Location for narrative element

We finally came to the decision that we wanted to use an empty multi-storey car park to film the narrative element of our video. This meant that were still keeping with the idea of using a public place, but without the hassle of people. We looked at a previous music video made at Hurtwood, called ‘Rock and Roll’, who used the top floor of a multi-storey car park. We liked the idea of using this as our location as this fits in well with our urban feel of our video, and it is quite a neutral setting which will mean that it won’t detract away from the narrative.

We want the car park to be almost empty, with only a few cars scattered around. This will enhance the hopelessness of a situation which will essentially provoke the audience to empathize with the narrative.

Lighting

Performance Lighting

For our performance element, we only really want to see the silhouettes of our band in order to reinforce the band’s image, which is quite serious and very unlike many bands and artists today. Instead of being in the foreground with lots of flashing lights, and essentially drawing attention to themselves, we wanted to take a different approach. We wanted it to be more about their music as opposed to their appearance. For this reason, we want them to be more in the background, with very few close ups of their faces etc.

In order to achieve this, we’ve spoken with a lighting designer, and we have decided to have some sort of light coming from the back wall which will hopefully produce the silhouette image that we are looking to achieve. We are also thinking of having a thin haze of smoke, which will further emphasize how the band’s music is more important, and how they are so passionate that they are lost in their own music.

We didn’t want any really bright colours as we felt that this would grab too much attention away from the rest of the video and wouldn’t fit in with the image of our band being quite subtle and neutral. For this reason we felt that earthy such as brown and dark red would create that fiery feeling towards the end of the song, whilst not detracting too much away from the other elements in the video.

Narrative Lighting

 I’ve looked at a low key lighting set up for the narrative element of our video, as we had already discussed that we wanted lowly saturated light. We want to keep everything quite neutral, not quite black and white, but with a filter which takes away most of the light. I don’t know whether this is exactly the kind of lighting we will want to use, but we would like to use the concept of this lighting set up, as I feel that it will be a very powerful and epic way of portraying the narrative.

This is a photo that Fergus took on his iphone which I then edited on Picasa. I added a neutral tint and changed the contrast settings to produce this kind of lighting which I feel works quite well.

 

Refined Cast List

For our band, we wanted alternative looking people in order to emphasis the band’s alternative image. We have chosen 3 people who actually play the instruments so that it seems more realistic as opposed to them just miming it. Because of the lighting choices of our set, we won’t see the band members in great detail, instead we will just see their silhouettes.

Practice shots

We didn’t feel as though our storyboard was very successful, as we had not carefully thought about what types of shots we wanted to use, and what we wanted to capture in those shots. From this, we decided to take a series of shots which we thought would be successful in capturing the emotion and intensity of the narrative. These are some of the pictures we took, which I have edited in Picasa 3 to make the lighting look less saturated, which essentially gives it a more dramatic look.

Animatic

Our track was originally about 5 minutes long, so I used the recording studios to cut the song down to 3 minutes. In order to do this, I had to get hold of a wav file of the actual song to ensure it was the best possible quality version. I then imported this into Pro Tools, where I then cut the middle section of the song and then used a cross-fade to overlap the 2 sections so that they joined together at the end of the chorus. I then cut the end of the song, where I used a fade to make the ending not sound too abrupt. I then exported this as a stereo interleaved file which I transported onto a CD. I used this CD to transfer the file onto the computers in the edit suite, where I imported the track into Final Cut Pro in preparation for our Animatic.

We took individual pictures of each storyboard image and positioned them in place alongside the track. Obviously this wasn’t going to be an accurate representation of what our video is going to look like, but we needed a general idea of how the video was going to unfold. This is the animatic we created:

The animatic wasn’t as successful as we had hoped, but we are currently looking at different shots we could potentially use in our video, however we haven’t displayed them in this animatic. This is just a rough idea of how the video will look.

Storyboard

Typical member of our target audience

I thought that this video and this type of band would appeal to a more sophisticated teenage audience because of their slightly obscure, alternative music. I can’t imagine this type of band would appeal to those who like commercial pop music by artists such as Justin Bieber, which often falls in the younger teenage category. I think the audience could range up to adults of middle age, depending on their taste in music, but ultimately, my target audience would be the 16-25 age group. The majority of my class fall into this category, and so the positive feedback suggests that this kind of video will be popular amongst this age group. I think this type of band appeals to both male and females, as the song content is about things that both can relate to.

Costume

We wanted to have the band dressed fairly casually, in order to relate to Dyer’s principle of being simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. This means that their audience can relate to them. There won’t be too much emphasis on costume due to the fact that only their silhouette will be shown.



Location

We thought about using an old tube station as our location for the narrative element of our video. We looked into a tube station that had been previously used to shoot one of the thrillers at Hurtwood. I thought that the tube station would be a more dramatic location to film the collapsed body. However we soon came to the realisation that to hire out the tube station to use as a set, it would cost between £300 and £500, which we of course didn’t have to our disposal. We are now trying to think of other possible locations which are in the public eye, but not with too many people.

Cast List

In order to cast our video, we looked at all the theatre students from our school and picked out people who we thought would be suitable for our video. We chose theatre students because our video will heavily depend on the acting in order to give it that dramatic effect.