Final Performance Location and Band Clothing

Our performance element to the music video will take place in an abandoned car park, the distopian setting is a postmodern theme, which fits well with the image of the band. The car park will not require a risk assessment as it is not exactly abandoned, it is just often very empty.

 

The band that we have chosen to create the video for are, unfortunately, not available to do the performance with us. Instead of using the actual members we have selected 3 people to act as the band members and we will control exactly what they wear and how they will appear. 

Guitarist/Singer

Long hair 

Black Vest

Black Jeans

Black Guitar

Bass Guitarist 

Hippie style hoody w. hood up

Baggy Jeans

Dirty shoes

Wooden Bass guitar

Drummer

Black T-shirt

Black Jeans

Black shoes

Equipment Needed for Performance

We got to the car park where we had planned to film the performance and it was a great location. It was run down, it had graffiti and it looked like a dystopian setting, which was just as we had wanted.

For the performance, we needed:

• A drum kit, provided by Tom.
• A guitar, provided by Brad Marshall, the lead singer and guitarist.
• A bass guitar, provided by the bass player in Fear The Lizard.
• The camera.
• A tripod.
• A car to travel there with all the equipment.

Shoot 2 - Beacon Hill

For our second shoot at Beacon Hill it was myself filming the variety of shots we needed and James acting the shots. Unfortunately Tom had a university interview so was unable to attend this shoot. Whilst shooting we didn't battle against too many difficulties, but here is a list of issues and successes...

Issues

• Bitterly cold so we weren't too keen on staying up there for too long.
• The terrain was very lumpy and loose so James sometimes lost his footing when running back up the hill.
• Some of the shots we wanted weren't clear enough with the glare from the sun on the lense.
• Took time to get the tripod level on the bumpy slope with the camera attached.
• The wall that James had to partially climb was fairly slippy so to be safe he had to climb slowly which in turn required us to speed up the footage on Sony Vegas.


Successes

• The weather was perfect with minimal wind.
• The shots looked professional and clear
• We managed to shoot all the shots we had drawn on our storyboards.
• We didnt have to move too far to achieve all the shots.
• James' acting was sublime so the maximum number of takes per shoot was 3.
• The equipment that we used ran like clockwork so there wasn't any technological issues.

Changes From Feedback

After our Target Audience feedback, we decided that there is a number of things we need to change:

•  We decided as a group that in our music video there should be performance as well as a narrative. 
• We also decided that there should be a Parallel narrative to run alongside the main narrative, this is only to be represented by a few shots of our Protagonist struggling in a bed, we are doing this because it is a postmodern technique. 
• We also decided to get rid of one of our planned locations because it was going to add little or nothing to the video, and there won't be enough time for it in there.
•  We've decided to do it speed up the editing of the video to make sure it fits more with the tempo of the song. 
• We have also decided that we will introduce the 'Monster' character will the use of fading two shots together, also suggesting that it is psychological which is anti-authoritarian, another postmodern technique. 

Target Audience Feedback

To work out how our music video was going, we devised a questionnaire and a screening for our target audience. From this we will work out how we can improve our video. This feedback was from our peers in our class so this feedback is from people with a sound media knowledge.

Fear The Lizard Logo



The FTL logo was created by the band when they first got together and is a vital part of the digipak for Fear The Lizard so we decided that it would be more authentic and useful to create our own out of electrical tape and also covering up the make of the drum kit with black electrical tape so the entire focus is on the logo. For those who recognise the logo and can associate it with the band have their own sense of elitism, a post modernist sense.

Hospital Scene

The shots in which our protagonist is in bed struggling will take place in a hospital bed. We will use the medical room at our Sixth Form, it will not be obvious that it is in a school though. We will tie down our protagonist with belts, to suggest that he is a harm to himself, to doctors or to other patients. He will also be wearing a classic and very recognisable hospital gown, this is so that the spectator recognises that he is in hospital. The hospital setting is suggestive of illness or in this case mental illness which is a common theme in postmodern texts.

Changed Narrative

To maintain our post modernistic concept of our music video we decided to tweak the narrative of our video. With the input of the performance it has forced us to change the narrative again. We originally had the idea of our protagonist waking up from a nightmare, but in that state of 'reality' he was in fact having the same nightmare and then this occurred for a third time until the audience then realised that he was in fact in a psychiatric hospital, which explained everything and added to the suspense.

With the added performance we decided that the original narrative would be too confusing for the audience, so with the extraction of the Spring Hall shots we only have the protagonist waking up twice (once at Beacon Hill and then on the hospital bed) just for clarification. We have also decided to en corporate short clips of our protagonist struggling in a hospital bed so its slightly more obvious for the audience to follow the narrative.

Shooting Reschedule

We scheduled to shoot our hospital scene on the 6/11/2012, but only myself and james (actor) were present, so once we had shot the scenes we needed and had designed on the storyboard, we all realised that we needed more shots with different variance to speed up the pace of the editing to match the song so we filmed some more shots again in one of our lessons. Now, as i said before the weather prohibited us from filming our Spring Hall shots so we postponed shooting, but after our teacher told us that we needed performance in our video we decided to scrap the use of the shots at Spring Hall because we have enough footage for our video now. We filmed our performance shots on the 4/12/12.

Ideas for Location of Performance

Once we had taken in the feedback of needing performance we started researching different music videos and became drawn towards 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana and the concept of using a deserted school gym.

We thought this would fit in perfectly with our plans and that we could use a smoke machine from the photography department, the school drum kit and microphone and the school gym. This plan was going to go ahead until we realised that none of us were free to shoot when the gym was free after school and we had a deadline to meet, so we had to think again of a different location.

Performance Needed

With all our planning in our narrative and storyboarding our teacher went on a course and gave us feedback as to what he had learnt. He explained to us that if there was no performance in our music video it could be perceived as a short film and therefore wont enable us to gain the maximum amount of marks possible, so we decided to remove the Spring Hall scene and replace it with a promotional performance scene that could be strategically placed throughout our video. This required us to draw up new storyboards for our performance and reschedule the shooting process.

Weather issues

On our schedule we planned to spend a morning filming on Spring Hall, but once everyone had arrived and we had all the equipment ready to go, wether permitted us from even thinking about filming. We didnt want to risk damaging the camera so we rescheduled this shoot for another time.

Shoot 1 - Barkisland Woods and Graveyard

This was our first shoot at the Barkisland woods and Barkisland graveyard where we set up for the beginning of our music video.
Issues

• We encountered that carrying the ladders from location to location was a bit of an effort, but we managed ok.
• When we shot the scene at the stream, our actor's splash from the water ended up soaking our camera so we had a dirty lense when we dried it.
• When we filmed in the graveyard it became difficult to shoot the tracking shot because we had to dodge between graves whilst keeping the camera reasonably steady.
• It took several takes to shoot our protagonist to jump over the wall and cross over the road because of the traffic that was coming past.

Successes

• The weather was glorius for shooting our video.
• The glare from the sun on the lense provided us with a really useful natural effect that we found out of luck when shooting scenes where our protagonist was at the top of the hill.
• The landscape didnt give us any issues and the terrain we had to shoot on was perfectly safe.
• All the shots we got were fitting with the story boards that we had created
• We managed to shoot more shots than what was on the storyboard which gave us a wider range of shots.
• We had no interference with the public or any animals that could have altered what we shot.
• Nobody was ill/injured and we suffered no technological difficulties whilst shooting.