Filming Fail

This past weekend was one of the options for weekends to film. My group did not film this past weekend. My other group members wanted to film, this past weekend, but due to my school situation, I wasn’t available. I wasn’t available to film because I was behind in my current online class. I was unable to stay ahead in my class due to my extracurricular, softball, taking up my nights and weekends. With season starting up, I ended up almost 4 weeks behind in my class. This past weekend was my only free weekend I had for a while. So I told my group that I needed to catch up before we film, making me more behind. My group fought me on this for a while, until they ran out of time to actually film. So I spent this past weekend trying to get caught up in my online class, instead of filming.

The reason my group was pushing for filming this past weekend was out of one of my teammates convenience. This next weekend coming up, is our thanksgiving break. This was the weekend we originally chose to film on. One of my teammates wanted to go on vacation instead, so she was trying to convince her parents and our group to allow this to happen. However, her not being being here for this weekend only left us last weekend. As I explained, I need last weekend to catch up in school work. My group mate felt that I could just blow off my online class for another week. I then tried to explain, it would put me over a month behind. My group mate was not happy to hear that she could no longer go on vacation. However, then the plans changed.

My group member then said that we had to film last weekend because her family was coming in town and she would only have time to film on Sunday. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t think it would take any longer than a day to work on. Then, she came back by saying then let’s just film on Sunday (yesterday). I then had to explain again that I could not blow off my school work, so she finally caved. We now have plans to film next weekend. However, we have already started to reach problems in the filming process. Our whole commercial is based off of a car. The car we were going to use was my team mates uncles. She had just informed me today that we can no longer use the car. He will now be out of town, making the car unavailable. So I informed her that we would need to use her car now, and she said, “No”. I tried to explain to her that we have to use her car, because it is a convertible and she is the only one in our group who currently has a working car. I am too young to have a car, and our other teammate recently got in an accident, so his car is getting fixed. Leaving is with only her car.

Storyboard for Music Video

In class today we finished our story boards for our music video. After two class periods we finally devised the best plan for our filming project. Since the maximum length of our video can be 1 minute and 15 seconds and the shortest can be 1 minute and 5 seconds, we decided that 12 boxes would be enough as some scenes may need to be cutout in order to stay within the parameters. Also, in our storyboard, there are several different kinds of camera shots and angles used to fit the conventions of a Rap/R&B music video, some of these being: tracking shots, three shot, medium shots, etc... In our story board we also included the types of transitions used between shots of the music video. In our music video we plan to have: jump shots, dissolves, fade outs, etc... The overall sound of the music video will be the actual song over the scenes of us, so no other sounds will be added so we can keep the entire focus on the song and the way the music video matches up to it.

Planning for Music Video

In class today, we began planning for our Music Video and how we would execute the video. After transitioning from the commercial to music video, we had to make a detailed plan of what we would use during the film, from costumes to our health and safety during the process. To help us remember what we need to include in our plan, our teachers used five key points, these were: Location, Health & Safety, Props, Costumes, and finally our schedule for the entire process.

Location- During our music video, we plan on using several different locations as it will better fit the conventions of a normal Rap Song. In our music video we will mainly be in Cooper City because we will be using one of our group members cars, the car will be a corvette in which we aren't allowed to drive far, so we will be using it within the Cooper City neighborhood. Also, we will be in some parking lots as we want to drive the car around slowly, or just have it parked in a certain spot.

Health & Safety- During the course of our music video, there are several safety precautions we must take in order to have a safe filming process. For instance, since some of our film will be shot near or in a car, we needed to ensure that we would off the roads as we planned to go slow; we decided that a parking lot would be the safest location to film the video as it will be secluded with no flowing traffic. Also, when going in the car, it will be mandatory to wear a seatbelt at all times for the duration of the car ride; although it may not be an extremely complex safety measure, seatbelts are an extremely effective way of staying safe. Also, when filming in the car we will have two people in each vehicle, one being the actor and the other being the person filming. In doing so, we will be able to have one person filming while the other is driving to prevent any multi tasking while driving.

Props- Since our music video belongs in the Rap/R&B Genre of music, usual props in Rap/R&B music videos would be nice cars, jewelry, and designer clothes. For our music video we will be using a corvette from a group members family. This will fill the spot of a nice car in our music video, also, a specific line in the song refers to Jeeps, so a group member has volunteered to use their jeep for our music video as well. In our music video we will also be using some jewelry as the song frequently refers to nice chains and watches. In order to fully capture the conventions used in a normal Rap/R&B music videos, we will also be wearing designer clothes such as Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger. For example, I will order Gucci shirts/jackets for the group to wear during the music video so it can be more uniform.

Costumes- During our music video we plan on using two different kinds of outfits to represent two different ideas in the video. At the start of the music video there will be a student in a classroom wearing school appropriate clothes. However, once we transition from the classroom to the scene of the Corvette, we will be using new costumes of designer clothes as well as jewelry. This would fully capture the essence of the song and also bring attention to our video from younger audiences.

Schedule for Music Video-

 11/22/2019- We will finish our storyboard for our commercial and begin to gather the supplies as well as secure locations for the music video

11/26/2019- We will finish our plans and check out a camera to use over the Thanksgiving Break to get the most amount of filming done.

11/29-11/31- We will be filming our music video during these days

12/2/2019- We will begin the editing process of our Music video.

Music Video Conventions

We completely finished our commercial project. For our first project I think my group did well with this project. While we were finishing up editing (our last day working on the commercial), we started to experience controversy. We had a problem with agreeing on some final decisions/changed for the commercial. We solved this problem by asking for our peers opinion on different scenes and shots. Overall, I felt that the commercial went smoothly, and our commercial came out better than I thought.  I believe that this is because when decided to go out and get extra footage, on our optional filming day. We did this because we felt that even though we followed the story board, we felt that we did not have enough footage to meet the time requirement.

My class has now moved onto a new project, a music video. In this project, I will need to get in a group of 1-4 students, choose a song, and then plan and film a music video outside of school. I chose to work with a semi-new group for this project. I am working with one of my teammates from my last project, but my other teammate had joined from another group. Before we came to class today, our teacher wanted us to already have our group and song in mind. So knowing that we needed to pick a song, I started looking at some sample music videos made by students for a school project. I found an extremely funny music video to the song plug walk, in laughter I sent it to my teammate Montana to start brainstorming ideas. She loved the video just as much as I did, so we started to think of songs like Plug Walk to use. Montana came up with the song Ballin’ and after listening to it I agreed that we should use it. We chose a song in this Rap and R&B genre, because we thought it would be fun to film and this way we could use Montana’s car in the music video. We could also dress all “dropped out” or rich.

 My group and I researched conventions of a Rap or R&B music video. We watched a few music videos and saw many repeated conventions. The camera angles that were commonly used were low angles to show the rapper, high angles to show their location, wide shot to show them bragging about their things, and close ups which would usually show detail on their wealth. The movement is not specific but they had a lot of zig zagging, pan shots, and tracking shots. These movements helped to make the scene more dramatic. The sound would be the song they are promoting in the music video. They also might have diegetic sound relating to where the scene takes place. We saw many transitions such as fade, dissolve, and rotation. In an editing perspective, they edit the sound in after filming the video so the sound is more clear and loud. They also insert text into the video during the editing process to inform people the name and artist of the song. Then at the end they insert the credits which include the people that helped with the production of the video. 

There is many examples of Mise En Scene in music videos. While researching we found that most of their costumes deal with big fur coats or leather jackets with expensive accessories to show their wealth. They usually take place outside or at night clubs so the lighting would be either natural lighting or strobe lights. While researching we noticed that they did not wear extravagant makeup and if they did wear makeup it was natural, and something they would wear on a normal basis. For their hair the guys sometimes would wear durags and the girls would have straight or wavy hair, or braids. During the video they use many props such as expensive cars, drinks, and money. The setting would usually be on the street, open area, night clubs, mansions, neighborhoods, and/or casinos. 

Editing Pt. 2

For the past two class periods in AICE Media Studies, we were working on editing our commercials. On the first day, my group and I grabbed our laptop and began the editing process. One of my teammates used their log in for the computer, and opened Pinnacle Studios. Then I reminded the group that because we are no longer on the desktop, we would need to re-upload our footage. Since the footage was on my google drive, I opened the page and logged in. I then downloaded the footage onto the computer. I attempted to import the footage into pinnacle studies, however it wasn’t working. We were not sure How to fix this problem, so I asked my teacher what we should do next. She informed us that you can not import a zipper file (the type of type we created) so we would need to create a new one. So that’s what we did. 

Now that we had gotten that problem out of the way, I imported the groups footage. This took longer than expected, for what we assume was just internet problems. Then, I noticed some unwanted ‘example’ footage. I showed my teammates, and one of the other groups over heard us. They told us that we needed to clear the example project before we could began on ours. So my teammate Montana, reset the project to start from scratch. So we then needed to re-import all of the footage. Once the footage that we wanted was finally imported, I decided it would b best to start off by just roughly, piecing the footage together. While I was trying to look through the takes, to decide which ones to use, I was unable to make out what was happening in the video. The program we were using was causing our videos to lag, to a point where we couldn’t even tell which take it was. In frustration of possibly not being able to finish my our deadline, I asked the teacher if we could use a different program. We explained to her the problem and she then relieved us by allowing us to use iMovie. 

Now that we decided to use iMovie, we could no longer work on it on the school laptop. My group mate Montana has iMovie on her personal laptop. So we had made plans to have her bring it to the next class. Knowing that we should get started, I FaceTimed Montana to work on the assignment. Over the phone I was able to walk her through the steps of getting the footage off the google drive and onto her computer, along with converting the file out of a zipper file. After we went through these steps, I walked her through the storyboard as she pieced the footage together. She made a rough draft of the commercial so we could get an idea of what it looked like. In this rough draft she cropped the videos, but she didn’t put any transitions yet. After seeing the rough draft, we decided to work on it more in the next class. 

The night before the next class my teammate Montana explained that she was not going to be at school the following day. Without her laptop we would not be able to work on the commercial. When I got to class my other teammate Amanda and I discussed different transitions that we could use and we brainstormed ideas for the finishing touches of the commercial. After school I FaceTimed Montana, and attempted to work more on the project with her, but she still felt ill, so I wasn’t able too. We plan to finish the commercial, if not before our next class, through outside communication.