Sunday 30 December 2012

Character list

For my recreation video of 'Hall of Fame' I am of course required to create a character list and, although this is not set in stone, this is the provisional list for our characters and other roles within the production;


Front man: Ben will be playing the front man of the band, he will be the singer and main 'star' of Burrito Dorito (our band name). Similar to Danny O'Donoghue of The Script, he will be there not as a character within the video, but there just to represent the group and try to look good (he'll have to do his best!) 
The Scripts front man
Ben; the front man









Similarly to 'Hall of Fame', we plan to have two separate narratives, one of a boy and one of a girl.
For the boys part we plan to base it around some sort of sporting achievement, and so a sporting' challenge' will take place. We aim to include much 'manliness' in the video for the male role, and so one of the characters will have to put in a lot of effort and commitment, fulfilling the notion of working hard to achieve your goals.

For the girls part we may not necessarily include a sporting role, although that is an option, but may instead head for a more school or job based feature, in which they would overcome some sort of social or work difficulty.

NOTE: this is not definite and may be changed if necessary.    

'Eye of the Tiger'; Survivor; comparison with 'Hall of Fame'

Saturday 29 December 2012

'Gold'; Spandau Ballet; comparison with 'Hall of Fame'

'Proud'; Heather Small; comparison with 'Hall of Fame'

Similar music videos to 'Hall of fame'

As recently shown, the music video we have decided to recreate is 'Hall of fame' by The Script and Will.I.Am, because of this I am going to display and analyse music videos which I feel have similarities to our chosen video. These are:

- Gold; Spandau Ballet: due to similarities in lyrics and the notion of "you can achieve".
- Proud; Heather Small: sports theme and Olympics link.
- Eye of the tiger; Survivor: sporting link through 'Rocky', and a similar message within its lyrics.


Saturday 1 December 2012

Confirmation

In order to go ahead with the recreation of The Scripts, 'Hall of Fame', we need conformation from their record label, 'Epic Records'; AKA Sony records.

Thankfully, after getting in touch via email, they confirmed that we could recreate the video for coursework purposes, as shown below...

Thursday 15 November 2012

Video we will do for our coursework piece; 'Hall of Fame' by The Script

Here is the video of 'Hall of Fame' by The Script, which is the song we plan to do for our coursework piece;



Reasons for doing so:
Firstly, as we established through our survey, The Script are the ideal band for us to emulate as they have a popular audience due to their genre of music, which consists of teenagers and young adults.
Also, the group consists of men, something that me and Ben can of course relate to, and is also a group that we both enjoy, and so we feel is ideal for us to work on.

Lyrics:
The lyrics of the 'Hall of Fame' are ones which can easily be interpreted as sports based, e.g. "you can be the greatest, you can be the best", which is something that I felt was ideal for us to make a video from as this gives us loads of great ideas to contemplate. Also, a sporty theme would attract to our target audience (around 14-25 years) as it is proven that people are in their 'prime' in this age bracket. With the lyrics of the video being a sort of sports theme, this is an inspirational song, and a song with lyrics that we felt are ideal for us to work with.

Possible ideas:
Cinematography:
We can try many different camera angles and shots in order to emphasise the message of the song, thanks to the inspiring lyrics.
Editing:
Thanks to the pace and upbeat tempo of the song, we can edit our video by using techniques such as 'rapid cutting' to match the rhythm of the song with the video.
Mise-en-scene:
Due to the interpretation of a sports theme, we could wear sports clothing and use sports equipment to appeal to the theme.
Sound:
We could add shouts from coaches to the athletes in the video for example, in order to create more of a realism to the video.

Roles within the video:
Director of photography: Me
Organiser: Ben
Editor: Me and Ben
Producer: Me and Ben
Actors: Various people willing to help out

Our Video Diary; Number 1

Our one minute extract- The Script- For the First Time

The Original: (The first minute):



Compared to ours:



With this being our second one minute recreation, I feel that this extract has been far more successful than our first. Firstly, our shots are definitely more exact and detailed than the ones from our previous video;

1)
     < Compare to  >


2)

< Compared to >









These shots are down to far more detailed use of camera angles, editing techniques, and similarities between the characters.

The shots are a great improvement, however I feel as though there is still room for improvement as you can see that our shots may not be of the exact same contrast as the ones in the shot; and this is something we can look to practice further and hopefully master.




< As you can tell, our shot isn' the same contrast as the original  >



Overall, I feel that in doing this task we have improved greatly from our first attempt and we have improved well in many different areas. There is still things we can still improve though, such as practicing colour corrector in 'Final Cut Pro', before I feel that we can undergo our final task.

The Script- For the first time

For our second one minute recreation, me and Ben decided on recreating part of The Scripts 'For the first time' video; here's the original official music video:





We decided to recreate the first minute of the video as this was the easiest, and most 'accessible', part of the video to film.
After taking into consideration the results of our recent survey into audience's view on music, we had decided that recreating a video of 'The Script' would be best to match the appeal of the majority of audience.

There were many different techniques used in the music video that we felt would be a good challenge for us to recreate, and shots that we felt would further develop our cinematography and editing skills. In recreating this video, it was the ideal task for us to prepare for our final music video.

Furthermore, throughout the video, there are many different scenes in which a black and white contrast is used to create a more dramatic emotion, this was something which we felt would be ideal to emulate and learn how to use well, so that in our final video we could use to create an ideal effect to match the emotions of the video. For example;






 

Monday 12 November 2012

One minute extract- Daphne and Celeste- Ooh stick you- evaluation

The original (From 0.32 seconds - 1.32 minutes);

Compared to ours;





As you can tell, this isn't the best extract we hope to make but here is how I feel we faired when looking at Cinematography, Editing, and Mise-en-scene;

Cinematography
We did our best to make sure the shots in both ours and the actual video were similar, but this was obviously hard to do so as we couldn't copy the exact surroundings and so we tried to find the closest background possible.
We also could not remake the exact costumes used by the people in the video (as is clearly displayed by Ben's wig), and so altered one shot in particular in order to remake just the bottom corner of the shot, in which Daphne and Celeste are involved, as opposed to the dancer in the centre screen.






Editing
Our editing was very basic and simple, there were no video transitions or filters that needed using in order to match the original video, and so the only minor problem we faced was to match the timing of our shots to match those in the video.

Mise-en-scene
There were a few props that we needed to use when recreating the video, although we didn't quite match those used in the real footage. Firstly, the wig Ben used was the closest thing we had to match him to the image of the girls, and so, thanks to limited resources, he looked nothing like either of them. Mise-en-scene was arguably the worst part of our recreation as almost all of our props and costumes were wrong in comparision to the actual video. This is something we will most definitely put more effort into during future filming.



                                                                      Not the best of similarities.....






Thursday 11 October 2012

Survey for my target audience

I have produced a quick survey including relevant questions in order to allow me to gain a good view of which my audiences favoured appeal of music is.

How often do you listen to music?
1. Every day        2. Most days        3. Occassionaly       4. Rarely        5. Never

What is your favourite genre of music?
1. Rock        2. Pop        3. Hip Hop        4. House        5. Other

Do you prefer to listen to music on;
1. A music video        2. Audio        3. Other

Thursday 6 September 2012

Questionnaire and answers for Band name

Question 1
What is your favourite genre of music?

Rap          Rock          Indie          Classic          Pop          Other


Question 2
What is your favourite current existing band name?


Question 3
Which band name do you think would best be suited for us?

Shaolin Monks          Future Peers          Burritto Dorito          Degeneration Ben          Doggy Dogs





After gathering much information and getting people to answer our questionnaire, here are the following answers we obtained:

Q1:     Pop x8
           Rock x6
           Indie x3
           Other x2
           Classic x1
           Rap x0

Q2:     Coldplay x9
           Script x4
           Muse x1
           Crush 40 x1
           40 years long x1
           Spector x1
           Killers x1
           Arctic monkeys x1
           JLS x1

Q3:     Burritto Dorito x8
           Future Peers x5
           Doggy Dogs x4
           Degeneration Ben x2
           Shaolin Monks x1


So, in conclusion, we have decided to go with the band name; Burritto Dorito

Band Info

Today me and Ben came up with a few possible band names (some of which we quickly ruled out!), and posed a questionnaire to a number of people in order to gain the best band name for us.

Initial names:
Shaolin Monks
Scroogeballs
Dino Saws
Cool Kids
Burritos
Dorito Burrito's
Future Peers
Degeneration Ben
Team Radical
Lady boys
Doggy Dogs

The songs with a line through them were those that we decided not to choose

Tuesday 19 June 2012

New Blog!

This is now my new blog which I will be updating with all my new A2 studies and coursework for Media!