Prop and Costume list

We made a prop and costume list to present to the studio designer as he/she can give us advice of how to present our location, plus we can see if the school will be willing to help us find any of the needed props.  

We will be looking into our personal stuff to see if we can find anything that might work, for example clothing wise we will be looking into our wardrobes, as well as the cast, to have as many options as possible.

Me and Hannah made a PowerPoint, listing all the props and costumes needed for our music video, inserting a picture to show exactly what we are looking for, as well as colour coding it, making sure we also know who is bring what. There are very few items that we are asking the school to provide, and for the rest we will be use are own if possible.

Everything that we searched and put into the presentation has been considered to be low budgeted. We might add more props towards the shooting day but for the moment everything that we need is written down.

Props and costumes from hannahbeapalmer1

Costume research

We than researched at possible outfits and costumes that could work for the actual music video. We looked and Indie and colourful outfits as our video will be introvert.

We don’t have a specific themed colour, however we know that we don’t want to have dark colours as all the girls need to stand out, especially the main singer as she would get change several time. Me and Hannah made a Pinterest board so we could have all the possible clothing style into a single place and se with what we started and ended up to, giving us the opportunity to search different ideas.

We than used those photos to show the girls in the video the style we are looking for, we attached into an email few pictures asking them to bring some of their own clothes into school to see if they could work to then do a test shoot.

We also look at more music videos to find some shots or idea that we could reuse or still from them having a verity of things, that don’t have to make sense all together.

https://uk.pinterest.com/fran2335/clothing-for-music-video/

Editing of the song

During our lesson we were listening to the song Pray (Empty Gun) one more time, and we all knew that it was too long, however if we cut it up to 2.30 minutes we would have missed the best part of the song, the finale, so with and editing app, Harvey edited the song. Cutting unwanted parts and adding the finale that has a better ending of the song and give us more material to play with for the actual editing process. Now the song it's only 2.35 instead of being 4 minutes, giving less worries of not heaving enough elements to cover up all the time of the song, without also making it boring. The amount of elements we have now should be enough to complete the music video and keep it interesting all the way thought, even though we will be still thinking onto more elements.

The actual final result it's a lot better than what we were expecting, making us liking the song even more. The next step would be to send this version of the song to Juli ( main singer) so she can learn the lyrics.

Lip sync test shoot

As we were undecided if we should have kept the song or not, and choose another one around our idea we planned a test shoot, with our main singer too see if she can pool of the look and if she will be able to perform as desired.

The shooting day, to make her feel more confortable we played the actual song onto speakers, and at fist we did a group shoot so she wouldn’t have felt with all the eyes on her, and the only instruction we gave was to feel the song and sing it our loud.

We then explain her specifically and in detailed what we wanted, showing few examples got from other music video, and while she was performing we were singing with her to make her feel more confortable with the surrounding, she responded positive to the trial and the more we rehearsed the better and more confident she was getting.

I believe our main singer has the perfect look and if we rehearsal more and more, even at house she will get more into character giving us the best performance during the shooting day.

As two of our friends were with us, we asked them to get into the shots so see the whole look fits and performance works with several girls. We made them do something simple and straight forward, bur remaining with a straight face, also adding one of them as the main casting in our project as we appreciated her look and performance.

The video was filmed with Harvey's phone

Lip-sync practice from Harvey Wright on Vimeo.

Changing our ideas

In today’s lesson we discuss about the possible elements to incorporate in the music video.

To start with Harvey used an app on his laptop to cut the song to 2.35 minutes, including mainly the cores the most important part of the song.

We then made a list of all the elements that we already have and how much time they would take up in the video to have a clearer idea of how much we have to do.

So we decided to make the video a bit weirder, as it won’t make much sense it would follow the idea of a group of bad girls banking school, and all this will be shot in the same location.

We then thought at several elements that could take up space in the video even if for a short time, for example:

Bikes,

Roller skaters,

Lollypop,

Gum,

Weird dancing,

Up side down girl,

Smoke machine,

Gymnastics (so flips or splits),

Skateboarders,

and as in our second location we have swimming pool that could take up a good 30 seconds or more of the video as interesting, and appealing to look at for the audience as we are also proposing something different.

However the second location is further away and the room them selves are based into a 60/80s look, so the whole style of the girls could be themed but they could still destroy or trash the house. All those elements will then be selected and we will be deciding which one will fit the best with the music video.

            

Cutting out elements and adapting the music video

Harvey made a mix tape of the main sources we based our video on, with our main song as the soundtrack to see if the overall look would have work or not, and we realise that after a good minute the video would have become boring, as the song is really calm and it doesn’t fit with the contrast of fast dancing and long stares from characters.

From this we decided to cut the idea of the main dancers and just keeping the main five girls.

As the video now is lacking of performing elements we decided to reincorporate the drummer, as a possibility however we need to find more for the music video. We were also looking at other songs to see if maybe something more pop would work with our original idea, however this isn’t the final idea so adapting it is still possible.

We have talked to Phill to talk about out overall idea and he agreed with the thought of cutting the dancers and also he took once our main inspirational source and analysed in front of us, to show us the amount of elements incorporated in it, and even if it looks like a simple and poor video there is lots going on, that keeps up the attention of the audience, at least 7 or 8 things happen in the video, for how similar they can be seen they still nicely shot and design to appeal to the viewers eyes.

We are also planning a test shoot with our main singer to see of she fits the look and her performance standard.

Walk this way - MO

Pray (Empty Gun) Visual Representation from Harvey Wright on Vimeo.

Discussion with the lighting man for our music video

We discuss with the lighting man which lighting would be the best for our music video, showing him our inspiration source and pictures of our possible location.

As we are shooting the whole day off campus in this abandon house the lighting would be mainly nature and provided by the sun, we wanted a wash out, dull, low temperature effect however if it would be a sunny day that could cause some problems for the outdoor shots but should be fine inside.

As we are relying onto the weather and the sun light (hopefully cloudy) the lighting technician told us that we probably would need three redheads lights and blue gel, so to be safe to have all the room that we want to shoot in perfectly lighting and in the exact same way without having a massive change of colour temperature.

He showed us a website where we could look at the different scheme colour and channels to use, or get inspired from.

Another problem that it will come along is that fact that we would have only few hours of sun light and than it would start to get darker pretty quickly, making a huge change day to night for the lighting, this could be an issue or we could turn it into our favour and adapt the music video to it make it with a time line and showing this through the lighting, as more shadows would start coming in towards the end of it. There isn’t much we can if not hoping for the perfect weather conditions.