Problem with, (and solution to) the music video

We have been informed by a band member that his job restricts him to certain times for us to shoot the music video. His job spreads from Monday to Friday so our original plan to shoot the video on a Thursday or Friday during the day has had to be altered. We search for other options and have now planned to shoot the video in the Sandgate Church Hall, where as a band we usually practice. It is not too far from the school stage we were originally planning to use, so our location look, based on our research should not differ too much.

Another problem we have found that due to Matt's work constraints, he is unable to film the section where he catches his drumstick before activating the whiteboard to show the animation. Instead, Aiden will take the place of not only Matt, but all the other members role's in relation to the whiteboard 'activation'. This way we will not have the time constraints of all five members. However, this will not alter the band members unique action during the video. For instance, Matt will still throw his drumstick off shot (this will be filmed at Sandgate with the rest of the video), but instead of himself catching the drumstick, Aiden will be there instead.

UPDATE: We again have decided to alter the video. Aiden will no longer feature in the video, but instead we are going back to the original idea, with a few slight differences. We saw it unnecessary for someone to catch the items to 'activate' the animation, so we have decided to show the unique items landing on a white background, most likely a large piece of card around A1 size, and be the starting point of the animation. From that background, we can use the same background to film the animation so it does not look uneven.  

Ancillary Tasks - CD/DVD & Magazine Research

Due to the weather conditions, we were unable to begin with the intial filming as George was not able to get into school. We saw this opportunity to make a start on some ancillary task, beginning with the research. We searched the internet for magazine adverts but had no luck, so we took the other option of actually purchasing a few magazines to find the adverts. We got two popular music magazines, known as, Kerrang! and NME. We managed to find a few useful adverts in these magazines that we could anaylse and depict the type of features, structure and themes we might want to include in our own magazine advert. Even though the bands featured may be of different musical genres, we can still use the adverts for ideas.

Bullet For My Valentine - The Fever Tour

(Found in Kerrang! Music Magazine)

On the left, there is an advert for Bullet For My Valentine's latest tour 'The Fever Tour', named after their latest album 'The Fever', featured in the centre. Straight away, there is an unmissable feature in the background of the advert. It clearly displays the same image as featured on the album cover of a semi-nude woman. This seems an obvious feature to include on a magazine advert, as it will inform of the audience of what album they will expect to hear if they attend one of the dates of the tour.

The image on the right hand side is the band's first album, 'The Poison' which follows a very similar theme of gothic, curved, sharp text; few but effective colours and another semi-nude woman. The gothic-like text is seen as fairly normal for bands of a hard rock or hardcore genre. There is a strong link between both albums, the theme and the magazine.

In terms of colours, both ablums use a little amount of standard colour. 'The Fever' has a blue colour to it whereas, 'The Poison' has a red colour to it. They also seems to be slightly faded or greyed over, with a grain effect over the top, again to give a gothic feel to the band, likely to appeal to the band's fans.

The magazine advert is full of the necessary information for anyone to find out about the band's new tour. This includes: the name of the tour; some of the dates and locations of the shows, with numbers to ring; the website of the band; and a caption of the album in the bottom left corner. The text follows the same colour themes as the album, but includes a 'red' for the dates of the tour. this could be used as a focal point for fans looking for the location of their next show.

Both of these products, the magazine advert and the related album follow the running gothic theme that the band aim's to represent and appeal to

Shooting Schedule

From the video planner, we have now been able to create a shooting schedule, which means we can plan and insure we will have all the props and order of which scenes we need to do is clearly presented to each of us. Therefore, there will hopefully be no complications when we decide to shoot the video. (By 'page' on the shooting schedule, we mean a A1 sheet of card we will use to form a background whilst we take photos.).
Here is the shooting schedule:

Video Planner

This is the video planner. These images show how we plan to shoot the video. Now that our storyboard is complete, we can concentrate on this aspect of the preparations:

Audience feedback to storyboard update

We recieved some audience feedback from our initial storyboard ideas. We took this into account seeing as our audience need to be happy with our production for them to rate it highly. A comment which read 'The shots before the song plays seem unnecessary,' raised a point that we took into account, since it was discussed amongst the group too, where we removed 30 seconds of none music based video before the music began. The final storyboard presents these changes with the shots at the beginning of the song. Instead, we chose to show the guitar playing the beginning guitar part to give it a quick snap to action, hopefully to interest our audience from the very beginning. Another piece of audience feedback caused us to decided to change the sweeping shots between each member and instead, change it to straight cuts to keep the audience in that quick snap of action, and instead utilise the other shots and transitions later in the video. For instance, tracking shots of the drums at 1:24-1:28

Here is the final version of the storyboard:

Storyboard updated

Here is the latest version of the storyboard:















The changes we have made were mentioned in the last post we posted involving the first draft of the storyboard. We decided to make it short and sweet with a sweeping shot of all the band members, whilst the music starts. Therefore, the introduction of each band member is still included as an integral part, but not dragging out unnecessary time. This hopefully will be more effective for our audience. At the start with an establishing shot, silhouettes of the band will be present until the start of the lyrics at 0:14 seconds. Later in video, when we decided to implement the animation, the drummer will throw a drumstick out of shot, where we would cut to a whiteboard with another person who then catches that drumstick to activate the animation section. This is the current stage we are at with storyboard so far.

Animation Experiment (unfinished)

Since we are considering implementing animation into our music video along with live shots, we saw it important to see what the type of animation we would be using (stop-motion animation) would look like in a basic form. The quality of the video isn't very good, but this due to the phone camera we were using, where as we would probably be using a high quality camera in the real product. This is only a test so the animation bares no relevance to our actual product.