we can decide which one we could use in the music video and in the photoshoot for the digipak. Here are the variants:

Trying on the costumes

As we ordered our costumes online, it was important to than check them and try them on before the actual shooting day. This is because if something would be wrong or not the way we wanted it to be we would have time to change it. As it was hard to contact our artist every time we needed to try something on, we found a friend who lives in the same boarding house who has similar sizes. Here are the pictures that we have made when we were trying costumes:

On the day we tried tose dresses we realised that the white dress is a bit transparent, so we bought a special skirt which goes under the dress and dont allow it to be transparent.

Rehearsal with the artist

We decided to meet with our artist to check how well she knows the lyrics and make sure that she knows what to do on the shoot day. Firstly, we explained the whole idea to her. We gave her the costumes she that we chose for each element. We asked to try them on and send us the pictures. This way we would be sure that the dresses fit well.
After that, we played Chasing Highs for couple times and asked Tea to play her role.

Filming Roles

Media production is social collaboration which requires a division of labour-specialised skills in order to manufacture the right shots in getting the correct representation of the star image for the 'pop promo' and single release.
Here is how we decided to divide roles between our group:
Andrew will be the Director of element 2, Set 3.

I will be Camera person for element 2, set 3.

Andrew will be the Camera person for element 1, Set 1 and 2

Dora will be the Director of element 1, Set 1 and 2

I will be Director for element 3, set 4 and 5

Dora will be Camera person for element 3, set 4 and 5.

Art direction will be a matrix role, of whoever is watching the set (camera person, director, floor manager) and can be taken by anyone, as we all planned the art direction together

Ya Fei will be Floor manager throughout the day.

This plan will allow each of us to be a director and cameraman on the shooting day.
I decided to be a director of the third element as I already made a research into the costumes and make up for these sets and looked into similar products. Therefore, I am already familiar with the shots we want to make and going to be more skilled for it. This element is not very complicated and hopefully, I am well prepared and going to cope with all difficulties which are going to arise on the day. I already know which shots I want to make and the shot list will probably help me to remember them on the shoot day. The only thing I am worried about is how our artist is going to communicate with the guy that we are shooting together her with. At this point, they both said that they alright with it, but on the actual shooting day they may be too shy.

Another my role is a camera person for element 2. In my opinion, I am going to be the best person from our group for this role because I was a dancer myself for 10 years and I know which shots are better to be taken. Andrew will know the dance more as he is working closely with the dancers so working together should produce a good piece of work.

How to edit your music video

Today we had a lesson about how to edit a music video. We recapped all the things we learned last year and found out even more.
We are going to use the same programme as last year: Adobe Premier Pro.

There are 5 main  steps that we have to follow when editing:

1. Sync everything up
2. Do performance cut
3. Do Narrative cut
4. Add effects 
5. Do colour grading 

The screen in this software divided into 4:

The bottom right is a timeline on which we actually edit the video, on the bottom left we have all the footage that we have. This footage is shown on the left upper screen and the footage from the timeline is shown on the upper right screen.

The first step is synchronizing and to do that when we are going to shoot, we well firstly show an iPad with the number (timing of track) on it displayed. So we will need to sync the number on iPad, with the number of song on the timeline. This called picture sync. When the video synchronized and dragged to the timeline, we need to cut its sound, as the only sound we need is music. It is important not to choose the first numbers and the one you choose should be definite. The last step is to double check if the music and video are in sync.

If for any reason it is impossible to do picture sync, you can do a sound sync. To do that you need to play the rush and listen to the deep bass drum. Then we need to find on what second it exactly starts and mark the rush in. Then we need to find exactly that drum in the playback on the timeline and synchronize them. Double check at the end.

After synchronizing each of the clips it should be renamed with what was shot and how. For example close-up of a right hand on guitar.

After renaming and syncing a duplicate should be made. You should also do a duplicate and rename it everytime a big change takes place.

There are four main rules when editing:

1. Listen to the music and illustrate what the song is doing. That will illustrate the idea better and will look like an actual music video, not a slideshow.
2. The first time the singing starts you have to show the led singer. This will introduce the artist.
3. Group your shots together. The shots that are following each other should be relevant as the whole picture has to make sense. For example, showing the close up of an artist and then a close up of hand playing the guitar won't make sense as it would seem that artist is playing the guitar. 
4. Cut to movement (graphic movement edit). This will increase the quality of the video to high standards.

To cut something you should press the space bar where you want to cut it, then C to use a razor blade, V will turn it to normal arrow again and then will allow dragging the video to timeline. 

Here are some tips for organizing the editing process:

• Use a drawing plan beforehand that you stick to. In that plan, it is possible to sort out which elements are introduced at what time. This will also exclude misunderstanding inside the group and make the production more efficient.
• Don't look at the whole thing, just edit one bit at a time. It is a good tip to edit 10 seconds at a time, but make it the best 10 seconds ever existed!!!
• Go for the best video, rather than a rough cut. Nobody likes to redo stuff, so it is better to do everything to the best standards from the beginning.
  

What is on the album cover and why (research into similar products)

I was looking into album covers of the artists who are similar to our artist. That was a pop genre. I wanted to outline what do they have in common.
Basically, the whole artwork is always done in the same style and similar colours. I took to albums of different artists: 1989 by Taylor Swift and "Younger Now" by Miley Cyrus.

This album is done in very bright and cheerful colours which certainly draws attention to it. On the front cover, we can see the name of the artist, an artist herself, album name on the jacket which is not straightforward and the record label name. We can also see the titles of the song on the front cover around the circle. On the back of the album, there is just a tracklist.

This album cover is done in more pastel colours and looks like polaroid photo. The main thing on the cover is the artist herself, however, we cannot see her face properly. We can also see album name in bold and artist's initials. On the back, on the background, we can see the face of an artist which is actually the same picture as in the front. On the back, there is also a tracklist, barcode, executive producers names, record name and label.

Production Schedule

Here is a plan for our shooting day. This will hopefully save our time on the actual shooting day as we will know what we need to do.

Call Sheet

This is a list of telephone numbers and emails of everyone who participate in our music video. This makes the communication much easier and if we will need to contact anyone we could do it much quicker.

Shot list

This is a list of shots that we will have take on the actual shooting day for each element of our music video. Using this sheet on shooting day should save our time and make the process much easier.

Talk with music videos producer Phil Tidy

Phil Tidy produced more than 100 music videos and commercials and came to our school to share his experience with us. He co-curate and produce BUG. BUG is operating since 2007 as an ongoing series of bi-monthly events at the BFI Southbank in London – the home of British cinema – celebrating global creativity in the music video. It showed 800 music videos on the big screen at the BFI from over 500 music video directors.

Phil Tidy also owns a production company Squire. Squire produces commercials, music videos and documentaries. Phil Tidy gave us an inside view of the work of the production company like legal entity, contracts and how artists and producers communicate between each other.

After giving us an understanding of his work, Phil Tidy shared with us other information about music video industry. This industry worth £4 billions to the UK every year according to a recent report by UK MUSIC and there are over 150k people in this industry which give the picture of how huge is it. Music videos are one of the ways to promote music. They are part of marketing promotional material in a campaign around the release of new music. Music videos were primarily made to help promote and sell records and were essentially born in the early 80's with the inception of MTV. However, with 31% of all music now consumed on Youtube, the landscape has changed.

To help with the production of music videos now and in the future, Phil Tidy gave us a set of questions that we have to think about to produce a good piece of work:

• Can the production be made for the available money
• How are we going to pitch the idea
• Are there resources to pay off the people from production team
• How to promote the product
• Who is going to take us seriously

And the last advice that we received from Phil Tidy was that big ideas are great but learning comes from the little things.

Costumes

 Here is our plan for the costumes for the third element which is in sheets.  I have looked at the other pop music videos which also were shooted in the same atmosphere: in the bed. So the common things are that they all have a make-up, but it is a nude one which looks quite natural. The costumes are all lacy which makes the artists look feminine and sexy. The hairstyle is usually big messy curls so it looks very nice, but also natural at the same time.


So for our music video, we decided to follow all these symbolic convections as the viewer will be already familiar with that idea and therefore better understand the atmosphere we want to create.
We want to make a natural but sexy look for our artist. The makeup will be in nude colours. We will make an accent on her eyes by brownish eyeshadows and for the lips, we will use pink lipstick which will be close to the natural colours of lips of the artist.

We asked our cast to check whether they have clothes we needed. However, for the most costumes, they did not have what we needed so we decided to order that clothes online. We searched for it in many websites as we needed to be relatively low in price and also suit our criteria. Here our final variants for the dress:

We really like the idea for it to be lacy and flawless. The dresses in the first two pictures are similar, however, the third one is longer. We thought that it may be very nice if the dress will cover her legs when she will be sitting.

Here are potential costumes for set 1 and 2:

Costume from Andrew Jensen

Legal Letter

Animated storyboard

Confirming our cast list with teacher

Feedback from set designers

Today we showed our idea to set designers and discussed how are we going to do our elements.  Overall the feedback was positive and they didn't change that much.

Here is a feedback that we have received: 

They said that it is quite easy to make a white set, however, the red one may be tricky. So they proposed that we can do a red set with some sort of material like red curtains. They also were not sure about the third element that we have got- as the bed won't look good and the light idea is hard to make. However, the idea of filming inside the sheets was approved and even improved. They gave us an idea to hang the sheets to the ceiling, make lights there and put the camera above the artist inside them.

For the sofas, we were said that it will be probably better to use the same one and just change the fabrics on it. That way it will look the same. Also, this sofa should be good enough to do different things on it, for example, lying, dancing on it, sitting on it and others. 

For the second element, the bulbs should be possible to do. However, it may be better to group them together in one place, rather than spreading them around the room. Also, for that element, we will need to have blinders if we want to make the dancers silhouettes.

Dance rehearsal with potential dancers

We found a couple that looks nice when dancing together. To see how they will cope with the choreography in our music video, we did a small rehearsal with them:

Casting of dancers and rehearsals: potential girls

We shooted different girls dancing back at the house. We asked to do choreography which is more familiar to their own style.
Here are videos of our pretenders:

Casting: group discussion and decision

After watching all the participants, we start our discussion on who is going to better as our Cheri. We all agreed that we want to have a teenage star, rather than an adult. Then, after analysing the behaviour of all of them, we thought that the most confident and best suitable person for us is going to be Tea:

Casting: casting shots

Here are the shots of each of our potential artist:

Casting: process

Today we made a casting for the artist in our music video. We tried 4 girls which we thought would work with our concept.

We tried to understand who is the best for the voice that we have. We tried to shoot adult (Lottie) and teenagers. So far we think that for our concept and target audience teenage girl will fit more than adult. We were in a studio for that time so we could play the music in speakers and even use a sofa for it. We were using chorus as the words are easy to remember there. The characteristics we wanted to see were: how confident the girl is, how she looks on camera, how the appearance fit the voice. For one girl we asked to try lipsyncing verse as well as she was doing very well. For each potential artist, we took two shots: wide and close-up.