Account of Music Video Shoot

The band

Sam - lead singer

Joey - bassist

Jannis - lead guitarist
Jesse - drummer

 As mentioned below, the first thing I’ve done before our Preliminary Music Video Shoot was researching some other videos of bands that have a similar style to ‘Acres Of Life’ such as Tokio Hotel, Sum 41, Bless the Fall. I was inspired by certain shot choices that were used in their clips (examples in the post below ‘1. Research’)

     

 

The day of the shoot began with us students meeting in the Edit Suite and then going to the studio where we met the band and actually immediately got ready to shoot.

As we prepared all our shots we wanted to take in form of a timeline, writing down at what point in the music we want what shot and for how many seconds.

We thought about a very simple set ‘keeping it real’ and seeing all the instruments cables and wires and equipment to create a tough image and that this band just comes from garage rehearsals but is going to make it big!

+Timeline

Shots

My group and I thought about a lot of different shots and when it then finally was our turn to take over the camera, it was harder as I thought to get effective but interesting shots. Because we only had 25 minutes time to fill 59 seconds of the song we had to just get some basic shots such as CUs and WSs and then we could experiment a bit more. That was what I though the biggest difficulty – the time pressure.

Except for a high angle CU on the lead singer that we thought would have looked really cool and a low angle on the boys’ feet jumping around – we got all the shots we wanted and had enough footage to edit and cut interestingly together.

I think next time we all know that we have to plan a bit more realistic and don’t take complicated shots and camera movements too easy.

 

Location
Using the studio as location had its advantages, for example we had all the equipment available close to us and an efficient lighting because it was artificial and we didn’t have to hope for good weather or sunlight or anything like that. The lighting was quite low key and enhanced the punky image of the band. On the other side it was quite a small space and I was quite relieved as I was in the last group and everyone else already went to the Editing. Also, at some points we had to move around the band members to get everyone into the shot and in one shot the lead singer Sam covers the drummer which I saw too late.

 

Post production
In the post production process, again, we were very pressured with the time and we only had 1 hour to edit. I thought that it would have been difficult to match the sequences with the song but it was easier than I expected as we just deleted the live recorded sound track on the footage and used one playback track that accompanied the whole edited together section of the song.

The section of the song my group had was the last bit and had two extremes – a very calm section and a very chaotic and loud section. So we chose to start with a lot of Close Ups on the singer and then increase the pace by cutting from CUs on instrument to the next one and the next one to convey a crazy finale of the song.

My Group
We were 5 members in my group and were swopping the jobs of director, cinematographer, sound technician. I’d say I operated the camera most of the time but also directed. I like doing both because I like to take over responsibility. I'm not really good with all the technique involved in a digital camera but I still find it really interesting to learn a bit about it.

Evaluation
I think that we were a quite effective team but some member contributed more ideas to the whole prject than others. But better than having an argument because everyone wants it just the way he or she thinks its the right way! We pretty much always agreed eachother and had same opinions. Also in the editing progress we almsots all gave our ideas constantly and worked together, so when we ran out of time we were pretty much finished, but we had to still finish it completely. But as only I had time to do it, I ended up finishing it by myself but I didn't mind!

Overall, I am very happy and satisfied with the result ! Even though we were different groups shooting and editing different sections of the song and then just putting them together, the video as a whole did not look patchy or something, as a viewer you could not tell that it was made by different teams! This is I think a very good achievement of which we can be proud of as a Media class! Also I think that we all were very concentrated and really wanted to get this music video done as professional as possible.
But the most important - Is the band happy with their video??
I heard that they were very pleased and thought that we acted very professional.
Feedback by 'Acres Of Life' will follow....

Thanks Guys! X