Preliminary Task

Task Outline:
For our preliminary task we had to recreate a music video for the song 'I knew you was waiting' by George Michael. My partnership was made up of myself and Laura-Jo, we chose not to look at the original music video as we thought we may get influenced and we wanted to go on our instances and see what we felt what would be suitable for the song. To complete our task we both had to carry out miming, filming, directing and editing.


Planning:

After being given our track, we then went onto coming up with different ideas which we thought would go well with the music for our filming. We decided the best way which would portray our ideas was through a mind map, this is shown on the left hand side, we both found this worked as it enabled us both to jot down ideas and then from that we was able to discus these ideas and work on the ones we liked.






Location:

For our location we came up with many places with we thought would be ideal for our filming such as, a dance studio, school hall, and a class room, sports hall, on a street and in a bedroom. We had to take into consideration where we would be able to get at such short notice as we planned to film on Wednesday 3^rdJuly. We resulted in the sports hall at our school as we thought that it would be ideal and a great place to film a music video as it was an open space and would be ideal for dancing, we then went onto remember that upstairs in the sports hall there was a mirror along one of the walls after that we then got convinced that it would be appropriate for filming as we could learn a lot about where we would position the camera and we could learn from mistakes.


Mise-en Scene:

After deciding that we wanted to do a dance music video we then went onto to consider what style of dancing would be suitable for the track we had been given. After noticing it had some upbeat sections in it we then thought we could dress more 80’s than any other era. So for costume we decided to dress in the sporty feel of the 80’s era for instance things such as, bright coloured leg warmers, leggings, leotards and sweat bands. As our basic idea for our music video was to do some kind of exercise in a dance studio of some sort we thought props could help the music video be more of a success. The props we used were a skipping rope, weights and a hula hoop.


Filming:

Filming our prelim task consisted of several hours one night after college. We started off from the beginning of the track by what we had planned to do which was to do a MS of my partner Laura-Jo from behind looking into the mirror using the weights. Next as the track progressed we then went onto doing a pan camera shot of myself skipping through the room, we thought this would be good as it went with the track as it progressed to more of a upbeat rhythm. We then took a minute and sat aside and went through the footage and realized that it was too dark in the room as there was little lighting and we thought the footage wasn't good enough. From that we decided to then change our idea and thought we should start the music video by us both walking in together towards the weights by doing a pan shot.

Next we then went onto filming our individual parts which we filmed for one and other. At the start of the filming of Laura-Jo's part she felt not very confident in front of the camera but then after repeatedly doing it over and over again she later got into her role. After that was my single part of the track which Laura-Jo filmed? At the start of my filming I struggled to remember the words to I had to keep looking at the lyrics whilst recording which another problem we faced was. Finally we moved onto our final section of the music video which was both of us on the floor doing some sort of exercise whilst lip syncing. After this we had finished all the filming we needed to, we then preceded onto editing.

Editing:

For the editing process from the beginning we faced a problem. As we tried to import our videos onto the editing software it wouldn't work, this then delayed our timeline and set us back which were disappointing. After conquering the problem we then went onto putting our videos into the correct order and deleting footage which was not needed. The editing process was hard at first because we didn't delete shots that weren't good on the camera before we uploaded them; this meant we had to go through all the shots we had collected to find the correct pieces for our segment. After that we then realized that in my section of filming I didn't actually like it, so we made the decision that we would cut it in half and use another bit of footage for the end part as I thought it was better, thankfully this worked out and it felt more confident and happy with our video. After putting all our footage in the correct order and carefully cutting our footage to make it fit in time with the track we had to then continuously go through our music video to make sure it was exactly timed with the track itself, I think this was the hardest job we faced as we had done nothing like it before but in the end we was happy.

Final Product:

This is mine and Laura-Jo's final product...


Conclusion:
Overall I really enjoyed producing our Preliminary task as I thought we not only had a lot of fun but we learnt a lot and we now have a lot of matters which can help us improve for our final product. Laura-Jo and I worked really well together and we thought in the end our final piece was a success and we thought our ideas worked really well. But from looking back at our process we obviously have improvement which we would do if we had the chance to do it over again. One improvement is at some parts in our music video there our lip syncing was slighting out of the rhythm to the track, although it was our first time of doing lip syncing we would suggest for the future to try to over exaggerate the mouthing of the singing a then when you come to editing you are able to notice what the person is singing as we found this hard whilst we was editing.

Also at the beginning of our video you can still hear the back ground noise of when we had filmed it which unfortunately was a teacher shouting  which is disappointing as it is not at any other point during the video. So when it comes to me making my own Music Video i want to make sure i have already planned and prepared for filming so i know what I'm doing therefore my music video will turn out more professional.

My Contribution:

On the left is the part of our music which I filmed by myself, this is the part when Laura-Jo is doing her individual part. If i would to have done this again i think i would have done some zooming in toward her lip to make it much more eye catching. But overall i find this part of the filming worked well. With editing we both tried to input our ideas into the whole of the sequence so we didn't end up spilling the sequence in half to do separately so we just did it together and took it in turns.