Planning

When starting off planning for our music video we were given the task of first finding a song that was not in the mainstream market. After going through my Ipod I found some suitable bands such as Electric Eel Shock and Fei Comodo, Gareth also looked through his music collection and said that he has recently been listening to the band Broadway and said that no one he knew had really heard of them, and because I listen to a lot of bands in the Pop/Rock genre and had not heard of them either I thought that they would be good to use. After listening to a few of their songs Gareth suggested that the song "Prom queen has no friends" sounded like a good song and I agreed 100% with him. It was important to pick a song that we both liked as we would be hearing it over and over again for the coming weeks. After listening to it a few more times we started to brainstorm a few ideas of what we wanted to the video to contain.

We gathered research for our project by studying different music video's and the certain aspects from video's we wanted to incorporate into our piece. Most music videos incorporate moving camera throughout the video, but ours uses stationary camera for the majority of the band footage. We did this to ensure we got enough shots of each member of the band, as well as the band as a whole. We believed it to be of high importance to include a substantial amount of the band as this is one of the expectations of the record label. From the majority of the research done we found that the camera was constantly moving when shooting the band, however we did find exceptions to the rule where the camera was stationary in shots of the band. An example of this is Funeral Thirst by The Black Dahlia Murder. Therefore it can be said that we challenged the conventions of music videos to a degree, but the way it has been challenged has been done successfully prior to our video so we could see that it would be safe to do so

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBHNiebX2Mo


To gain research of what people expected to find and also wanted to find in a music video we set up a questionnaire. We put this questionnaire on Facebook and these are some examples of answers we gathered.



The main aim of the questionnaire was to find out what people like to see in their music video's, In conclusion with the results we found out that around 61% prefer to watch music videos involving the artist performance and a storyline


After deciding that we wanted to put both storyline and performance into the video we had to think of the storyline. Me and Gareth again brainstormed some ideas and studied the lyrics to the song and came up with the plan to show a rocky relationship between a couple. We felt that this storyline would link to the song very easily, we planned that we could tie in lyrics such as "and just walk away" and "how do we get so close to resolution and just give up suddenly" with the visuals of the couple fighting and making up again.

CAST

We decided from the outset that Gareth would be playing the lead role in the storyline of the video, we decided to stick with the roles from previous video's that we had made with me working the video camera and him playing the lead role.



With the plan for the storyline of our video in place we needed a female character to play Gareth's love interest. We talked through a number of possible candidates and decided to ask Georgia, we knew that she had some experience in the acting field as she had appeared in a number of plays and studied drama at school for a couple of years.



We then needed to make a band to perform in the video:

For the role of lead singer we needed someone that would have a lot of confidence in what they do and would be able to learn all the words to the song easily so that there would be no issues to do with syncing the visuals and singing in the song. We thought that Ryan would be ideal because he loves his music and he fits the image perfectly, with a number of piercings and the dress sense of someone that is in a rock band.




James always stood out as being an ideal candidate for the role of guitarist for the band, he had all his own equipment and had listened to the song before, and we knew it would not take him very long to learn how to play the song. We needed to someone who was very capable with the guitar as we needed insert shots of difficult techniques like finger tapping and sweep picking.



For the spot of drummer we again needed someone who was very capable on their instrument, for the drums we needed someone who was confident with playing double bass pedal parts and was good with drum fills. We had two candidates for this slot, Chris and Connor but decided to go with Connor as he lived very close to me and did not have a job at the time where as Chris did. He also fit the stereotype image of a Rock performer with the suitable clothing and some piercings.



Josh had previously been in a band with both Gareth and Connor so he was the best candidate for the role of bass player for our project. He learnt the song in a short space of time and has all his own equipment to bring up for the shoot. He was also the only member of the cast who could drive so he came in handy for taking the gear up to the shoot.



The next stage was to create an animatic to show what our video would contain. We draw shots of the band and the storyline scenes as well as insert shots of important features that we felt should be included in the finished video such as skilled pieces of musicianship by the band and facial expressions from the characters in the narative sequence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCuiMc7B-Lg