Blog 8 - Initial Ideas

We thought it would be a good idea to film a live performance cover of the song with my band in a certain location; one of these could be a deserted, derelict garage setting off the A27, another could be on the bus and film the bus driver kicking us off the bus. This would present a natural, realistic feel to the video if the situation we are creating is not scripted. The idea is to present to the audience how it would happen in real life if a band started performing in a no musical instrument zone. This will give our video a good mix of handheld and static shots, as well as rehearsed and naturalistic looking footage.

We were also thinking of filming a large proportion of the video from a first person perspective, possibly as one long sequence to represent a first hand view of whatever we want to represent. The solid idea that all of us are happy with is the idea of getting actors to turn up and get made up as zombies. This could be filmed by our crew and would be easy enough to produce. Research that I have conducted indicates that it costs about £1.50 per zombie. The recipe is flour, syrup and blue and red food colouring. Add this to water and you get a fantastic fake blood concoction. Add this to another recipe of cornflour, water and syrup which makes it look like flesh is hanging off, and you have realistic looking zombies for a very small price.

To go through with this idea we will have to get a large number of participants to make a good looking zombie horde. I have now made a facebook event to promote the day, on the 4th of february, where lots of people will turn up to be made into zombies and run around the forest and get us some footage.

This is the screenshot of the event we have made labelled 'zombies day out'

We are also going to involve my band in the music video shoot and syncronise this with the music we are making a video for; queens of the stone age: medication.

Blog 7 - Copying An Existing Video

For our media production lessons we have been recreating the music video for 'Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag'. For these lessons I played the lead singer of the band and we reproduced the scene in the school corridor, the scene on the stairs and the scene of walking to school. The corridor scene was relatively simple, all it involved was the cameraman walking backwards to film me walking forwards in a mid shot. At the same time two syncronised bystanders walked through in the background. This had to be timed carefully and it was important to use appropriate levels of depth of field to ensure that I was in focus and the background was out of focus, but in focus enough to see the image of the two walkers. Soon after this, in the same corridor, we recreated the scene of the lead singer being shoved. We did this by using the same angle as before, using the same method of backtracking shot while 2people walked into me and one of them shoved me.

On a later date, we recreated another couple of scenes from the same video. The first of these was the shot of the lead singer asleep on the stairs, which is the establishing shot for the Teenage Dirtbag video. I played the main charecter again, so it was an easy job for me just having to lay on some stairs quite stationary. There was a lot of people in our group and this created a type of 'too many chefs spoil the broth' type of effect. This meant it was difficult to keep everybody quiet at once, and not everybody had a job. There was only the job of operating the camera, operating the clapperboard, directing and starring. We had about 8 people on the set and this prolonged the staircase filming process altogether, and produced a few dud shots. However as it is a music video, it does not matter if silence is not present. This will be the same case with our main music video project, but overall care and discipline will still be nessecary.

Editing the shots was a much more lengthy process than actually filming them. We used an Apple MacBook, with the 'Final cut pro' program. This also had a lot of people around one piece of equipment, with only one person actually able to operate it at any one time. This led to some members of the group learning nothing about editing, and none of us with any real experience of editing an entire stream of shots from start to finish.