Director's Commentary

Task 13 Evaluation Script

Question 1: Our media production utilizes the conventions of more modern music videos, such as "Drive By" by "Train" or "Bruno Mars’ Grenade", by telling a story about a lost love of our protagonist through the use of the song and the imagery in our production. We also follow the camera technique of handheld footage to give it a more rustic, and raw feeling for the emotion of our characters. This type of camera work is quite typical for Lost Love Music Videos, seen here in 'Grenade', and we wanted to capture that feeling of professional video-making in the same way but without the bigger budget. The use of lip-syncing by our main protagonist who "sings" for most of the duration is a trope utilized by all music video directors since it's a great way to combine the musician's natural singing talent with their acting so their unprofessionalism doesn't become too obvious for the viewer. Of course the song wasn't actually performed by our actor but it did get him involved more with the actual song and gave the song a connection to the story we were trying to tell. Black and white footage is used within our production which was inspired by the the music video of "Someone like you" by Adele which uses black and white footage for symbolism of depression, which we use as well but instead of symbolising depression we use it for symbolism of memories. We also got the inspiration to go for a long walk montage from this music video because we thought it worked well for the depressing tone of the story and the music video. The montage near the end of the video was partially inspired by the ending of "The Godfather" which also utilised a montage of contrasting imagery to highlight the difference between events. Also, as the song gets quicker towards the end of the song we paced the cuts more frequently to suit with the pace of the song which was inspired by mainstream action movies that speed up their cuts to different shots as the music/scene gets more intense.

Question 2: The combination of our main product and ancillary texts are that they are quite similar as they both feature the main actor in our production and that it contains some screen shots from our main production to our ancillary texts.  The poster includes the main actor and actress, and the text on the poster talks about how good the song is which helps to promote the song. The quotes were from famous music magazines to further cement the idea that this album is critically acclaimed by professionals. Also, it includes the other print artefact, the cover of it, as in some posters the front cover of it would be featured so that people would know what to buy. The main protagonist is in black and white because he is sad and depressed as his girlfriend left him in our main product. This effect was achieved by using Photoshop to remove the background around the boy, moving the image on to the posters background and painting thin white lines around the image. His girlfriend is on the left, the sun is shining down on her seems like he is reflecting of how she seems perfect in his eyes. This was done by painting a line of yellow across the background and her, rubbing some bits to make it look like streaks then blurring it so it merges with the background, and finally decreasing the opacity so its not too bright to obscure the girl from view. The thing is that she has her back to him meaning we cannot see her face so it seems like she is walking away from his life and he is remembering the good times. We got her image from the our main production and used the same technique that we used to get the boy's image from a separate image. The CD cover was achieved with a mixture of different Photoshop techniques and some inspiration. The colourful front cover and the flamboyant text was inspired by old album covers made during the 70's where this song was produced. The way we got the image so colourful is by adjusting the brightness, contrast, and hue so it enhances the colour more then normal. The image of our two protagonists hugging during the sunset was obviously faked by getting a stock image of a sunset placing the image of the boy and girl hugging over the top and then adding some effects to make it look like the sun was shining on them. The floating text of the inside cover images was achieved by typing out the text and then using the transform tool to make it look like it was attached to the wall. The black and white effects were simply a filter.

Question 3: To find out what our audience feedback was we sent out about 20 questionnaires to our target audience with different ages, gender and ethnicity. We asked them to watch our production, and then asked them rate different aspects of the production on the questionnaire. What we have learnt from our audience feedback is that most of our audience find the production to be in a good standard, maybe not excellent but at least satisfying enough to watch with pleasure. This may be due to some lacking qualities within the production which we will get to talk about later. People found that when observing our blog they thought the planning was in a good state of condition, which is down to our 37 posts and the detail within them. When questioned on the different attributes of our production, the sound and the music very good as 77% of people thought that that was excellent therefore most people like are song. Which is quiet surprising as it is a rock song and generally people do not listen to rock music. From our music questionnaire the type of music that generally people listen to is Pop, RAP and R’n’B while Rock was lower down. Maybe people do like listening to rock from time to time and generally they listen to other types but still enjoy listening to this type of music.  This means that our selection in music for our audience was most appropriate considering the reactions of our audience. On the other hand, the aspect that people thought was the weakest of the production was the Mise en scene which most people described as "average" and "uninspired". This might be down to our lack of research into appropriate environments to film in and the improvisational nature of the costume design because of the rushed nature of our filming time. If we had another chance to repeat this production we would make sure to dedicate more time to finding filming locations and filming in general to have a higher quality of product. All other aspects of our production got either an excellent or good review, making our production most consistent expect for the previously mentioned reception of our Mise en scene. Other criticisms that have been highlighted have been mostly of the narrative since some people found it a bit confusing, which may be down to the sudden reveal of the other man, changing the meaning of the story. It could have been handled a bit better since there was a lack of foreshadowing in the video and it’s hardly explained within the music video itself. If I was to do this production again we would probably add scenes of the other boyfriend to establish him more into the story. The general feedback, of the print artefacts, was excellent with people saying that it fits the tone of the video and the music. Most of them said that the ancillary text and the video worked well but there were a few who thought that we used many different fonts therefore we should have used basic colour scheme. The use of font was mostly good, a few people said it was excellent meaning that the people could read the text and they liked the font that we used.

Question 4: In the research stage the media technologies we used were ‘Blogger’ to type all the information in that we found. We used it week by week and as we used it before we know few things about the site. It is like a log that we kept, keeping up with everything that we did from the first thing we did in the research part, right to the end of the construction and the evaluation parts. This allowed us to research the codes and conventions of modern music video making and other  information that could be used in media production. We used sites like Google to search for images, information and other things to add to the Blog. This is how we found the stock image of the sunset for our album cover. Through the use of YouTube we were able to watch music videos and analyse them to get some inspiration from real media products, we also embedded the video so that we could watch it from our blog. In the planning stage we thought about few songs which we thought would be appropriate to create a music video under the guidelines of our research and created a synopsis against the song that we had chosen, "Layla", once this was done we drew a storyboard to put together ideas for different shots any other ideas we would want to put within our music production. We added all the information onto our blog to have some evidence of planning. In this stage we sent an email to the company, who has all the rights of the song Layla by Eric Clapton, we asked them if we can borrow the song for non-profit bases and create a music video. The cameras we used were a Sony HD Camera so the footage we filmed was a high quality and we used a tripod to get stable shots within our production. We shot a large variety of different angles and shots to give some variation to our production. In the construction stage the media technologies we used were Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our main production; to add effects like black & white, slow/fast motion and zoom in. A major aspect of the editing was the final montage at the end which revealed the twist which we achieved by cutting in sync with music to give so it looked more professional was highly effective. Another technology that we used was Photoshop to edit and construct the poster and the DIGI pack. We took a few images from the internet, copyright free, and screen shots from our main product to be included in the ancillary texts. We edited the images adding couple of images together and text from the song or a quote from Eric that links with the image that we were creating. The final piece of technology we will use for this production will be a video converter to download the videos necessary to complete this evaluation.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Print Artifacts

Final Production

This is our final Production, a music video Layla by Eric Clapton but acted by our actors and the characters created by us.

Images from the outset

 Images from the outset 

 These are the pictures taken from when we where recording on one of the days. you can see clearly the place that the scene was taking place and the actors and who was the Cameraperson at the time. All these images were taken with my one phone as my project partner was recording. 

 The images were taken from different angles and different times to ensure that the images would show a lot of different angles so that they would not be taken from the same place.

 This image is a still of the characters, the actors were portraying. you can see that the scene is not a happy scene like some of are other scenes.

Filming Blog

Day 1

Today's filming consisted of getting the lip-syncing scenes that will form the main crux of our music video and basically form our timeline. We tried to get as much as we can in our time we had there and we pretty much got what we needed from the session and we didn't deviate too much from the regular plan. We had no trouble filming in our location, which was a street in the local area, and our actor was quite co-operative with us so there were not many misunderstandings or trouble between crew members , though he did have to improvise some of the lip-synching because he forgot to learn the lyrics of the song. Our angles were limited to a medium handheld shot but they were fine and the lip-synching of our actor wasn't that bad either so we got a pretty solid day of filming done. Next time we shall film our plot scenes for our little story which our music video is going to tell.

Day 2

Today's filming took place in the school with all three of our main actors present. We decided to film within the school foundation the scenes of our couple interacting with each other. Most of the shots were improvised and were somewhat experimental using techniques such as handheld and a variety of tracking shots. We managed to include a dance scene of our two protagonists which will most likely be a big part of our main production since it was quite a interesting concept to use within our production. There were hardly any difficulties during today's filming process, except with the final scenes of the major plot twist when we found out that they were cheating on another man, since the actors got a bit giggly and the crew weren't quite sure how to execute the shot in the best way possible. But other then that there were no problems with todays filming.

Day 3

The final day of filming was used to tie up any loose ends in the production's elements and to reshoot one scene which we weren't quite satisfied with. The scene in question was the revelation scene which troubled us because the actor (also part of the crew) who portrayed the betrayed boyfriend didn't like a hand gesture he made the near the ending of the confrontation so we quickly filmed that and went back to giving our production an ending that would hopefully satisfy. We decided it needed to be brief but poignant with a element of the unknown so he decided to leave it with the face of our protagonist looking sad while the girlfriend walks away. No problems and was overall a good end to our filming process, all we need to do know is complete our main production.

Locations

There are couple locations we recorded and this Google maps image is one of the locations we visited. The Cope' s Dr street is a good location to record. We wanted a street which is wide and quiet long as the actor needs to walk, on an average pace, from bottom of the street to the top.

Task 10.2: Risk Assessment-Health & Safety

Risk Assessment
Here is a list of the potential hazards and risks for our music video production and the possible solutions we have come up for our problems to prevent such accidents.

What are the hazards?	Who might be harmed and how?	What are you already doing?	Do you need to do anything else to manage this risk?	Action by whom?	Action by when?	Done
Slips and trips	Staff and visitors may be injured if they trip over objects or slip on spillages	We carry out general good housekeeping. All areas are well lit including stairs. There are no trailing leads or cables. Staff keep work areas clear, eg no boxes left in walkways, deliveries stored immediately, offices cleaned each evening	Better housekeeping is needed in staff kitchen, eg on spills	All staff, supervisor to monitor	01/10/2010	01/10/2010
Road Awareness.	The actors and the employees, a car may hit one of us.	All the employees and employers have a very good road awareness so they know enough that they will not get hit or to leave the equipment lying around on the road. Lastly, The employers and employees are fully briefed on health and safety on and by the road.	Crossing the road when no cars and riding or use the level crossing to cross the roads safely. When recording on the road as soon as a car appears move the equipment and all the employees and employers to move off the road to keep a safe distance.	Lukas Szalbot	3/10/2013	3/10/2013
Equipment used E.G. Camera and tripod.	Employers, employees and even visitors may be injured by the tripod not being used properly.	employers and fully trained to use the camera and the tripod so that the equipment will not be harmed and other people will not be injured by it.	After a while she should go through all the safety tips with all the employers to make sure that they know how to handle the equipment safely.	Lukas and Callum	11/11/2013	11/11/2013

As you can see our production wasn't plagued by too many hazards since it wasn't high risk.

Task 10.1: Production Schedule

Production Schedule

When	Who	What	How	Which
3/10/2013	Sam - Eric	1.       Street scene.	Backward Tracking, horizontal tracking. Multiple camera angles. E.g. close ups extreme long shots. Also, Pans left and right. Zoom in and out.	Full HD camera, tripod with casual wear (costume). MP3 player with earphones.
14/10/2013	All three	2.       Work place	Horizontal tracking, pans zoom in and out,	Work clothes (professional costume for all three characters), tripod and full HD camera.
11/11/2013	All Three	3.       Fight scene + work place but re-recording one part of scene.	Pans, forward and backward tracking.	Full HD Camera and Tripod. Professional work clothes for all three characters.

Task 9: Casting

Casting

Eric - Sam, He is the protagonist which is in love with his friends girlfriend.
He will need professional work clothes, like: a suit with a tie, white shirt and trousers. This will make him look professional. Another costume he will wear casual clothes e.g. Jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper with a hood.   

Steve - Lukas Szalbot, he is the boyfriend of Layla
Also, he will wear the similar professional work clothes like Sam

Layla - Kristy Guy, she is the love interest of Eric who is cheating on her boyfriend with him.
Lastly, she will also wear work clothes as they all go to work together but her boyfriend works on a different floor to her and Sam. 

Copyright email

Copyright 

We sent an email to the copyright holders of Criteria Recording studios to get copyright of the song by Eric Clapton and the song's name is Layla. 

This is the letter:

The letter said: Dear Sir/Madame We are A2 students, studying media studies in college and we would like approval of your song by Eric Clapton Layla. This is for non-profit reasons and require for our music video for educational purposes. We hope you approve of our request as this would greatly help with our project. Thank you for your time. Kind regards from Lukas and Callum.

Task 8: Final Proposal

                                                                          Final Proposal
Title 

We decided to do a music video to the song by Eric Clapton called Layla. The song is about someone who has an affair with someone’s girlfriend and he is questioning about their relationship, are they in love or was it just for fun.

George Harrison married Pattie Boyd in 1966, a model he met during the filming of 'A Hard Day's Night. In the 1960s, Clapton and Harrison became close friends. They worked together on couple songs. Their relationship was short lived, after Clapton fell in love with his wife.

Image of Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton, with his band, wrote a song about this situation, it’s called "Layla".  The title, "Layla", was inspired by the story of Layla and Majnun. By the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. When Eric wrote the song "Layla", Ian Dallas told him of this story. The tale of Nizami is about a moon princess who was married off, by her father, to someone other than the one who was desperately in love with her, resulting in Majnun's madness, and so Eric named the song after her name.

Genre 
The song is blues, rock. Also, the song will be mostly narrative but it will have some concepts of performance based.

Channel of broadcast
We have decided that the channel of broadcast would be on Kerrang because the genre of the song links in with the channel as they would generally show Rock music.


Another broadcasting channel it could be shown is on VH1, as this song is quite old and it is a classic, VH1 show classic songs so they will play this song on their channel.

Target Audience
We think that the target Audience is about 16-40 year old people, as anyone would enjoy listening to this song as it is quiet an old song so the older generation would listen to it when they were teenagers. Also, it can be for teenagers as their parents may show the song to them and they may like it. It may not be a song that came out a week ago but some teenager may still listen to this kind of music.  We think it is for both males and females. The class is unspecified. We think it is mostly mostly for the Western Audience ethnicity.

Style
The main character names is Eric
The females name is Layla
The other males name is George

The idea of are music video is about a man called Eric who has an affair with someones girlfriend. At first, they are having fun but later, Eric wants more from their relationship so he is walking to her house see where they are in their relationship. Is she going to leave her partner and go out with Eric or is she going to stay with George?

A Mastershot of Eric with a very slow zoom in to his face, with cuts in between to two people arguing.
It will show some flash backs of Eric and Layla being together, being happy, while he is walking to her house singing. and also it will have her and her boyfriend being unhappy. There will be shots of  a couple, in shadows, who are arguing and you would expect that the two people arguing are Eric and Layal, but it is actually Layla and George.

 The style of the music video is with a range of camera angles from Long shots to Close ups. The video will include camera movements like pans, Backward & forward tracking with very slow zoom in/out. Also, we may use black and white footage to distinct different footage between them.
In terms of editing we will use dissolves, fades, fast and slow motion footage.  

This is our original plot line but since the production started we changed it as we thought there would be a better way. So we had footage with Eric and Layla being happy, holding while walking and even dancing together. When they sneak into a room and George sees them together, they fight and he leaves. Soon after, Eric and Layla fight as well and she walks away from him.

During these narrative parts we added Eric, just him singing making this our performance based scene. He is wearing casual clothes unlike when he is with her; he is in his professional clothes. This scene we find out at the end to be the future scene while all the other scenes are him reflecting about his relationship with her. 

Task 7 - Role Allocations

Role Allocations
These are the roles we will adapt to make out music video. there are only two of us so all the ntasks will be halved.

Callum Ford - Writer (Storyline), Co - Director and Editor
Lukas Szalbot - Director, Camera person, and Editor

Task 6 - Storyboard

Storyboard

This is our storyboard for our music video: 

Lyrics for the song 'Layla' and The Song itself

Eric Clapton - Layla

What will you do when you get lonely?

No one is waiting by your side?

You've been running and hiding much too long

You know it's just your foolish pride

Layla, you got me on my knees

Layla, I'm begging darlin' please

Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind?

Tried to give you consolation

Your old man let you down

 Like a fool, I fell in love with you

You turned my whole world upside down

Layla, you got me on my knees

Layla, I'm begging darlin' please

Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind?

Make the best of the situation

Before I finally go insane

Please don't say we'll never find a way

Or tell me all my love's in vain

Layla, you got me on my knees

Layla, I'm begging darlin' please

Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind?

Layla, you got me on my knees

Layla, I'm begging darlin' please

Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind?

Here is the actual performance below on youtube:

Task 4: Music Questionnaire By Lukas Szalbot

                 Music Video Questionnaire

1.    Which type of music video style do you prefer?

A.   Performance (The Artist/band performs the song in the video)

B.   Abstract (A Music video which is unconventional and very creative)

C.   Narrative (There is a story within the music video)

2.    What is your favourite music video?

________________________________________________________

And why?

________________________________________________________

3.    What format do you watch music videos on? (Circle all which you use)  

A.   YouTube

B.   TV Channels (e.g.: MTV)

C.   Mobile

D.   ITunes

E.   Spotify

F.    IPod/Mp3

G.   Other: ______________________________________________

4.    What style of music do you prefer?

A.   Pop

B.   Classic

C.   Rock

D.   Rap/Hip-hop

E.   R’n’B

F.    Other: ________________________________________________

And why do you prefer this?

______________________________________________________

5.    What is you’re favourite music video from the genre you have chosen?

________________________________________________________

And why?

________________________________________________________

6.    Out of all the music channels, which channel is your favourite and why?

________________________________________________________

7.    What makes a good music video?

A.   Lot’s of special effects (CGI, Animation etc.)

B.   Very Little special effects (Real People and real situations)

C.   Lot’s of action (Fast cuts, Fast tempo song)

D.   Slow, Relaxed music

E.   Other: ________________________________________________

Why do you prefer this?

________________________________________________________

8.    Where on you’re preferred music channel do you prefer the channel logo to be positioned? (Please draw where on the TV below where you prefer the logo to be placed?)

9.    Do you prefer?

A.   Parody Music videos (Music videos that mimic an original song by changing the lyrics so they have comical value)  

B.   Deconstructed music videos (Videos which pay respect towards older music videos)

C.   Experimental music videos (Unconventional and abstract videos which are different and have not been done before)

D.   Classic Music videos

And why?

________________________________________________________

10. In you’re opinion, what length is ideal for a music video?

A.   1-3 Minutes

B.   3-5 Minutes

C.   5+ Minutes

11. Do you prefer a serious, straight to the point or a un-serious/comical music video?

A.      Serious music video

B.      Un-Serious music video

Thank you.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The results were:

1.

A - 3 votes/ performance based was second most popular

B - 1

C - 4/ Narrative was the most popular =that is why we will use a narrative based video than the others.

2. Favourite music video: Rudimental - waiting all night has three votes, Carly Rae Jepsen - Call me maybe has two votes, LMFAO-  I am sexy and i know it, Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication - it is a very cool video and it is very Abstract (three votes). Ed Sheeran - Give me love (three votes)

3.

A - 6 votes/YouTube which shows us that most people watch/listen to music videos online as it is easier and quicker to see/hear your favourite music video.

B - 4/ TV Channel is second top which shows there are people that still listen to music using TV

C - 3/Mobile so people also listen to music on the go.

D - 2

E - 0

F - 2

G - 0

4.

A - 4 Votes/ Pop reason for this is because "More fun videos"

B - 0

C - 1/ Rock - It may not be the most popular but we choose to do this as it would be good to do this one.

D - 3/ Rap/Hip-Hop - These two are second popular as currently there are most songs being made into these genres.

E - 3/ R'n'B -

F - Folk (1 vote)

5. Beyoncé - Single ladies/ "It is fun and lots of dancing"

Jay z - Run this town

(These are some videos that people have said)

6.

MTV - 6 votes/ it has a range of different music on.

7.

A - 4 votes/ Lots of special effects. Some people would look to see a lot of special effects, but it is kind of tide, as second most popular is very littler special effects.

B - 3 / very little special effects.

C - 3/ lots of action

D - 0

E - 1/women

8.

4 votes for Top left

3 for top left

3 for right left

9.

A - 3 votes/ parodies

B - 2

C - 4. Abstract/Experimental 

D - 1

10.

A - 4 votes/ 1-3 minutes

B - 5/ 3-5 Minutes

C - 1/

11

A - 5/ Serious

B - 5/ not serious

This is tied so people like to watch both serious and not serious music videos.

Task 4 Music Video Questionnaire Results by Callum Ford

The audience I am appealing to are the people in the 16-20 year old's range for both sexes. This makes it easy for me, since I am within this age group which makes it easy for me to appeal since I know what the majority of my age group likes and I have no limits to who I can appeal to in gender areas.

People mostly watch their music videos on the internet, probably from the convenience and the availability of the internet to most audiences. Which is why some people voted for phone you can only really get music videos from the internet.

Most of my audience agree that a narrative based music videos are the best out of the three catergories since it technically gives more to the audience, by telling them a story. And I suppose it could make it more personal with the addition of a story.

It seems my target audience prefers Rock music with just pop folling in from behind. This will make me think about what song I should choose for my music video. This is probably due to the amount f sub-genres of rock that I think this type of music was selected rather then just singular rock.

Most people agree that the themes of the song must match or relate to the themes of the music video in this age group. It makes sense since you want consistency in tone with the medium; there is no point in showing a happy story to compliment a sad song.

Most people agree that background noise should be included in music videos even though it was quite close with the votes. This might be because of storytelling or just general reasons but if I want to include other noise in my music video I am not going to get much objection.

Its quite a landslide here that people think that special effects are especially important in music videos which I find suprising. I guess when you have a good director and story it is less then enough for the audience so special effects aren’t particuary necessary.

It seems in the eye of my audience that editing is a key thing in creating a music video which does make sense. Editing if not highly refined can diminish the effect of any visual medium whether in film or television so it should e no less for music videos.

This was quite a shock to me when I saw this result but I guess I should have expected since this is the generation that celebrate individuality and uniqueness and raised in a time where indie is considered king. It seems it’s not about appealing to people; it’s about creating your own identity.

In conclusion these demands given by my audience are doable and somewhat interesting because they have given us a kind of leniency in terms of what I can do so I can be really creative with this medium thankfully.