Music Video
Skills Audit
Demo Work
Demo Work
Demo Work
Contents
Demo Work
Contents
> Theoretical exploration of the purpose
and application of research
> Secondary research into
music video genres, codes, conventions,
techniques, and theories
> Primary research with the
client to inform ideas development
> Focus group presentation of ideas for
feedback and review via questionnaire
survey
Moving Demo
Wednesday 1st June
With the completion of the work today, my FMP is now 100% completed.
The work I did today comprised of simply checking over my WIX website, making sure that all buttons worked and all images and videos could be used as designed.
I ran into a couple of errors, but they were very minor, simply images that couldn't be enlarged or a spelling mistake here or there. But they were very easy to fix.
I made sure to check over my whole website, all the menu pages, all of production and even all the different journal pages
And with it all checked over, I’m confident that my WIX website works exactly as it’s supposed to. This means that I now have no more FMP work to complete. It feels really good to have completed FMP and I feel really proud about all the work that I’ve put into this whole project.
Monday 6th June
With FMP now officially finished, I’m off project for these last 5 weeks before summer. And so going into lesson, I didn’t really know what we were going to be doing.
But Danny introduced us to the work which will take up our next two weeks, which is a multi camera “live” production, which will prepare us for the project on this during year 2. We’ve been put into groups and chosen our jobs role. I am in charge of the teleprompter, which controls the script, as well as being in charge of the lighting for my group.
As this was my chosen job role, it also means I’m one of the three who are in control of the design and theming of the piece, whereas the other six are in control of the VT’s which will be needed.
Overall, I’m actually looking forward to what I’m going to learn and eventually what we’ll produce.
At the end of the lesson, we completed a demo task on single camera interviews. I had to act for it, which meant I didn’t use the camera, but I still helped set up and learned the theory behind it, so it was still a really useful demo to have, and I was very happy with our final result, where we were able to have shots of each of the actors, noddys where the interviewer nodded as well as combining the audio from several different recordings.
Tuesday 7th June
Today, we continued with the multi camera piece. My group discussed possible ideas for our final product. We discussed a number of ideas, but the best one we planned revolved around some form of game show or challenge show. I think this is something which has great potential, so I’m looking forward to furthering our idea.
In the latter half of the lesson, we learned a bit of how to use the equipment, and I was able to have a practice on using the Autocue machine. It’s fairly easy to understand, as I write down the script, flip it and then press play so that it’s facing the right way round for the hosts. The hardest part was making sure the timing was good, so that the autocue wouldn’t be too slow and ruin the pacing, or too fast and cause the hosts to lose track. But overall it was really fun to learn and I’m sure I’ll learn even more skills over the coming days.
Wednesday 8th June
Continuing with the Multi Cam Production today. We properly planned out our idea better, and we seem to be choosing the game show method. And so with our rough idea down, we looked at expanding it more. One aspect of this was planning the VT’s. For one of our VT’s we are planning to create some fake adverts and so for the rest of the day, I looked at creating one of the adverts.
I based my advert around medicine, using previous adverts I’ve seen as a basis for my own. From these I included aspects such as a doctor, stock footage of people smiling and a long side effects list to my own advert. The final piece could only be 40 seconds long so I had to cut down a bit of my footage to make sure it fit in the time frame, but overall I was very happy with the final product. I used a green screen to film myself as the Doctor and used stock footage and premiere tools to create the rest of the piece.
Thursday 9th June
We completed a demo task today. It included creating a short video in the style of a news report. This style included an interview as well as other aspects such as B roll and voiceovers. It was a good demo, but my groups went quite wrong.
The parts we recorded went pretty fine, although a couple of our voiceovers went slightly wrong, the rest of our recordings went fine. However it wasn’t till afterwards we were told that the final piece had to be about a minute. And with the content we’d recorded ours was roughly 1 minute 50 seconds long. Obviously we had to cut this down to a minute, but a lot of our segments were quite long and slightly hard to cut down. Which resulted in our final piece not being overly great.
However, the demo task was still useful and understanding the style a bit more will become useful in the future.
Monday 13th June
We are still working on our multi-cam piece for this week. And today I helped in creating the background for our production.
Our aesthetic for the background is newspapers, as it provides a visually engaging background. We created this background by taping lots of loose newspapers to some large backboards which we’ll be able to lean against the wall at the back of the studio.
And so I spent the beginning of the lesson taping these newspapers to the backboard. And with the backboards completed, we also wanted one of the backdrops to have the title on which is “Stuck in the news”. We used black spray paint for the work Stuck so that it seems more natural. And then for the words “In The News” we printed out the letters to appear as if they’re from a newspaper.
And so we were able to complete the backdrop. While a couple of use were working on this, others were working on the running order and script so after today we are getting a lot closer to the final production.
Tuesday 14th June
My group was in the studio today for some practice for the final piece this Friday. This included people figuring out the lighting and cameras a bit more. And as for me I was practicing a bit more with the Autocue, something that I did a bit of when I returned home.
Then to finish off the lesson, as it was only an hour and a half, we filmed a section for one of our VT’s which included seeing inside the gallery. This is the other VT than the one I’m working on so I didn’t know too much about it, but the group seemed happy with what they filmed.
Overall, I feel it’s been a useful day and has helped all of us improve our skills a little more.
Wednesday 15th June
My group spent the entirety of today’s lesson going through tech runs to allow us to practice for our final production on Friday.
I spent today transferring the script onto the Autocue software. Slightly annoyingly, the script wasn’t 100% completed so I couldn’t transfer all of it, but I did all that I could. My plan is having the separate sections of script on different tabs within google. Then during the VT’s I can switch tabs so that the different sections of script can be separated from one another, and played at different speeds.
These tech runs were really useful, and allowed me to gain more confidence in using the Autocue, and I’m sure the other people found it useful as well.
Thursday 16th June
We continued with tech runs in today’s lesson. I’ve got the full script now so I’m able to fully convert it onto the software which is helpful. I felt the tech runs went well, and I think our group will be ok for the proper run through tomorrow.
The only other thing we completed today was some final filming for our last VT. This involved me filming an interview between the loser of our game show and the head of the show. This wasn’t too hard and I was able to use the skills from the Single Camera interview that I learned in the demos last week.
Friday 17th June
Today was the day of our final multi cam production. My group went first, and we were able to get several takes done before the final thing. We ran into a minor problem as one of our hosts was ill today, but luckily we were able to replace her with someone from the other group. But overall, I felt it went really well, and I’ve really enjoyed this whole mini production.
The other group went after us, and there Autocue person was also not in, so they asked me to fill in for them. I was happy to do this, and it took me a little time to get in sync with their script and the pace they wanted it, but once I understood what was happening, I was able to help their production run with less problems.
Then to finish off the day I wrote the evaluation for this production. This simply covered things that went well/wrong as well as how I felt about my job role.
Monday 20th June
With our multi cam project complete, we’re now moving onto a new project. For the rest of this week, we are working in groups to replicate a conversation scene from the original Jurassic Park film. This week will serve as practice for the next two weeks, where we will be choosing our own conversation scene to recreate.
Similarly to the multi camera piece, we’ve chosen job roles to fulfil within this mini project. For this week, I chose to full the role of first assistant director, as I didn’t really know what it incorporated, and I thought it would be interesting to find out and learn something new. From my initial research, the first assistant director helps to keep the production on time and scheduled as well as serving as helping to communicate with the director and heads of the other departments.
I’m looking forward to this short project as well as the responsibility that will come from this job role.
Tuesday 21st June
We continued with our new mini project today.
My group started off by sorting out the jobs people needed to do. The camera people went off to look at some of the equipment, and the sound operator started planning the sound.
And so me, the director and the two actors started on a script write up, planning how everything is going to work, as well as the beginning of a shot list, which we will finish in the first half of tomorrows lesson. Having this all planned beforehand is useful as it will allow us to be more efficient when it comes to properly shooting.
Then in the last 15 minutes we went out to scout a couple of locations. And we were able to find a pretty good one which will be the location we’d most like to use. However as they’re all on college premises, we’ve made sure to gather a couple of backup locations just in case our other locations become unusable.
Wednesday 22nd June
In the first half an hour of today’s lesson we finished off the shot list from yesterday. And with that complete, we were able to actually start some shooting today.
As the 1st Assistant Director, I was able to help with a lot of different things during the shoot. To start out with, I helped carry parts of the jib out onto location so that the camera crew could start constructing it. Then throughout the shoot, I helped to support the sound operator, practice and learn the script with the actors, as well as making sure everyone was ready when we were about to film a shot. All these different jobs allowed me to develop different skills which was quite fun.
The shots we gained today were good, although we ran into a couple of problems, which means that we’ll need to shoot again tomorrow to finish it off. A couple of our problems were related to the sound as we had members of the public as well as things such as planes which kept obstructing our sound. But our biggest problem was the fact that the remote for the Jib didn’t work at all. We tried charging it but nothing worked to fix it, and this meant that we couldn’t do our original planned shot with the Jib. We informed Ash so hopefully by tomorrow the issue will be fixed, but for today we weren’t able to complete all our shots.
But the shots that we did create were quite good and I’m confident that with tomorrow’s shoot as well, we’ll be able to gather all the shots we need.
Thursday 23rd June
My group ended up using the whole lesson today to complete our filming. We had a couple of issues, particularly in regards to the weather as much of our equipment could not be used in the rain. But luckily, there was only about a 10 minute period where we had to stop filming, and during the rest of the lesson we were able to complete our filming.
Luckily, the remote control for the jib worked today which allowed us to properly complete our jib shots to begin with. These were important as we were required to use the jib for at least one shot, so now that the remote control issue was fixed we were able to gather what we need.
Then in the last hour we were able to gather our final shots which was the over the shoulder of one of our actors, as yesterday we were not able to get that shot due to background interferences. We also made sure to gather a couple of extra spare shots just to provide us with options when it comes to our editing.
Thanks to today’s filming being completed, I’m confident we’ll be able to edit it properly and to a good standard in tomorrow’s lesson. Although we’ve ran into a couple of problems throughout the filming I think our final product will definitely be good.
Friday 24th June
Today was the final day for our recreation of the Jurassic park scene. As per the job roles, the two actors were also the ones who edited pieces. And so they spent the entirety of the lesson editing it, while the rest of us completed other work. We watched their final pieces at the end of the lesson, and I felt they were very good. Even though we ran into a couple of problems throughout the project, I felt the final piece was actually rather good.
But the work the rest of us completed, was preparation for next week, when we are completing the same task again, but we’re allowed to choose our own scene. We thought we had two weeks to complete this next scene, but apparently it’s now only one week as the final week will be devoted to the start of Unit 11 that we need to complete over summer.
We looked over several different potential scenes, but in the end we decided on a scene from the Pixar film “The Incredibles”. The scene contains Mr Incredible talking to his boss and arguing with him. We chose this mainly for it’s use of camera angles and framing, as we felt that it presented us with a good challenge. Additionally, as the film is originally animated, converting it to live action will also provide us with interesting problems that we may have to solve. I’m really looking forward to next week, as I feel this scene will be really interesting to create.
Monday 27th June
Today was a continuation of the Incredibles scene that we decided on Friday.. However we had both our Art Director and main cameraman missing today, and turns out the main cameraman has caught COVID. And since I was the assistant cameraman, this basically means I’m upgraded to the main cameraman.
And we completed a lot of work today, even with these losses. We’ve come out of today with a classroom booked for our filming, a plan for all the audio we need to record, plans for costumes and props, and I’ve been able to have a hands on test with the Ronin Gimbal that we are planning to use for a couple of our shots.
The only thing we have left to complete is our shot list which we plan to complete in tomorrow’s lesson. We will then spend Wednesday and Thursday filming, while we edit on Friday. I feel pretty confident based off what we’ve been able to complete today, and so I believe we can definitely produce a good recreation of our scene.
Tuesday 28th June
We continued with our preparation for filming today. As I’m now the main cameraman, I worked with the director to plan out the shots that we wanted to film. We compiled all these shots into a shot list that we will use to help us know which shots we need while on set.
To create this shot list we used the original scene as a large inspiration. We had chosen this scene purposefully for its interesting framing as well as the camera movements and shots that it used, and so we didn’t want to change the scene too much, instead we plan to focus on recreating it to the best of our abilities.
With our shot list completed, as well as all the work we completed yesterday, I feel pretty confident for our filming tomorrow, and I believe we’ll be able to produce a final product which would be even better than our one from last week.
Wednesday 29th June
Today was the first day of our filming for our recreation of The Incredibles scene. We decided to use today to try and shoot our more complex shots. And so we started with the gimbal shot, which we had practiced for on Monday. We did about 10 takes for it and so we have quite a few options to choose from when it came to editing. As the cameraman it meant I was in control of the gimbal, and so after 10 takes of it my arms had become quite tired.
And so after that shot we shot the beginning shots which included, a close up of the pens, a mid shot of the Boss and then a slightly wider mid shot of the boss as well.
In total we were only able to get about 4-5 shots completed today, but many of them were the more complex ones, so in tomorrow’s lesson we may have to hurry up a bit to make sure that we can complete all the other shots we need.
But overall, I’m very happy with our filming today, and I really think our final product will be a good recreation of the original scene.
Thursday 30th June
Today was our second and final day of filming for our recreation of “The Incredibles” Scene. And we were on a pretty tight schedule to get it all finished in time.
We didn’t run into any major problems filming, in fact the only thing that we struggled with was completing everything in the time limit, which we ended up having to compromise with towards the end. We started with the most important shots and worked our way through the whole conversation part of the scene. In the original scene Mr Incredible spots a mugging outside. We were running out of time, and in order to complete the scene we made the creative decision not to show the mugging but to instead just have Mr Incredible talk about it. This way we would still be able to use our Gimbal shot that we had shot yesterday.
Aside from this compromise on the last shot we were able to gather all the other shots we needed to a good standard. As the cameraman, I feel I’ve gained quite a lot in this short time, especially with the wide range of shot types and angles that we’ve had to create in this project. And I’ve also just really enjoyed it.
I’m looking forward to the group editing it tomorrow, and I think even with the slightly altered mugging shot we’ll still be able to make something really good out of our footage.
