Video Commentry Transcipt

Part 1-
Naomi : Hi Im Naomi

Marianne: Im Marianne

Naomi: And we are the production tram of high up in the sky by the cajun dance party.

Marianne: A Valley Girls Production

Naomi: Before we started filming and planning we had to do a lot of research of the genre of which the video was from, which was actually indie. So we looked at a lot of their videos and got a feel for them. Where we thought about costume, props and locations so we thought about a lot of fields and urban kind of areas - which were used in our video.

Marianne: yeah we because it was cajun dance party who we choose the song from and a lot of their videos were in fields or running around. So we wanted to do something like that.

Naomi: So we looked at the femal vocalist, who always wears a ball gawn - keeping it quite casual and quite young so we teamed the dress up with converses - which was quite contrasted.

Marianne: Yer we thought it would look quite good, that kind of look.

Naomi: And for the male we had him wear quite a smart outfit - but still keeping it looking quite young. We presented a lot of our research on our blog which shows how a lot of our ideas came together.

Marianne: and we showed a lot of our general first ideas.

Naomi: It showed how much our ideas changed due to like problems.

Marianne: Our first ones wernt that good - so we just had to take that, change it and build it up to better ideas and come to a conclusion.

Naomi: And of course new media technologies made it such a better music video than what it could be - because we used a lot of fades and because our syncing was a little bit out it took us alot of editing and time to get it to as good as we could get it.

Marianne: That was because of a problem we had when we was filming as we didnt have the song with us so I just had to remember what it was and try and sing it to the beat. So we had to be precise.

Naomi: So we had to speed things up and slow parts down - we even had parts where no one was singing.

Marianne: We had to cut bits out.

Naomi: which led us to not have a lot of shots of the male vocalist; so its a lot about the girl really as it was easy to refilm if we needed to.

Marianne: We wanted to like use a plot that would be a quite big representation in our video, so we decided to use an multi-coloured umbrella. Which we used a lot either holding it up or just walking along with it - but it was always there - as our main prop.

Naomi: It was something we could link the three products together with, so you could immeditaly tell that it was a Cajun Dance Party theme - like it was apart of them. So we got this idea from a previous picture that was taken on them which was in an urban city and had this big umbrella and we immeditaly thought that was something we would like to use to link our products together.

Marianne: Final cut obviously we used to edit our video, but we also used photoshop so that we could (because we had to make an magazine cover) so we used that to change - because at first we took photos and once we had them on the computer we changed the colors , brightness of it.

Naomi: We gave it effects as if it had been drawn . Unfortuently we didnt have time to finish our poster because it was quite a rushed course and we just run out of time and had some absceneses of the group and we just spent quite a lot of time on the DVD cover.

Marianne: Yeah we was more pleased with the DVD cover. As we had more time to think about what looked good - at first we had one picture of me on the front but then we thought it looked a little too different from the back, because we liked the back quite a lot with the umbrella, so we made the front better; so we had three photos of me but they were all differently edited; so one was darker then we other and then it got lighter.

Part 2-
Naomi: What made our music video come together was obviously the Darwin conventions. One of them of which was notions of looking where we looked at genre conventions - basically when we looked at all the videos we looked at what was expected of and it was with young people and were always wearing what young people would wear today (quite preppy) and its all just quite innocent and young and upbeat.

Marianne: I think thats what we wanted to get across , like a lot of indie videos have the band and a lot of close ups of them singing but we thought that the song wasnt a rock type it was more about telling a story - so we just had a lot like focusing on the person singing and trying to tell a story.

Naomi: Also, a lot of indie videos the vocalist is directly singing at the camera so we wanted to make sure that the audience felt they had a conncetion with the song and felt invloed with - so we had a lot of shots where the singer was singing straight to the camera (making it quite direct and personal) - as it is about love which is something that a lot of people experience. Interxtuality is what are the genre conventions, and here we focused on making sure there was a strong narrative - so we had to make sure we linked the music video well with the lyrics; which was about finding love. We also made sure we had a lot of shots direct with the camera because this was quite common in indie music videos and its quite personal and natural - its not staged, it seems like its true life. The indie music genre had quite a lot of bright colors, big ball gawns, suits like quite a lot of formal wear but still looked quite young/casual. So we made sure we came up with an outfit that was quite obvious to indie audiences. So that they would know that it was an indie music video.

Naomi: In a lot of The Cajun Dance Party’s music videos a lot of nature locations and open fields are used, so we made sure we used places like this. We wanted to make sure we had a lot of different shots, to make it effective and keeps it appealing to our audience. Otherwise you would get quite bored after a couple of minutes of it. We made sure we went out to lot of different locations and got enough shots.

Marianne: Thirdly another convention of Goodwin is Music and visuals. We wanted to relate to the lyrics in the song so we wanted a location to fit ‘walking up the hill’, so we went to castle hill, which I thought would be a good place to shoot. We wanted to get a lot of different shots of the sky because that is one of the main things said in the song, ‘High up in the sky’. I think one of our strongest shot was the end shot when me and josh were sitting on a punt and then the camera zooms up into the sky. It was a good closing shot.

Sian: Hi, I’m Sian and I will be doing the voice over. ‘Walking up the hill’ is a frequently used lyric in the song, so we felt it was a key element to have a variety of shots of our vocalists walking up the hill. We also thought about the location, relating the surrounding to the lyrics. For example the ‘city, gritty, shadow’, so we had backgrounds of cities to relate to this. We then had Marianne and josh walking up the hill together.

Part 3-
Naomi: we had some shots in such open environments, and then we would be in a city in the middle of busy people.

Marianne: they both went well together though, having the town and then shots of the country.
Naomi: to make it more interesting, when the beat gets faster we wanted something that was also faster and more exciting.

Marianne: we used different tempos, so we sped up the bits where it was faster. When we were standing in the city, with people rushing by, we sped this up. Also running, we had a shot of just the feet and sped this up, so it look faster

Naomi: we also though carefully about colours. We used the colours of the umbrella, to be used on our DVD cover and though carefully about font. We had it quite messy and teenage.

Marianne: In quite a stylish way.

Naomi: so it wasn’t rough but at the same time it matched the outfits they wore. It was formal, but at the same time casual.

Marianne: the feedback we got from our rough cut

Naomi: was quite positive, but we still got enough to work with to make it a better music video. A lot of people said that we represented the indie genre well, just by costume and location. People noticed that this is what you expect to see in a professional Indie music video.
People also said how we had good visual lyric links. This is probably because we had the hill and we had a lot of shots of views. We were told that maybe we need more sky shots, so then we went out again and got a few more shots were you would see the sky in the background. We didn’t just get plain shots of the sky as this wouldn’t be appealing to the audience, but we tried to do it in a way that it still link well, but wasn’t to obvious.

Marianne: They also said we needed a few more close-ups of either singing or a face for the close up because we only had a few at the beginning but we did manage to go out again and film some more.

Naomi: Which was also good because a lot of indie music videos do have direct links with their audience, so looks as if the vocalist is singing to you, like talking to you about the issue.

Marianne: We were down on midsummer common and thought it would be good to have a birds eye view of me standing underneath the bridge, so we went on the bridge and had the camera literally looking down and actually quite a lot of people recognized this and thought it was really good shot.

Naomi: I think also a good shot as well was a close up of the converses which is showing it is an indie video and representing indie outfits and a lot of people were impressed by it and we were told to do some more but because of timing issues we couldn't really go back to the set and do that shot again.

Sian: The umbrella was a key feature in our video and this is seen in our ancillary products.

Marianne: We did have to improve our synching because at first it kept going out of place and we would have to change it again but i think it did work in the end, but it was a problem that we had, probably more than other group's as ours had a lot of singing to the camera so had to make it work.

Naomi: A lot of the male vocalist we had to we had to just remove as we would have lost more marks having it there, than having it out of sink, so taking it out and putting in a completely different shot, we had to do that in quite a lot of situations but where it is now it's still not 100% perfect but its much better than what it was before.

Marianne: In a lot of shots i looked a lot brighter, as i had a bright pink dress on so in Josh's scenes he looked a bit dark, so we wanted to just change that so we used filters to make that brighter in quite a lot of shots.

Naomi: We also made the umbrella a lot brighter than what it was before because this is like our key element and was a link to all our products together so had to make sure it properly stood out, because our shots were under trees and was quite a gloomy day so had to make sure we used filters, this was a part of our feedback from our teacher who said it would be a good thing to do.

Marianne: In our pitch we said we quite liked that song and wanted to get across we could make quite a good music video, so we came up with quite a lot of good ideas, where we set it, who would be in it, straight away we were thinking about these things.

Naomi: It became quite natural, we got loads of ideas straight away and were told we had a good idea for the contrasting outfits and locations and making it more interesting really and were told to make a list of props and costumes to make sure we can finalise and have everything there.

Marianne: Straight away people saw we did have quite good ideas for what we wanted to do which was pleasing.

Naomi: We were also told that in our pitch we made it obvious we had a good link to all our products and to be obvious to our audience that they were all in one product together.

Marianne: Hopefully you found this useful, that we actually did quite a lot to produce this video.

Naomi: To get it to the standard that we have, and had a lot of problems, like where to do the filming, did effect a lot of things but i think we pulled out well.

Marianne: I actually had quite a good time filming it.

Naomi: Editing is what made it what it is so just hopefully you enjoy it and you enjoyed this as well.

Marianne: Cheers, bye.