My group's practice Music Video:

This was my group's completed music video. I personally liked the band "Monarchy" and their song, "You Don't Want to Dance With Me." This resulted in my group liking and also wanting to film a music video with this song. I put forward the ideas that it should involve some sort of sadness or madness, due to the song being about the separation of two people. This resulted in Georgie and Ellie being the main directors, filming wide-shots, close ups and extreme close ups of our actress showing emotive scenes which relate to the suggested themes. Ryan then became the main editor and as a group we chose the black and white colour scheme of the video to connote the actress's unhappiness. We also chose to cut out some lip syncing scenes as well in order to link the different scenes together as way of telling an emotional story which reflect each others. This is an example of how we applied Goodwin's conventions in our music video, since he believed that the lyrics and scenes of a music video link to each other.

By assisting directing, learning about camera shots and using Premiere Pro again, I believe I have learnt more valuable skills for my future project(s). I also got to learn and apply a theory, as I mentioned (which I hope I can use again) and hope to learn about more theories which I can use in the future.

My group's CD covers:

My group were given the task to form a fictional band that we could essentially release music with if it was real. I came up with the idea of linking the Garden of Eden to 'our' single and music video which we were going to release. This resulted in my group deciding to be called "The Guards Of Eden." Since the song which we wanted to use for our music video, "You Don't Want to Dance With Me," by Monarchy and Britt Love is a sort of up-beat sad song about separation and reflection, I realised that The Garden Of Eden has been the focus of similarly themed stories. For example, the snake tempted Eve into biting an apple, which could've lead to Adam and Eve's separation since God apparently made them get out of the garden. When we thought of ideas for our music video and CD cover we thought of how people could be tempted to be different, but due to society's restrictions they could be upset about how they couldn't truly be themselves.

Our front cover used extreme close ups of our group member Georgie Brough and Max Jackson from another group. We thought it'd be an interesting idea to explore how someone would feel if they felt they were born to be someone different but they struggled to be who they really were.



The back cover also reflected the themes of someone struggling their identity, as we chose to collage two pictures together to show how someone may want to be a different gender, but are currently opposite of who they want to be. We used different apps to gain our desired covers with effects. These included Pic Collage, Retrica and YouCam Make Up. This is how we were able to collage our pictures together, add make up and titling to reflect the discussed themes.

The middle insert of what we fictionally thought our CD case would look like tied all ideas together. This is since it had the lyrics of "our scene" wrote on it, as inserts do as well as referencing the Garden Of Eden story I mentioned. We therefore chose this to have the desired effect, to insinuate the struggles people can go through. The apple being offered on our insert is therefore another metaphorical statement about temptation and struggles people may face.

One Minute Music Video Development - Lip Syncing Practice:

As part of the research and development behind making our one minute music video, we were able to develop our lip syncing, editing and creation skills during one of our lessons at sixth form. We were able to use the iPhone app called Video Star to do this. Me and my group members Ellie Lester and Georgie Brough thought it was really useful and entertaining as it allowed us to create a professional looking music video with different colour schemes and quick editing techniques in the form of straight cut transitions. It has been re-named "Backstage Footage - Music Video Bloopers" so that it makes our "group" look more like actual, realistic artists, as we are making a website on Weebly to promote us and "our" single "You Don't Want To Dance With Me," by actual artists Monarchy and Britt Love. You can view this below.

   

One Minute Music Video - Initial Ideas:

My group consists of myself obviously, Georgie Brough, Ellie Lester and Ryan Parsons. Above is an interactive mind map which I created on MindMeister and have made to document initial ideas for our one minute practice music video. I'm personally a fan of the song we chose so I'm hoping it will be easier to be creative and make the music video interesting.

Practice Music Video Creation:

After watching and understand how Pharell's "Happy" music video was created, we were told to practice and make our own short music video in a similar style. As a result we used similar lip syncing, choreography, jump cuts, cross-cuts and straight cut transitions to edit our video in a way that reflected that of the "Happy" music video.