Filming Schedule

Location Scout and Risk Assessment

Here are the locations me and my team considered as well as their risks, written by me. I chose to embed the document in order to not ruin the formatting of the table and make the content unclear.

Here is a link to the document in case the embedded link do not work:

Location Scout and Risk Assessment

Reflection: Making this location scout was not as time-consuming as I thought it was going to be as I've done it multiple times already and I think I have gotten used to doing it to the point that I don't really pay attention to the time whilst completing it. I didn't encounter much problem as well as before I started, I asked clear questions regarding the specific locations and elaborated from there. This will help my groupmates and I in easily coming up with a solution when ever we do encounter any of the risks I thought about as we have already preplanned it before. Therefore, we won't need to waste unnecessary time in trying to come up with a reliable solution. 

Technical Elements (Classwork)

Here I will be writing down what I have been learning in class regarding technical elements such as camera, mise-en-scene, sound, and edit. 

Below are the collection of notes taken from my teacher's explanations in class and videos I watched regarding the topics. 

Camera 

The different camera angles and movements and their effects towards the audiences

Camera Angles 

1. Long shot: A shot in which the subject can be seen from head to toe. 

2. Establishing shot: Wider shots of landscapes and shots where the subject's full body appears smaller, often used in the beginning of the film or series to introduce the setting or as a method of making the subject look really small. 

3. Medium shot: Shows the subject from head to waist where the audiences are able to see what the subject is doing with their hands. 

4. Close-up shot: Shows the subject only from their head to their shoulders. This focuses the audiences on their facial expressions, giving them a better sense of what the subject is feeling or thinking about. 

5. Extreme close-up shot: Shows the subject only from above their eyebrows to below their mouth, or even closer. This is to really emphasize on their facial expressions, often making them look more threatening and sparking a sense of discomfort to the audiences due to the proximity.

6. POV shot: a shot from the character's POV, making things look more realistic. 

7. Over the shoulder shot: Seeing a subject or an object from another subject's shoulders

8. High angle shot: It is when the camera looks downwards, making the subject look more vulnerable as it is as if we are the ones looking down at them. It makes the audience feel pity or sympathy towards the subject. 

9. Low angle shot: When the camera looks upwards, mimicking us looking up towards someone. This makes the subject look more powerful and threatening. 

10. Dutch angle shot: When the camera is significantly tilted. This causes a sense of disorientation and uneasiness towards the audiences. 

11. Cowboy shot: Shot of a subject from the middle of their thigh and upwards. 

Camera Movements

1. Track: Moving the camera towards or away from the subject or to follow a moving object

2. Pan: Pivoting the camera to the side or fast movement sideways in order to follow a moving subject

3. Tilt: Pivoting the camera vertically up or down 

4. Hand-held shot: Random camera movements, makes the scene look like a realistic pov. 

5. Dolly zoom: A method of zooming in while the camera physically moves backwards 

Mise-en-Scene

Arrangement and design of visual elements within a frame or a scene 

Mise-en-Scene consists of:

1. Props

2. Hair

3. Lighting

4. Weather 

5. Set design 

6. Makeup

7. Blocking

8. Environment 

9. Costume 

10. Color

11. Focus lens

To convey emotion, theme, mood, and character traits. These are factors that helps the audiences accept what's happening. 

Sound

Sound can be divided into three types:

1. Diegetic sound: The sound within the world the character can experience

- Chairs sliding

- Background chatting

- Sound of the AC

Effect: Adds a sense of realism, reveals information to characters (and then audience).

2. Non diegetic sound: Sound that the audience can hear but the character can't hear

- Narrator

- Soundtrack

- Sound effect

Effect: Enhance meaning, create an emotional response in the audience. 

3. Trans diegetic sound: Sound that starts off as diegetic and turns non-diegetic later on, or vice versa. 

- example: Wall E

Effect: Creates a link between the audience and the world. More immersive. 

Edit

The process of selecting, arranging, and manipulating footage to create a cohesive and engaging story. 

Key words:

1. Shot: Camera frame

2. Cut: Editing technique

3. Sequence: Order the shots are in 

4. Montage: Different shots put together

5. Continuity: The flow when you edit one scene to another (it has to flow so it makes sense)

6. Pacing: Duration of the shots 

Editing techniques:

1. Montage: Compiling different shots together 

2. Non-montage: Just one long shot 

3. Parallel editing (cross cut): Shows 2 events happening at the same time in 2 different locations 

4. Cutaways and inserts: cuts to reactions, moving to different subjects, or showing of details

5. Match cut: When the cuts have the same compositions 

6. Cut to the beat (rhythmic editing): Synchronize the cuts to the music 

7. Flashback (analepsis) and flashforward (prolepsis): Adds context or information

8. Continuity: Has to flow to make things realistic and make sense

Reflection: This was really helpful in boosting my memory regarding the terms we learned in this topic as I have forgotten about the effects of some on the audience, where not only will this be beneficial for the making of the project as we have specific effects we want to create on the audience, it will also be beneficial for the theory exam as well as I will avoid cases where I forget about the terms and thus, have to put a random term to fill it in. 

Screen Test

To find a star for our music video, we need to conduct a screen test. Here is a video of our class's group audition. We did this as a class. Unfortunately, I wasn't present in the production of this screen test, therefore I will just be analyzing the advantages and disadvantages I can find in a third person point of view.
 

Advantages: 

Disadvantages:

Song Research

Here we will look in detail of our song choice 'Catch Me In The Air' by Rina Sawayama (2022) which was done by Regine, Aurel, and I.

Catch me in the air by Rina Sawayama does not currently have an official music video but does have a official visualiser. A visualiser differs from a music video by being less focused on storytelling and instead simply being an abstract representations of music that enhances the experience through dynamic visuals.

 

1. Song Background;
Genius.com, a lyrical database and digital media company, has provided a small description of the song
“ 'Catch Me In The Air' is the second single from Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl album. The song details Sawayama’s relationship with her single mother, and how they have supported each other through difficult times."
Rina also introduced the song on her Dynasty Tour with "I wrote a very special song and it's about my relationship with my mom who's a single mom. [...] I just wanted to write the fact that we have caught each other when we're falling, and so this song is called 'Catch Me in the Air'." (information found on a website called the Rina Sawayama Wiki)


We can conclude that this song is about the relationship between a single mother and her child as each other’s support system and how their relationship has evolved now that they’re both on their own.


2. Why we choose it
The song was suggested by a friend who's a fan of the artist. We liked the song as it had consisted of a narrative that we can easily follow and develop upon. The song is also really heartwarming which will allow us to more easily invoke an emotional response from our audience, making it easier for us to keep our audience engaged as they will have a stronger attachment to our music video. In addition to that, since the artist does not have an official music video, we have more freedom to experiment and create a narrative based on the meanings we capture from the lyric. These reasons are why this song in particular stuck out to us among all our other options.


3. How your music video will be different
Genius contributors mentioned the first verse of the song is written in the perspective of Rina's mother but we plan to subvert this idea by exclusively sticking to the artists' point of view. This way, it will put the audience in the artist's point of view and would create a stronger emotional reaction more effectively.


Additionally, we choose to subvert from Rina Sawayama's usual style. In the music video she is seen wearing more modern chic clothes, which is a convention more strongly associated with pop artists, whereas we choose simpler rural-like clothing which is more frequent in indie pop artists. This is because our star's persona conveys her more as a simpler girl, keen on keeping close to her roots. Furthermore, in comparison to how her video consists mostly of visual performances taking into account that it is an official visualizer instead of a music video, instead of following that, we'll be creating a storyline.

Reflection: Again, I wasn't present in the making of this due to my Economics exam. However, I tried to contribute by adding a few bits in the paragraphs such expanding the explanations. This research helped me understand more of the song my group chose such as the meaning behind the lyrics of the song instead of just choosing it and going with it without taking into account what it is actually about. 

Storyboard

Here is the process of making the storyboard for my group, which was done by Regine. 

A storyboard, defined by Teachfloor, is said to be "a visual representation of a story, often in the form of illustrations or images, arranged in a specific order to show the sequence of events in a film, video, etc."

I had taken the time to learn a little more on storyboards and what is expected through this blog by the BBC - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z2vrhv4/revision/2 - however my teacher had ended up providing us templates to aid in our storyboard process. It included 2 templates, one wth 4 large boxes for detailed and another with 8 smaller boxes. Our teacher had suggested us to draw out the scenes from a singular location rather than planning the cuts between a performance to a b-roll, with the intention of reducing confusion in the narrative. Because of this, most shots did not have a defined duration, as it can vary depending on where it will be placed in the editing phase.

By the second detailed page, we were asked to show our progress to our teacher and he was able to give us suggestions on our storyboard and narrative. He informed us on his concern over how well we would be able to communicate the different flashbacks/timestamps that were happening since we did not have access to actors of different ages, which prompted him to suggest a different approach of one flashback and a continous display of the artist's journey through her career from the mother's camera perspective. We, as a group, all agreed to this new narrative as it felt as though our message could be delivered more clearly and readjusted our previous planning to fit towards it.

In these first few pages, I had used 2 pages of big boxes to draw out my ideas in detail, however, I will be switching to the pages with smaller boxes moving on to be more time-efficient. Since I would focus less on detail, I will be able to spend more time in ensuring the ideas all throughout the video will be comprehensible (due to the limited space to write descriptions) to both my team members and my teacher. This is the continuation of the storyboard.

There are still some scenes missing, which include the scene from the bridge as my team and I had not been able to have the time to properly discuss our next plan of action and realign our vision. Thus there will be more to come. However, for the sake of the due date, this will be all to submit at the current moment.

Reflection: I didn't really contribute into the making of the storyboard other than giving a few ideas whenever Regine feels stuck on what to do for certain scenes. Though as stated above, we experienced a difficulty in making the flashback and flashforward cuts clear in which this led us to have to modify a bit of the storyline when we thought that our narrative is already fixed. However, it is relieving to receive feedback by my teacher early on in the project as there are always room for us to improve our work before we officially submit it to Cambridge. 

Lyric Sheet

This is a lyric sheet that my group used to discuss our vision for each verse. 

For this task, we started with a paper of the lyrics provided by our teacher where we discussed the general idea/narrative we wanted. Here are some of our notes from when we did this during class time. 

However, we had a limit of 10-20 minutes to discuss this during our class time, thus we decided to continue this at home through Canva. My teammate Regine wrote down her, my other teammate Aurel, and my ideas altogether and gave them some more detailed visuals and wrote them down on Canva whiteboard. This way we could all share ideas and comment on each other's idea. 

The link to the canva whiteboard: Lyric Sheet

Although there might be slight changes and features (videos, clear images, comments, and their replies) that can only be seen in the embedded link, I also included our whiteboard in the form of images. 

Aurel had commented some great questions and ideas to add on the whiteboard, however most of our discussions were done within our group chat on WhatsApp. Despite this, I felt as though we were able to expand a little bit more on our idea. Not only will it make our music video stand out, but also ensure our vision is aligning as a group. 

Reflection: The annotating process on this lyric sheet was quite fun as my group and I got to brainstorm multiple ideas for each verses of the song. However we experienced a few difficulties on what to do on certain verses as what was important to us was making a clear flow in the narrative we want to create taking into account that we are including flashback and flashforward cuts. Thus, we had several discussions in our WhatsApp group chat to come into a conclusion as well as asking our teacher for feedbacks regarding what he thinks would be fitting to do for the verse. 

Moodboard

Here is the mood board my group had made to aid in aligning our visions with one another. We had made 2 pages of the mood board as there will be 2 very different settings that we plan to have. The first pace is set in a rural area (village) while the second is in an urban area (city). 

Reflection: Creating these 2 mood boards was really fun as all my group mates and I had to do was search for images within one aesthetic in Pinterest. I can use this as a guidance as well to what overall look and vibe my group and I have to follow in my music video, such as specific color grading for the different locations and timeline. 

Theory of Stardom

In class today, we studied the Theory of Stardom by Richard Dyer. Here are my classroom notes about the celebrity, Beabadoobee, as her songs are within the same genre as my team's music video song, which is Indie Pop. 

This will help me in my music video because I need to create a persona for my artist. 

I did this work with my team mate Regine and Aurel. 

Media Ownership (Twitter to X)

This can be used as a case study for exam questions regarding media ownership. 

Statement of Intent

 Here is the statement of intent regarding my group's music video project. 

Reflection: A problem that I faced was that when we were tasked to do this in class with our groupmates, I was not available due to my AS exam, thus I couldn't really contribute to the making of it and was only able to read it after my exam where it was already finished, in addition to reading their discussions through the WhatsApp group chat we had which made all my questions answered.