shooting today

Today Tom and I are shooting scenes at the park which we were supposed to do Friday but at the time I managed to forget about our meeting, and did homework instead. So today we are going to be doing hide and seek scenes at the park. To the right you see the weather report for today which Tom and I got off of bbc.com for the purposes of knowing whether or not it would be sunny at any point today which it has been somewhat. Tom and I will be shooting during lunch time, and the lesson afterwards which should be more than enough time for the shots we need but you never know what can go wrong with this sort of project.

Tom and I should get some good shots for our music video. I should also be able to scope out good locations for shooting our cd cover or insert. As I have said in earlier entries Tom and I will see which ideas work best and go from there.

Impressions I want the audience of my music video to get

There are several things I would like the potential target audience of my groups music video to see. The first is the archetype of a "hero" on a quest which is the opposite reading you normally get with the rock genre of music which is that of rebellion or the archetype of "villain". Though this could somewhat be seen in the setting of our music video which is the city or urban area, and the text of our CD cover which Tom and I both agreed would be sort of Gothic medieval calligraphy if we could find it on whatever computer program we use to make the front cover of our cd. Barring this we haven't decided on a backup style of text. This could also be seen in the possible representation of regional identity which is again the city or urban theme which is somewhat common in rock videos. The more oppositional reading stuff Tom and I decided on was the representation of the main male character in our music video as sort of sensitive or into his emotions which is unusual for a rock video in which men are portrayed as more the "alpha-male" than the "philosopher". That is to say men are normally portrayed in rock videos as muscle-bound, leather wearing, romancing, drug, and drink addicts rather than the unconfident, sensitive, emotional type of people. This is also probably why Tom and I thought it best that if this track, music video, cd, or magazine ad were ever used we would use an alternative music label or an independent music label for distribution because apart from anything else our track isn't well known, and the concept we are using is a non-mainstream one for our genre of music. Though I think we chose a rather mainstreamed target audience which is boy and girls 16-19 years old, probably from middle class families with some contact from night clubs or alternative music clubs which would probably help to distribute our cd/music video because of the use of the cultural reference of the hooded sweatshirt which shows up on the video. As for final ideas for the cd cover Tom and I are still seeing what ideas will actually work with the level of computer know how he and I have which in my case is not exactly high.

more cd cover ideas

I have just thought up 4 ideas for pictures for the cd cover or inside booklet for my cd cover. I have also thought up two ideas for the text to use for the cd cover. The first of my four picture ideas is one I have mentioned before which is taking a close-up picture of one detail of each of the three hide and seek game locations, and mix them together to make one picture. The one new part to the idea that I think might work is to have a picture of the starting location of the factory super-imposed on top of or underneath the other location shots to possibly symbolise or connote urban superiority. The second of my four picture ideas is to use stills of the last three shots we use for the music video which show the seeker chasing the hider across the three game locations just before catching him which shows synergy between our cd cover and our music video. The third of my four picture ideas is a picture of our main character in the position he is in right before we show the start of the hide and seek game which sitting against the wall of the factory with the hood of his hoodie down, and his knees drawn up to his chest possibly looking scared or blank faced to show having his own freewill, personality, or wishes taken from him possibly by the grayness or uniformity of the city. The last of my four picture ideas is to basically combine the first and third ideas but add the two hider and seeker characters in miniature running around the main characters feet with puppet strings attached to them which could symbolise the main characters ultimate control of his own mind. Though this idea will probably have to be simplified to be any use in this project. These ideas are yet to be confirmed as Tom wasn't in today, and since we are partners in this project I must consult him before I put any ideas into effect myself since he may have some improvements upon these ideas or ideas of his own. The same can be said of my ideas for the text or lettering on the cd cover for which I have two. The first idea is to have the lettering in gray while the picture is in colour with the font as sort of faded typewriter lettering which shows denotations of wanting to catch attention, and symbolises the state of mind of the main character of our video as possibly forgetful or the personality of our videos main character as being overpowered by his environment. The second idea is to have the words in red while the picture is in gray which has possible connotations of the theme of our video of a man on a mission which is fullfilled.

analysis of graphs on previous post

The first graph is a pie chart pertaining to four of the types of music that our selected probable target audience likes. As we can clearly see a majority of our target audience is into the rock genre called metal while a minority of them are into the classical genre of music. Of the remaining two types of music which are on the graph the second most popular genres of music were Rock, and Indie. These two make up 50% of our target audience while metal makes up a further 45% or so of our the remaining 50% of the graph, and classical makes up 10% or so of the remaining 50% of the graph. This means that the same amount of people said on the questionnaire that they liked the rock and indie genres of music, and the least amount of people who answered our questionnaire said that they liked classical. Whereas the most amount of people who answered our questionnaire said that they liked the metal genre of rock

The second graph is a 3-d bar graph with triangular bars. The scale goes as high as four, and represents the elements of music videos which our target audience likes the most. The elements which the graph represents are performance, narrative, and low key lighting. Of the three of them narrative is the most popular with four, whereas performance and low key lighting both got 1's on the scale. This means that most target audience members in the area of the ages 16-19 prefer music videos that tell a story to match the lyrics or something similar rather than a video that follows a concept or shows the band performing the song. This also means that people in the area of the ages of 16-19 would probably prefer naturalistic lighting, and narrative or conceptual music videos rather than performance music videos.

Both of these graphs help Tom and I to know what type of music we should be using for the track in our music video, and what elements we should possibly include in our music video. Though Tom and I have already decided that we are doing a conceptual video with a rock track not a metal one. The reason for this being that by the time we got the results of the target audience questionnaire we had already decided on a conceptual video, and I can't stand metal music because it is too loud, and is nothing but people screaming.

target audience analysis graphs

second day of filming

Today Tom and I did more shooting up on the third floor of the sixth form. We did four shots of Tom walking down the hall wearing a grey sweatshirt. There was one shot which Tom and I had to redo because he ran part of the way back towards the camera. It also turned out that I managed to shoot four shots as one which lasted a minute and a half. I don't know how I did that either which means I have to learn how to use a camera. I wonder how Tom and I are going to use two cameras at once when shooting in the park on Friday because there is no way I can be at two places in the same area at once.

editing for first day of shooting

Today Tom and I edited the scenes we shot on Thursday. We looked at the footage we had which was harder than it seemed because Tom forgot to rewind the tape, and we ended up shooting a minute of just looking at the wall. When we finally imported our shots we ended up having to wait five or six minutes while the computer letterboxed our work, then took a minute to go to the computer options and get rid of letterboxing. When we looked at the footage we noticed right away that most of the transition shots we filmed out in the churchyard had a shaky frame, and had to get rid of most of them. We also had to cut 2 seconds of film from the shot of the seeker walking down the hallway because of an unrelated to filming person showing up on film. We also took out some of the walking bits of that one shot to make it look like the seeker was wandering in a zigzag up the hall. Personally I think that particular shot is a little shaky in its foundation because the cut is a little sloppy in between the seeker looking into individual doors. In one of our churchyard shots we have a separate shot of the sunny sky which we could use for some of our transitions. Finally we made copies of each shot just in case of work loss. After all that work we found out that the computer had seemingly rejected our changes, and there was only ten minutes left of class time which really bites in my opinion.