Original storyboard, why it had to be changed

This is a sample of a commentary of our original, undetailed and messy storyboard. We were told that storyboards, to be fully functional and useful, the pictures had to be atleast somewhat comprehendable for an outside audience. This lead us to create a better, more detailed storyboard which then featured in the final voiceover. The reason why I changed the storyboard to make it overall better and in-depth is because I was told that the storyboard was such a huge part of the planning phase and giving it a lackluster level effort was an absolute waste.

Photo shoot from filming

 

These are some of the photo we took while filming on our second day. We will most likely use some of these photos when creating the digipak, as some of them fit brilliantly for an album cover (front and back). For example, the photo of Nick walking away in the grass would be perfect for the back of our album, as it can be edited to fit the same colour scheme that we are aiming for.

Work in progress 2 - Thinking Out Loud (defunct)

This is a fragmented work in progress piece, with no narrative/concept parts yet but with every lyric that we are using in the final piece having a coressponding piece of footage. This is a major stepping stone in the creation of our music video and is the result of two full days of filming. Using this incomplete project we can now begin to input the narrative/concept inbetween the performance and eventually finalise the music video.

Many peoples favourite part of the video is some of the match on action style cuts, such as the one at 0:54

Final location shots - The Performance

 

 

 

These are the pictures we took of our performance location, under a motorway bridge in Sandford Mill. The extent of the flood in the area is also illustrated the second pictures depicts how deep the water had got. One unexpected feature of the set was the presence of the "Anna will you marry me?" Myself and Jack had absolutely no clue that was going to be here but we managed to work to our advantage massively.

 

 

Overall I think that this location was a brilliant choice as the lightning was good and it had  the aura of a rather desolate place to represent Nick's inner turmoil.

Shooting schedule

This is our shooting schedule, including details for which shots are being filmed each day, the locations, characters and props. It has been very useful in terms of organisation and keeping track of the days we need to take to film. The reason for the rather large delay between the performance and the concept was our rather large change to our original plan, from a strictly narrative segment to a strictly concept.

Rabbit in the Headlights - UNKLE, a brilliant use of concept

This is one of the most astounding examples of concept in a music video I have encountered. The video's usage of a such a simple theme to represent the lyrics and message of the song speak powerful volumes and have influenced me to lean more towards a concept style than narrative style when designing my music video. It allows it to be massively open to interpretation, which as in literature, denotes sheer quality and is something I personally want to match in my video. For example, for this video many people have stated that the character portrayed is Jesus and there are many factors supporting and defusing this fact.

The quality that his video has, with such a simple concept, is something I believe that a narrative music video cannot match and is why my video will try and match this quality of concept as much as possible.

Our first risk assessment - the performance

This was done by Jack, analyzing the potential risks of our performance set. It turned to be surprisingly useful as we realized the possibility of flooding in the area, which turned out to be completely true.

A letter to Atlantic Records

This is the letter we wrote out of respect to Atlantic Records and their ownership of 'Thinking Out Loud'. We deemed it necessary to enquire about usage of the song.

Difficulties while filming

On the first day of filming (14/10/14) myself and Jack found that the main part of our set was completely flooded due to the constant rainfall of the past two days. Originally we thought that this would stop of from filiming there indefinitely, but we decided to brave the water and go up onto an elevated area to complete the filming. This proved worthwhile as it gave us amazing results as it was such a unique setting and location, though the difficulties were many,

Work in progress 1 - Thinking Out Loud (defunct)

This is a work in progress piece, compiling all the footage we acquired from our first day filming. Overall it was a rather good day but as our camera ran out of battery we could not finish it off fully, plus it was getting dark too so it would have to roll over onto another day. Looking through all of this footage, throughout all the good shots there were some which definitely had to be refilmed. Some shots (such as the first one) was out of focus, another one's lip syncing was too short and one of the later shots had Nick's head cut off.

We knew from the start that refilming was inevitable so going through and compiling all the footage and identifiying problems promptly allowed us deal with those problems quickly and efficiently by refilming a couple of days later.

The Pharcyde - Drop

This video stood out for me as I'd never seen anything like it before. For the mid 1990s, the techniques used here were completely new and arguably revolutionary. The clever method of singing and performing backwards, then reversing that footage was something never done before and looks absolutely amazing. The bit that stood out the most of be and perhaps will serve as some inspiration while filming the rest of my video is the sequence at the end, the backwards painting of the perspex glass. I feel this is somehing that could be used in the remainder of our video, with perhaps painting such as a heart of "love", then making it go backwards similar to the video.

 

 

Storyboard voice over

This is the complete storyboard with a voiceover and the song playing simultaneously, allowing for the best possible image to be created from it.

Pete Fraser talk

Pete Fraser's talk was enlightening in terms of what to include in our blogs, music videos and evalutions. The examples of A-grade music videos he showed were extremely helpful as it gave us realistic standards which we could hope to achieve with our own music videos.

His emphasis on not staying away from narrative and instead focusing on concept when creating a music video also made me rethink the premise of my music video, though the extent of the changes I and my group want to make are still undecided.

Also the prospect of easter at the NFTL was intriguing and something I might take up.

Peer assessments from the class - the halfway presentation

An example of some of the feedback we received.

A summary of all the feedback we received essentially boils down to our lack of a coherent video idea at the time, due to the lack of a fully complete and detailed storyboard. This criticism is completely just as during the presentation we only had a segment of the storyboard completed and that segment itself ended up being scrapped and completely redone.

Aside from that the other feedback we received was generally rather good, with our confident stage presence and very good website being noticed and commended upon,

Nicholas Alexander powerpoint - group work

This is the halfway presentation for our artist's brand, including our image, audience, biography and interviews.

Shot list

Existing students music videos

Bastille - Of The Night

What it does well

One of the best qualities of this video is the editing, as it utilises Andrew Goodwin's theory in regards to syncing the video and the music. That is constant throughout the entire video which is somewhat hard to produce. Also the shots are very interesting and dynamic and definitely rival the editing as the video's best quality. The use of the relatively dull theme could be regarding as a drawback of the video, but personally the sombre aura of the song fits in extremely well with the wet, winter theme. The subtle nature of the narrative is also commendable.

Drawbacks

The major drawback of this video is the lack of lip-syncing, as the structure of the video easily allows for it to be possible as there are multiple shots of the main characters face walking in front of the camera. This lack of lip-syncing makes the video rather boring. If it was a part of the video it would easily be an A-grade piece of work, but at its current state it's a solid B.

Macklemore - Can't Hold Us

What it does well

This video has all the elements of a nearly perfect music video. The overall style fits with the fast paced nature and somewhat laid back sense of song. The cartoony aspect goes really well also and is the best nature of the video, as the old-fashioned robbers contrast very well with the modern rapper and gives it a very entertaining and comedic edge. The fast flows of Macklemore were also lip-synced extremely well as it is evidently challenging to not only speak that fast, but to sync it correctly too is nothing short of amazing.

Drawbacks

There are very few drawbacks to speak of in this music video. There could have been a little more lip-syncing as most of it is choreographed performance but the speed of the song (as stated) is challenging to max so the lack of it can be accepted.

Website sketch

This is a sketch depicting the homepage of our website and it will contain the same theme throughout the other pages. The usage of the twitter feed at the side of the website is taken from many of our influences, as they also use twitter feeds to reinforce the artist's presence of social media on the website. Ed Sheeran goes as far to base his entire website off his twitter feed which definitely persuaded us to make it a large part of ours.

Obviously the music video has to be a large part of the website too, which is why it takes up the whole portion of the scrolled down website to make it easily accessible to the user. The photo at the top is used to help establish Nicholas Alexander's identity as an upcoming singer-songwriter and being recognisable is mandatory for that.

Digipak sketch

Digipak sketch

This is a planning sketch for our digipak. We have decided to go with a light blue colour with a recurring silhouette theme to coincide with our album cover. Although a silhouette could inhibit Nicholas Alexander's identity, some of the digipak will contain a photo of him in full which should hopefully rectify this issue. The use of a constant light blue colour and white silhouette will give us the marks for a recurring theme throughout the digipak which is by the far the most important.

We now have a solid foundation in which to build the digipak from and we will hopefully stick to this design for the most part.

Radio 1 interview - Nicholas Alexander

This is our artist, Nicholas Alexander, in his first ever official interview with prominent radio station, Radio 1. It was a fun experience and was a very good addition to the website. Hopefully we will do more in the near future, solidying Nicholas' identity as an artist.

Peer assesments within the group

These are the reviews that my group gave me. I am relatively happy with them as they both highlight what I'm doing well and give enlightening ways as to how I can improve.