Storyboarding: animatic

Here is our animatic, roughly edited to our chosen song. We would like our real shots to have the same duration as those in our animatic however we are aware that this may change when we are editing.
This task has made it so much easier to visualize how our shots would flow when edited to the beat of the song - hopefully it will look much better with some real footage than it does with my terrible illustrations!

Storyboarding: finalised plan

Here is a quick look at our storyboards, with the relevant details of location, shot type/movement/angle and actor movements/costume, written to the right of each shot.
To make annotating our storyboard easier, we have labelled the character Little Red Riding Hood as RRH and the Big Bad Wolf as BBW where it is necessary.

Inspirational music video: Dark Star - Jaymes Young

This is another music video that uses a shaped border layered onto a background, which looks really powerful.

  

The use of smoke and fumes throughout the video is something we would like to use, to create a mysterious atmosphere. Perhaps we could use artificial smoke to make our shots appear ghostly; we could also use the smoke to morph symbols into the air, which looks very effective in this video.

The artist is illuminated using studio lights, to accentuate his facial features; this is something which we could also experiment with, to reflect our characters dark thoughts and fears.

Here is the full music video:

Storyboarding: finished post-it note plan

Here is a picture of our storyboard(s), which we drafted onto post-it notes. This made it really easy for us to chop and change where each shot should go; we did this many times before deciding that the order above works best.
Storyboarding this year has been a very long process. All in all we used 9 A3 sheets to complete our storyboards, which take up a significant proportion of my bedroom wall. However, it has been extremely worthwhile storyboarding in this much detail - it has given us all a much clearer idea of what shots we need to take in each location and the rough duration of these shots, so that our filming days can be done as efficiently as possible.
We now have to copy up the post-it note illustrations onto our storyboards and create an animatic showing each shot in detail.

Band/album name inspiration: initial research

In today's lesson, our group began to think about band names and an album title. We did some quick research into band/ album names, in the indie genre, that stood out to us.

Here are some of the albums/artist names, off the top of our heads, which we really liked:

We like the idea of having a simple name, which our audience will be able to recognize and relate to. However, we also really like the idea of '___phobia' for our main track title, as it reflects the dimension of fear explored in our music video.

Creative task 2

Today, our group played a quick game in which we all wrote down

1. An adjective 
2. A noun 
3. A verb 
4. Another adjective 
5. Another noun 

When we swapped the papers around, we folded over what we had written. We then revealed the final name generated from all of these words combined. Here are the results:

Although they do not make much sense put together, we found that some of the words put next to each other made quite unique and funny names e.g screaming cow or the wonderful stutter.
This was a beneficial task that really helped spark our imagination; writing down the first thing that comes to mind is clearly reflective of our individual experiences, which combined, can make a really interesting fusion of ideas.

Inspirational music video: You Know - Zeds Dead & Oliver Heldens

This is a really effective video, with fast paced shots which fit the genre well. Although the song does not fall under the indie genre, the use of shapes and abstract imagery is something that we are planning to use.

The use of flashing symbols throughout the video is also something we would like to replicate, using layers to create depth and emphasize star image throughout, as shown in this music video.

 
Fast and slow shot duration's are used in this music video, which alter depending on the rhythm. This is shown to be really effective; we would like to include both quick flashing images for the instrumental parts of our song, and slowed down shots for our narrative.

 Here is the full video:

Costume/ prop research

We have done some research into the costumes we would like the characters in our music video to wear.
In the classic storybook illustrations, Little Red Riding Hood wears:

• A red cape
• A white dress
• A small basket

We have decided that our protagonist will definitely be wearing a red cape and using a small basket. However, we have all voted against her wearing a dress.
This is because we would like to draw parallels between our two characters, as in the video, they are later revealed to be the same person. We must also take into consideration the time of year/ weather conditions - in a cold, wet, muddy forest, it is probably impractical for Tayla to wear a short dress.
We also voted against using an actual full wolf costume, as we felt it would look immature and unrealistic.

Here is an outfit plan for both of our characters:

We hope the that by using similar clothing for each, the audience will recognize the subtle similarities between the characters, making the message of our narrative much clearer.

Inspirational TV show: Pretty Little Liars (2010 - present)

One of our inspirations for costume was ABC's TV teen drama Pretty Little Liars. This show is heavily consumed by members of our target audience (16-24yr olds) which we know from primary research.

The 'A' Red Coat and Black Coat Girls (above) represent the 'anonymous character', a stalker who preys on the group of girls. We wanted to make our portrayal of the wolf implicit, as we felt that using a wolf hand might look tacky and unrealistic.

We have therefore chosen to use a black hooded figure, like A in PLL, to represent our stalker or Big Bad Wolf. As for the Red Cape, our narrative is based on Little Red Riding Hood, which is an explicit reference to the fairytale and elements of escapism in our music video.
The big reveal at the end of our video is that Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf are in fact the same person, so sharing the hooded identity might help signal this to our target audience, who we hope will understand this reference better as PLL is popular among this demographic.

Storyboarding: do's and dont's

This week, we began storyboarding our ideas for the shots we would like to include in our music video. 

The storyboard for our AS film opening was not very detailed. It had quite a few written annotations on it, especially between each frame on the paper, to show transitions. When filming, we found it really difficult to visualise what we meant in the annotations. However we did find it extremely useful to have the storyboards with us, even if we did  end up straying from them. Here are our storyboards from AS:

Music videos tend to have fast paced shots with a smaller duration and quick cuts, meaning there is a lot more camera movement. This means that our storyboards this year will be much longer; it is evident that we will need to storyboard in much more detail, as we need a clear visual idea of what each shot will look like when we go out to film. Hopefully this will make each shot easier to frame and position, so our time spent filming is done efficiently. Here are our storyboards from our A2 prelim, which we rubbed out and edited several times before we went out to film. All of these boxes were used for just the first 30 seconds of the song:

We have decided to use post it notes and pencils to storyboard our ideas, so we can easily change the position of our shots if our ideas/ narrative structure changes, as they did at AS and in our A2 prelim. Here are some pictures of us in the process of storyboarding, and our current storyboards:

Here is a quick vlog we did during our lesson, describing what we have included in our first few post-it notes and how we are finding the process of storyboarding:

Artist research: Vevo

Vevo is a multinational video hosting service, often described as "the Hulu for music videos" which launched in 2009. It is owned and operated by Universal Music Group (UMG), Google, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media.


Vevo allows users to stream live performances as well as promoting the latest official music videos on their premiere page. Artists featured on Vevo belong to a variety of different genres and are either mainstream or upcoming artists, on the same platform. This allows less well known artists (with similar music) to be discovered, using the related artists links at the bottom of another artist's page.

Vevo also censors explicit content such as profanity and features versions of songs/videos which are edited. This allows them to make their network more friendly to advertising partners such as McDonald's and also audience members who may be of an unsuitable age.

Here is Halsey's Vevo page, which features all of her music videos and audio tracks on the same page. It also has a list of her tour dates with quicklinks to ticket distributors, and links to her official social media accounts, such as Twitter and Facebook. Vevo have also done various interviews and other similar features with Halsey, which makes her more accessible and relatable for audience members.

The Vevo page for Empty Gold has the official audio track, with the number of views it has received (909,216 views). Plus, all the relevant details of the track, including the director, producer(s), composer and so forth. This was really useful to us when searching for the producer to send an email requesting permission to use Halsey's song.

Lip syncing task: finished practice!

Here is our finalised practice lip sync video for Halsey's 'Empty Gold'. We really enjoyed filming and editing this! It was a really beneficial task, that has helped us figure out what we will and will not do when it comes to filming our real music video.
We found that it was a lot easier to sing along, rather than just mouth the words (even if we were terribly out of tune) as sounding out the words makes it look like we are singing as Halsey would. We also found it useful for someone behind the camera to direct our actions, as it is easier to maintain our position so the shot flows.

Here is a quick group vlog, describing the process of our practice lip syncing task, and what we learned from it:

Lip syncing task: filming

One of our tasks was to film all the members of our group practicing the lip syncing to our chosen song.
Here are a few BTS pictures of us filming:

 

We had a lyric video up on YouTube, on a nearby laptop. We connected it to the speakers in an empty room to make it easier for us to stay in time with the song. We filmed against a plain white background as we felt it might help to make it look more sophisticated.

We all sang along, to prompt each other with the lyrics and whoever was filming at any point, coordinated our actions in the video. This made it really straightforward and quick to film. 

We now have to edit our singing to the actual track, hopefully we have enough shots of everyone in the group, to lip sync for the whole duration of the song!