Bugsy Malone

See video here.

This is one inspiration we had for our music video. We would like to have jazz instruments playing at our scene if possible. I know we can get a few of these from Coleridge and I know a saxaphone player as well. I'm sure the rest of the crew/class could help us to bring everything to the location. The main point of using this video however, is the theme of Bugsy Malone where children are everywhere, so in that case the children/teenagers in our case would be allowed into the club.

Locations

Here is a list of possible locations for our music video, I will add to this post later as our grou thinks of new places we could shoot. This is the main problem of our music video idea, is that we don't actually have a Jazz club, and so we're going to have to make our own.

• Long Road media studies black room
• The Romsey Labour Club (Mill Rd, Cambridge CB1 3NL, UK)
  
• The Man on the Moon (01223 364 840) (2 Norfolk Street, Cambridge CB1 2LF)
• The Junction

DVNO Original

Here's another video which can't be embedded, but it's here. I decided to put this on my blog as it shows the original video for the DVNO song, and it looks really effective. Essentially it's just a lot of idents put together to show lyrics of a song. I believe it's called Typography when the lyrics show up on screen along with the music. There's also another example of this here, I really like this style of music video as it's so visually interesting.

DVNO Hurtwood House

Yesterday we looked at this video from Hurtwood House media. They've got previous videos from the project that we're doing now. What makes this video effective is:

• The convincing performance of everyone in the video, including the dancers.
• The lighting of the video.
• Fast paced cutting, different camera angles and editing styles.
• Costumes- Continuity in the theme of the face paint masks.

We also had a discussion in class about how we could recreate this video. The lighting can be done in a number of ways, but the best low budget way I think would to be to get a large light and put black card over it, then cutting out the shapes of the letters into the card.

For the tubes we could just find tubes and tie them together, use a flashlight to light them and reverse the camera a few times.

For the location we'd use the long road black room. The makeup would be easy to find and apply, we'd get the dance costumes from Primark and the sailor outfit from the army navy stores or a costume place. A few people in class have decks, and we'd get auditions for actors to make a convincing performance.

Chipmunk inspiration

Embedding has been disabled for the video, but you can watch it here.

When my group first pitched their new idea to me, and then showed me this video, I thought it was pretty much exactly copying it. For example it is going to be set in a Jazz bar, girls are getting ready to perform, a man walks into the bar with a few friends all dressed in suits, and the girls come onto stage and start flirting with them.

Now we have added a few extra details. Such as the costumes for the girls will be sequin based, there will be jazz instruments on stage as well as dancers, and we may decide to only have teenagers for actors.

Mood Board

This is the mood board we created for the Wicked Little Girls song. It helped us refine our ideas. As we couldn't use the feathers for the postcard we decided to use them falling down the mood board to make it more visually interesting. I think this really shows the train of thought from our group. We began with the whole corsets teasing thing, which we have now decided is too sexual for our purpose, and then we thought about the puppet idea. At this stage we hadn't yet thought of the Jazz club idea.

We got most of these images from google image search.

Postcard

Below is a postcard we created using a picture of the artist (Esthero) which we found on her myspace account. We played around with this image a lot, using different filters and trying out a falling petal or a falling feather effect but we couldn't quite make that work. We ended up just applying one filter and selecting the blackness of her eyes with the magic want ool and using a brush to make them darker. I like this effect as it really highlighted the eyelashes and left a few speckles, which makes her look more glamorous.

Wicked Little Girls- Lyrics

Wicked little girls, kissed the boys and made them cry
Raisin' double trouble every time we pass them by
And some might say we're wicked little girls
With curves and kissers and pearly whites
You better keep an eye on your boys and lock em up tight

You think that I'm a lady? You think that I won't fight?
I'll make your eyes shine like a liliqoi moonlit night whoa oh
You think you're my one and only, only?
Sophisticated Yoni told me:
"You gots to love livin' while you livin' or you won't love life"

I'm the high pimpstress, I'm honeybrown
I'm the baddest bitch to ever hit this town
Cornbread woman, yo ho and a bottle of yum
I'm gonna have a party with my body, do ya wanna come?
Well alright

Cause we're such wicked little girls, kissed the boys and made them cry
Raisin' double trouble every time we pass them by
And some might say we're wicked little girls
With curves and kissers and pearly whites
You better keep an eye on your boys and lock em up tight

Hey girls, I'm back again, that vixen nobel and I brought a friend
Bend the rules, headline "bad news", it's the Sisters of Salem, they on the loose
Shakin' her caboose like Dottie, Octopussy like a James Bond hottie
Smokin' like a Cuban, when you're with Mikey Reuban, better know what you're doin'
Or get kicked out right away, gonna hide away
I'd advise you not to play with those

Wicked little girls, kissed the boys and made them cry
Raisin' double trouble every time we pass them by
And some might say we're wicked little girls
With curves and kissers and pearly whites
You better keep an eye on your boys and lock em up tight
[2x]

Here come those devils, cheeky sneaky rebels
Every day and every night, hot steppin is what we like

Wicked little girls, kissed the boys and made them cry
Raisin' double trouble every time we pass them by
Some might say we're wicked little girls
With curves and kissers and pearly whites
You better keep an eye on your boys and lock em up tight
[2x]

Chicago Inspiration

We got quite a few of our ideas to begin with from the Chicago musical. We were going to use similar costumes to them such as corsets etc. as they are not too difficult to get hold of. For example, Hannah has one as shown in this picture:

Production meeting

Today Hannah, me and Louis all had a production meeting as there were some disagreements about our ideas. This was mainly because I had been away for a few days so the plan changed of course. However, before the meeting they hadn't really explained the idea other than that it'd be in a Jazz club, and they hadn't thought of anything other than the setting. Now we know more about how to make it an interesting music video with progression, rather than just a few shots of someone on stage, which is a generic style of music video.

We have to think quickly about the location now, and go around some clubs and see if we could use it on a morning to shoot at. If not we could use one of the rooms at Coleridge or here at long road (black room), or I could get some studio rooms at Anglia Ruskin.

We were thinking of doing auditions for the roles, we would need a lot of extras and they all need to wear formal wear. However this should be okay as it's all going to be teenagers (prom settings) and we can get plenty of dresses and suits from proms.

My Treatment

The song which our group wants to do is 'Wicked Little Girls' by Esthero. The general theme of the song will be girls teasing boys, but also it's like they are giving life to them as well, as they start out as scarecrows. The first few shots will be cut aways of the girls and tickly (crow?- black) feather things they are holding, then it shows that they're in a room with scarecrows in (or maybe in a field where scarecrows live).

When one of them touches a scarecrow with the feather, laughs and starts to walk away. It comes to life and slowly stands up in a floppy way. The girls look backwards and see it is standing up (now it's a person dressed as a scarecrow in the same clothes). Then the main girl finds out she is like a puppet master and can control it with her hands.

Then the other girls wake up another two scarecrows and leads them out of the room (or around the field) to begin with they keep stumbling into each other but then suddenly the girls know how to control them and they do a choreographed dance routine. Also, the scarecrow is slowly transforming into a person, and this is shown by the face paint slowly coming off and the padded gloves get smaller and then disappear. At the very end the girls look at each other, click their fingers and they all slump to the ground and quickly turn into scarecrows again.

Our Keynote

Charna, Louis And Hannah's Wicked Little Girls Pitch

View more documents from longroadcreative.

What we thought of each of the tracks

We had about an hour to listen to each of the tracks in class, and that's not enough time to fully listen to them all as there is an hour and a half's worth of music and we also had to talk about them. We did hear the beginning of all of them and we narrowed it down to four as we were asked.

What we thought about all of the tracks at first glance:

Everywhere- We really like this track and can instantly come up with a simple idea for it.

Breathe- By the same artist as Everywhere but not as good. As a result we don't think we'll use this one.

1234- This is one of th tracks we all recognise, and it's quite a nice tune. We put it as one of the maybe's for our video, as it's a simple melody and easy to do.

Wicked Little Girls- We love it, we can see what we'd do with it, very upbeat and possible dance routines is what we were looking for.

Lets go surfing- It's more of a beach song, which would be expensive and also it's not summer at the moment.

Cigarettes in the theatre- A little over the top, it would give us a headache listening to this song over 50 times whilst preparing our video, so we chose not to do this one.

Somehting good can work- This is a posibility, not to difficult to do an indie brit-pop video just include british iconography. It's also upbeat for a dance routine.

Every minute every hour- Not our style, we didn't want to make a boyband video as we haven't seen many examples and would have to spend a lot of time researching them.

The hardest part of breaking up- See above, boyband thing.

Number one enemy- I thought this song would get too repetative, but the others in my group loved it, so we put it down as one of our possibilities. Louis really would like to act as Chipmonk and we came up ith an idea.

Mansion in the sky- Quite a lot we could do with this track, simple riff and easy to lipsync to. We put this as a maybe.

Strange times- We would end up just filming a live performance style band like we did with my generation, and we want our video to go further than that. Very repetative throughout the tract.

Margarita- A strange song.. Not sure what to make of it.

Stars above us- Could make a dance routine from this, very upbeat. A little cheesy. A lot of visual lyrics to adapt.

It doesn't have to be beautiful- We liked this song, it's sweet and upbeat. We put a little smiley face on it by the list. (we were organising them quickly using emoticons nect to our list).

Honeybears- We didn't like this much, OTT.

No social- We thought of doing something with special effects for this track, or with LED lights.

What did he say- Not easy to dance to, and we wanted to do some kind of routine. A little too slow.

I'm good I'm gone- repetative, but had progression. We put this in our pile of maybes.

Lovesick- Funky, nice for dances. Couldn't think of a setting we'd use, but maybe we could work something out for this. Liking the effects on the voice.

You've no clue do you- Meh, too repetative and no ideas for this track. Needs to be striking.

Feel the love- We looked at the lyrics and like them and what we could do with them, but it's so repetative and slow it's not quite working out.

Shadows- I really like this song, has amasing lyrics and, though it has a slow tempo we could use the lily allen effect I talked about before very easily. I did have an instant idea but my group didn't feel like it was worth competing with the other groups for.

Summertime Clothes- Long song which is hard to cut down to 2-3 minutes. could dance to it but takes a while to progress so would have to build it up very slowly.

Lie- Don't like the instrumentation not easy to get them all for our video. Also we have found many more we like better already.

You'll disappear- Slow progression, long song.. Funky, could work with it.

'My Generation'

This is my edit of the 'My Generation' video. For this task I used Final Cut and applied the same technique as I did with the other lipsynch task with the two girls in the barn. For this task it seemed a slot esier to synch the songs because there are pips/ bleeps in each of the recordings and also in the actual song. I have left them in this video so that when I watch it back I am reminded of how to make it.

One technical problem we had was that the film was slightly stretched so it slowly became out of sync, therefore we could only edit around 30 seconds before needing to readjust the video to fit the audio. Hopefully this problem will get resolved by the time we get to record the real thing otherwise it'll take much longer than it needs to.

Finally, as we were told to personalise our videos, I added an intro wave pattern from my shapes video and then made a quick animation using the pen tool in photoshop and exporting those frames.

Yasmine's presentation

Today Jasmine, the winner of the 2007 BBC blast competition with her A level music video, came to talk to us about how she made it. it was helpful to hear her talk about her music video as she must have put so much effort onto it and she told us the differences between the experiences of directing the BBC blast music video and doing her own. The main thing she saw was that in the BBC blast video, everybody stuck to their roles, as each person was a professional in their area. As a result she had to find a way to communicate as a director to show what she wanted. It also meant that she couldn't criticize the editing of the video, which she wanted to be more upbeat. She also had to make a lot of decisions on the spot when people came to her for advice so there was a lot of pressure on her.

Here is the A level music video she created with a group of 5 girls:


Here is the BBC blast video she made with £3000 and a crew of professional music video creators: at the black dog company:


She had to do a lot of Pre-Production work for this video. Firstly she had to create a treatment. This was a rough version of the ideas she had. She told us not to go into detail on all the camera shots in particular, but to describe in brief the storyline and the mood you'd like the video to have. Also to give references on exactly what you want in the video. For example, not just 'a boy' but more like 'a boy wearing this exact shirt and who is 12 years old. Or not just 'an inflateable toy' but gives references to which toy exactly. She describes the treatment like a 'paper version' of a music video.

Here is her treatment:




She also made a more detailed shotlist to outline her ideas. This had to be updated 4 or 5 time until the final was made, but it's all a part of the process of refining the ideas.

Here is her shotlist:

Tracklist

At last we have been put into groups and have begun to think about our music videos. I am with Louis and Hannah for this project, and today we have looked at what songs we'd like to make a music video for and why.

Apparently we should narrow them down to three or four that we like best so that we can make treatments for all of them and if another group chooses our song to do as well, we wil have to compete with them.

Here is the tracklist:

Personal Statement

Technical Skills

• I have learnt to use equipment such as the HD and DV cameras and Apple Mac software
• Better at using Photoshop and Final Cut now since the start of the year.
• Know basic editing skills.
• Learnt to use music programs in Music GCSE

Creativity

• Can animate in stop motion or 3d.
• Use greenscreen.
• Did art GCSE and got 2 C's.

Organisation Skills

• Keep up with the blog.
• Feed snake every week though it doesn't have a hungry face.
• Went to work experience and organised locusts.

Special Powers

• Hula hoop
• Animation
• Contacts at coleridge (get instruments or borrow art)
• More contacts at coleridge (get a lot of kids to act in videos) and can put posters up there for auditions.

Another Video

I was looking at some music videos last night and found this one by Lily Allen. Embedding has been disabled so here's the link. I saw the 'behind the scenes' video and found it quite interesting that not only does she lipsynch but to create a subtle flowy speed effect, she does so in high speed.

I think I might use this in my music video depending on the genre we choose and if it's suitable. I think that changing the pace of the video in this way is a very effective way of keeping the audience interested.

Shapes music video

As I wasn't there for the beginning of the shapes video lesson which the rest of the class did early last week, and we were given time today to catch up, I decided to finish it.

I created layers in Photoshop using the default paintbrushes (see below for one example, because they now look different due to filters). Then I exported each layer (including the background black layer) as a .jpg into a file, and then put them into Final Cut with a song we were given to use.

In Final Cut, I imported each image into the same layer in order except for the two circles which I made. I decided to make these come in over the top of the other background layers to make my video more dynamic. To the first half of the background layers, I added the effect 'ripple', to the second half I added 'pond ripple', and to the circles I added both 'ripple' and 'scrape' all of which are in the 'distort' submenu in filters. To the circles I wanted to make them look like they are dripping as a new sound comes in, so I added keyframes to move it across the screen as well.

Ancillary task for Robots in Disguise

Last week we were given a practice Ancillary Task to prepare us for the real one and practice the basic format and conventions.

This is the Magazine cover

This is the inside of the Digipak

This is the outside of the digipak- The front on the right and the back to the left.

My Generation recording

Today we were given the task to get ourselves into different roles in order to create a group lipsynch video. As I have contacts in Coleridge I was given the role of Production Designer. Steve turned up with two cardboard instruments for us to use, but by the time we began the production we had a drama studio, a piece of art for the background and a full set of musical instruments. I got the props from the teachers I know and they've told me I can borrow them for any project, and Steve managed to talk to Mr.Jones and found out that the drama studio is free on Fridays. So luckily I think we ended up with some good quality footage.

I also ended up working the CD player because the person who had that role left it and I had already done the first role so I took over.

To make a successful music video

Today we made notes on what a good music video needs to have thought about, and if it doesn't have it it should be obviously on purpose.

- Props in the scene
- Costume
- Location
- Lighting
- Mise en scene
- Timing
- Keeping organised
- Editing
- Choreography

For our own music video projects we also need:

- Digipak
- Poster
- Convincing performers
- Lip-sync
- Planning, proof of work and evaluation on blog

Tracklist for Robots in Disguise

1. "Boys" – 5:06
2. "Postcards from..." – 4:06
3. "DIY" – 5:55
4. "Bed Scenes" – 3:51
5. "Argument" – 6:00
6. "Hi-Fi" – 3:20
7. "Mnemonic" – 3:47
8. "Transformer" – 4:10
9. "50 Minutes" – 4:21
10. "What Junior Band Did Next" – 4:18
11. "Cycle Song" – 3:51

Taken from This Wikipedia Article.

Digipak

The task today is to create a test of a conventional digipak and magazine cover, which each will get 10 marks towards the final project. The track which I have been given to do a cover for is Robots in Disguise- La Nuit. This video above is the track on youtube. The image below shows the existing CD cover for their album. The band became famous after an appearance on the TV comedy show 'The Mighty Boosh'.

Lipsinch Test

Sophie, Charna, Angelica video exercise from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Today at coleridge those of us who were away because of snow on Friday were given the task of creating a lipsinch video based on a popular song karaoke style. Me, Sophie and Angelica were put into a group. Angelica did all the performance, while me and Sophie filmed and edited the video. We were given a list of instructions on what types of camera angles we needed to include which gave the performance a lot more character than it would have had rather than in one shot. During the editing process I realised that in Final Cut we could cut all of the layers at the right place for something to be cut to the beat but not actually delete the clips. This helped us because that way we could see what the best clip would be for each line by turning layer visibility on and off and use that one.

Music video: Black Caravan

Notes about 'Black Caravan'- The Winter Kings
.Shows drummer playing guitar playing and singer singing as with a lot of bripop/ rock videos
.Fire troupe in the background-visually effective
.Costume very gothy gives the band character
.Most of the video is washed out in black and white except for the girl and the fire until the chorus comes in. Then we notice the life has come into everyone as they are energetic and we see details such as the coloured dreadlocks.
.Female is featured as a main feature, the lyrics and video draw her out as a devilish seductive character not a band member.
.There's lipsync throughout the video

Editing

Also today, we were given a few clips from a music video to edit in Final Cut to a selection of songs we were also given. We were shown all the songs at the beginning of the day so I had already chosen which one to use before we started which saved a lot of time. It was helpful that each of the names of the files gave us an idea of what was in them such as 'Shark' or 'Tiger and Shark'. I noticed most people were using those two characters a lot in their videos and then cutting straight to the main breakdancing video, which doesn't make sense because they just seem to appear in the crowd from nowhere. What I decided to do was introduce each character in turn, which meant I had to look into each clip and select ones with more obscure characters like the turtle, and then zoom into them to make it look like it's only them in the scene.

This task was mainly designed to help us remember the skills we learnt before in Final Cut. I made the video match with the beat by looking at the waveform and used slowmotion in the video at the beginning. I also added the trails effect on all the turtle clips, I reversed the film when the turtle throws his shell as if he is magically summoning it and timed the reversing with the bear so it looks like a new crazy breakdancing move.

Editing 'You Wanna What'

As a task to get us to know how to lip-sync edit using Final Cut Express, we were given a sample from a previous student's work a few years ago. We got a full length video. and two slightly overlapping parts of the song. We were also given the original audio file to match up with the footage.

To do this we hid each part of the audio in turn, and added markers to parts of the song. Then we matched the footage up and deleted the live audio once it matched. after doing this to each clip, I used the razor blade tool to cut it in time with the song. I decided not to add too many cuts because a real music video would hold a shot for a whole line at least, rather than switching shots mid word.

I took this screen grab after exporting the video: