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.

Filming and Editing Evaluation- Sian

Our filming and editing over went well, however we did have some problems on the day of shooting. One was that it was cloudy, where as we had hope it would be sunnier with more of a blue sky. We also had the lyrics to the song but we didn't have the music, meaning it was harder to remember how the song went so we have now had more problems editing and trying to make the singing in sync with the music.

We tried to stick to our storyboard and a lot of the locations are the same however we did have to change somethings such as the alleyway as we didn't have as much time as we thought but we still managed to use a small path under a bridge, which created a similar effect and we noticed this was quite dark anyways so it may have been hard to see the artist let alone see what he was singing, which is also why we used this shot but not when the male was singing as you couldn't see.

We managed to get a tall multi-coloured umbrella which was good as it is a key feature in our video and we used it in most of the scenes, which i think helps to link the female and male singing together which is what we wanted as well as the same locations, but at different times. The costumes also worked well, especially the pink prom dress with the black converse it was a good contrast and seemed to fit the song well and what josh was wearing worked also worked with the style of the video.

The editing has taken longer than we originally thought, just to make sure everything is still in the right place and in sync and there are still quite a few gaps in the video, which we think may mean we have may to re-shoot some other scenes, maybe at a different location just to give some more variety as we still have a lot of missing gaps and time in the video.

We still have a lot of editing to do as we haven't even started on the effects yet, which is also a main feature in our video and there are somethings that may need to be changed, but we have a lot of footage which has been good and it means there are lots of different scenes which is what we wanted.

We have to sort out the gaps in our video, which may mean re-shooting some shots espicially where the miming is out of sync with the music, the effects still need to be done and we need to take the audio out of our video for when we do final cut.

Inspiration and Research

This is a video by Cajun Dance Party we got some of our ideas from this video such as running through a field and animation, however are animation isn't going to be the same or as extreme. This wouldn't be a very interesting video if it wasn't for the random animation, so we have taken this style and will use more random images to help make the video more appealing to the audience. Bright colours are also going to be a main feauture in our video and the animation is this video used bright images that are also happy and child like.
Seeing as the song we are doing is by Cajun Dance Party it is important that we looked at there videos and took notice of there style as we want to portray this in the video and make sure it is right to there genre style of music.



Since we have decided to not use animation in our video any more, as we don't think they are right. We still wanted to use things such as a flower, however real ones instead of animated ones. In beyonce's video she is pulling petal of a rose but it is in reverse order this is what we are thinking of doing, when Marianne is in the field and maybe with a daisy.This video also uses black and white. We may use this in our video for different effects as we want to focus on graphics as well as a narrative to make the video more interesting. Similar to Beyonce's video as there is clearly a narrative between her being a 'Broken Hearted Girl', which we see in the video and a male also features in the video, he isn't a artist but he supposed to be someone Beyonce knows and the storyline is about romance so it is quite important that a male is shown as this fits and emphasises the point of romance and love which is what the video is about.
Not only does she have the shot of her pulling petals of a rose, but in reverse order she also has petals falling from what looks like the sky as the shot fades out and in to another one. There are various settings and costume changes in this music video, although it is mainly set at a beach and Beyonce's costume is long or floaty dresses portraying her as feminine and stylish.

Magazine Pitch

The ideas we had for making a magazine cover were that it had to be similar to the CD cover. We would have our main characters from the video at the front of the cover, behind we were going to have a picture of an estate at night time, this is because the Cajun dance party often use scenery in their photo shoots or album covers. We would use a lot of graphics to create lights and a modern effect as this is also how we want to portray the band, as individual and contemporary. The band like bright colors, but their lyrics can often be quite dark so we thought in contrast to this we would show the two main artists, who will also feature in the video in black and white and then the back round will be all bright colors and images. There will only be two members of the band in our magazine cover though as we are only using the a male and a female in our video similar to the two main people in the band the female and male vocalist.


The initial idea is that the magazine cover will be similar to this, however we would change the back and edit it, so the artists are in black and white. As you can see this is the Cajun dance party and they are dressed in an indie style with bright colors which is why we thought it is important that we incorporate this into are magazine as this would be the type of style they would like for a magazine cover.

This is the photo we edited in photo shop it isn't finish but it gives an idea of what it could look like with different effects. We liked this as well as we wanted to use lights and a night time effect and this show that, however we would have the back round as an estate and in a photo style and normal color. You would also need to see the artists faces if it is for a magazine so we like the way the artists are looking at the camera and the effects, although we would need to edited in better detail so it looks more like a magazine cover.

Music Video Pitch

Together we have chosen track 4 : "The hill, the view and the light". We have decided to choose this song because we feel we can experiment with many different ideas and have a chance to use more experimental techniques which differs from our past work, so we can challenge. This song in our opinion allows us to use graphics but can also focus on a narrative, making it hopefully a more appealing music video.

Mise en scene

Location : Were going to try many different locations as its quite a slow song so we need to maintain the audiences attention. A lot of the lyrics include references to out door locations and situations such as the weather (sun,sky), hills and a lot about walking to different locations, in this case we are planning to do a lot of tracking following around the singer focusing on her. Were going to contrast the locations to costumes for example if when in a field or estate the singer would be wearing classier clothes. Here we have written a list of different possible locations :

- Park (close up shots of her on swing)
- Woods
- Walking through estates
- In busy areas such as the city center (we were thinking to have her stood still in a crowd whilst people are rushing by her (we could use a effect to speed up all the people around her - fast motion)
- Fields and hills (mentioned a lot in the lyrics) we were thinking to film at different times of the day showing different types of sky's as a lot of the lyrics mention looking up at the sky.

We want a shot similar to this to show not only the female artist who will be singing, but to show the sky and setting around her, as these are all important as they relate to the lyrics and we therefore want to make sure they are seen.

One of our idea of where we might set part of the music video is in the woods, similar to the picture as it creates an atmosphere and we want to have lots of different location in our music video to create variety and interest.

Narrative

The theme of the song is love, which shows in the lyrics and a lot of metaphors are used to represent love and we will use these to help us with the narrative and to relate the lyrics to what is going on in the video. We aren't having a fixed narrative as the lyrics don't specifically relate to two people. We were thinking that when the artists are singing there is lots of tracking of what they are doing and at the end they meet, which is what are main narrative will be based on.

Pace

The pace of the song is relatively slow to begin with however when the male vocalist starts singing the music and pace increases, this is when we would start to make things faster, and could be when we have people walking past the female singer or male in fast motion.

Goodwins Theory

One of Goodwins theories were that there is a relationship between the lyrics and visuals, we are going to show this is our video by showing what is said in the lyrics for example how the lyrics talk about sky and hills which will be included in the setting of the video. Also how the song is about love and at the end we hope to illustrate this by showing the female and male artist together.

There will be a number of different shots including a lot of close up on the main artist and this is how we are thinking to start our film with a close up of the female singer. This will be for both the audience and to help set the narrative and visuals to the lyrics. It is also likely that both artist will be singing directly into the camera which is a example of voyeurism.

Costumes and Props

It is likely that the setting and location of our music video may be a more run down area, therefore in contrast to this we were thinking we would have the people in our video dressed in a more classy, indie way but yet still showing the youth of the artists, as this fits the genre of music. The props will be fairly simple as we are going to focus a lot on graphics and the setting of the video, however the props we will use will probably be day to day things as we will be tracking the artists as though they are doing normal day to day things. Our main prop though will be a multi coloured umbrella which is a main feature in our video

This is what we imagine the artist will be dressed like, similar to this, however maybe slightly more colorful.So we are thinking Marianne will be dressed in a floaty prom dress in the field with wellies, then maybe converse and laddered tights for another location. The male artist will be dressed in skinny jeans and a smart suit jacket and then smart shoes. For another location skinny jeans again, more casual shoes either converse or high top trainers and then a casual jacket and top.

To make sure that all our products fit together as one package we are going to be using the colorful umbrella in all our products, such as: both the magazine cover and the digipak will have the umbrella included in the image, or we will somehow use the umbrella as an opening mechanism on the digipak. The umbrella will also be used in a few different shot's in the music video.

Spike Jonze

For this task our group had to focus on a specific famous music director - Spike Jonze. To present the information we researched about him and also his work and then we made a power point presentation. The main focus to our research was to look at an auteur (to look at what makes his work recognizable to others). So that we are able to think about how our three products will link together well representing our production company label.

On a whole we feel that his work is quite unique and can be easily recognizable to his audience. This is the type of media we need to look at us to help us with our own work, as it is very important to make sure that all our products link well together indicating that all of which are from the same production team.

By Naomi, Marianne and Sian

Q1 Auteur Presentation - Spike Jonze

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Andrew Goodwin Conventions

To make sure we have a good understanding of the conventions of Goodwin's theory we each analysised a music video of our choice and explained how the goodwin's theory was inlucded in each one.

By Naomi
Q1 Music Video Analysis

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By Sian

Q1 Music Video Analysis

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By Marianne

Q1 Music Video Analysis

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