Monday, November 25, 2019

Filming process

Last Friday marked to first day of filming for my group and I. To recap, my group and I are doing a music video for Hollaback by Gwen Stefani. We have a total of three locations for our music video. Our school, a grocery store and a park. My group and I figured that we could get some of the filming out of the way by staying after school on friday to film. I felt a little nervous to film after school. This is because we needed to have the track field in the back of the shots that we needed. Usually this is ok but this time in the season there are a lot of sports on the field. We have track practice, wrestling, and soccer practice all out on the same field. Nevertheless we were still able to film most of what we needed.
When we first of to the field there was only the wrestling team on the field. Since they were the only ones there my group and I asked their coach if we could film on the field. To our surprise the coach said that we could. We proceed to film but very fast so we weren't in anyone's way. Our shots that we need to film were the opening shots and a shot of all of us dancing for the compilation that we want to make for the end of the music video. The shots might sound easy but it turns out we had to take a lot of time on just the first opening shot. For the first shot we wanted to film the main protagonist getting back at the bully  then walking away with the music playing in the background. The difficult part was trying not to laugh. Whenever anyone films with friends there are bound to be a couple of laughs. We had a lot more laughs than we wanted.
The other difficulty we came across was all of the sports that were happening around us. Since  we were on the track, the track team was practicing. Every time we were filming a part of the music video the track team would run in between us and we would have to reshot the scene. Instead of stopping we decided to time the runners so when ever they would go past us we could go back to filming. We are still amateurs at film. We can see this because we needed to film a clip of all of our group dancing for our music video. We were so rushed to go that we totally forgot to film that scene. Now we have to go back to the same spot to film that scene on Tuesday. Nevertheless we got what we mainly needed to do done. Not only that but the video that we got was really good. I'm really excited to see the end result of our project.

Friday, November 22, 2019

Storyboard blog

Hello! Today my group and I’s next step into making our music video was to create our storyboard. We utilized the storyboards in our last project and it ended up being extremely helpful. With a clear and percise storyboard to reference when we film it tell us exactly how we want our vision to be brought to life. In the first box which represents about 4 seconds of the song we will be shooting on a soccer feild and we will use a tracking shot to film the main girl (Ava) walking up to the villain (Alex) bad talking her. Then the next box is the next 4 seconds and Ava goes to slap Alex and the beat drops and the beginning of the lyrics begin. Then the next box is representing when the chorus starts which is 9 seconds long and it’s a tracking two shot. Then the next 9 seconds is the chorus again and it will be Ava still walking on the track lip syncing to the chorus. Then as you can see in the 5th box it jumps to a grocery store where we will film us dancing in the aisle for 17 seconds. The next box jumps to us in bayview park where we will continue to use a tracking shot while the next verse plays. Box 7 will be a flashback to show how the problem/ fight in the video had begun. Then the next box is back in bayview. We will continue to sing the next part of the song before it jumps back to the chorus. So far we had filmed in 3 different locations the feild, the grocery store, and the park and for our last two boxes we decided it would be cool if we shot us dancing in a combination of all locations. We will sing to the chorus again until the end finish time switching back and forth between all locations. And that is our set storyboard plan for filming our music video of Hollaback girl by Gwen Stefani. I am so excited to begin filming especially with such a detailed storyboard to help guide our vision.

Planning blog for music video

Hello ! My team and I are in the beginning process of planning for our music video project which is for the song Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani. We were all estastic when we realized we were going to be able to create or own style video for this song. We got into class and sat together we had a little bit of a vision of what we wanted the project to look like we didn’t have it scene by scene played out. We were excited to sit down and put our ideas together and on paper to bring our video to life. We all individually brainstormed for a few minutes thinking of just where to start. We knew that the planning stage was very vital to creating a successful end product. With being very organized we knew it would make the whole filming process much easier. It for sure did with our commercial project. So then we began.
  The first thing that we did was watch the music video and pick which minute and 15 seconds we wanted to use for our video. We all agreed to use the first minute and 15 seconds which we thought was a good idea becuase the beginning sets the tone and includes the chorus twice. Then we googled the lyrics to section them off in different parts for how we wanted to film for each lyric line. So on a paper we wrote down each line and figured out how much time it took up. It ended up being a total of one minute and 13 seconds. As we went through we shared some good ideas of what we can act out for the lyrics. In the beginning we decided that we wanted to start off with a fight type scene becuase we felt as though the song was about a fight so we thought it was appropriate. During that time we also thought it would be a good idea to insert a flashback of why a fight was breaking out. And then it was time to think about our Mis en scene.
 We needed to pick our locations next. So we thought it would be a good idea to shoot the first shot on our school’s soccer feild and then the next couple of ones of on our track. Then we came up with shooting in a grocery store as well to add some diversity and also in a park and then for the last 17 seconds which is the chorus to shoot a combination of us in all of our locations. Then we were expressed the importance of health and safety, so we will be having a first aid kit with us at all times and whenever we are driving to any location all of us will be wearing a seat belt. Our lighting will be bright. We will have props such as grocery carts, a ball, backpacks, and food. Our costumes will be as close to the original video as possible to give off the same vibes and follow that convention such as straight hair, chains, hoops, crop tank tops, jeans, and beanies. Overall we are very excited to start filming becuase our planning makes it seem like it’s going to be very fun to film.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Intro to the Music video

Today marks a new project. We are saying goodbye to the commercial project and introducing the Music video project, but before we really say goodbye I'm going to reflect on what we did. In the first project we had a lot of things that worked for us  and turn out really good in our commercial. One thing that really worked was the storyboarding process and the filming process. The storyboarding process went super well because we had some really good ideas that really translated well onto the paper and while filming. I also drew the storyboard and got everyone onboard with the ideas before we had to film. This made the filming process very smooth.  Talking about the filming process, I was very fortunate to have such a great group to film with. Everyone in my group pulled their own weight and came together to make the commercial great. Some things that we can work on are the editing process. For our group the editing process didn't go as well as we hoped it would. We had a lot of bumps in the road but at the end we pulled through and got our project done.
   The song that we chose is "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani. This song was released in 2005 and the music video was released in 2009. This song did very well ever since it hit the charts. We as a group love this song and are really excited to make a music video for this song. We as a group chose this song because we all remember jamming out to this song in the back of the car. This song peaked at the number one on the Billboard  Top 100 for eight weeks when it first came out. As soon as we talked about doing this song a lot of ideas piped into my head for what we can do for this song.
   The conversation for this music video can be summed up in the abbreviations "CLAMPS".
1. C- the costumes for this music video would be early 2000's attire. This includes tank tops, low rise jeans, beanies, and California inspired cloths.
2. L- is for lighting, the lighting in this particular music video took place in the middle of the day and at night. This means the lighting for most of the music video was bright.
3. A- the actors in their video had a lot of young adults. The actors were seen to have a good time.
4. M- the makeup for this video had a lot of makeup looks from the early 2000's. This includes caked on makeup, thin eyebrows and dark eyeshadow.
5. P- the props used in the music video are very random but they also connect to the locations. The props include Pom poms that cheerleaders use, a car, signs, etc.
6. S- the setting for this music video was in a grocery store, school campus, and the street. All of these locations connects to the props that is used in the music video.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Editing blog

    Finally the day has come to start actually editing our commercial. We have two days to edit our final commercial. The first day of editing was on Tuesday, 11/5/19. This day didn't go as we planed. instead of getting the full class to do our work, we had complications with the technology that we were using. First of all we forgot to transfer the downloaded shots that we took for our commercial onto our google accounts. This was a very important step to do but we forgot to do it. This created complications for us because we needed to get into the computers that was said to not work. We tried and failed for what seemed like hours but finally for some reason that's unknown the computer turned on and started working! Before all of this happened we attempted to put all of our shots onto a flash drive. Unfortunately this certain flash drive did not work. This is why we were in this certain predicament.
    Once we were into the computer I took out another flash drive that I knew worked because I always use it for anything that I do. After we fixed the problem we had to get the footage in the app that is used for our editing.  This app was known to be a little slow but after what we just went through all we wanted to do is get this commercial completed. Im not sure if it was just our computer but it was acting kinda slow but, nevertheless we got onto the app and chose which shots were going into our final cut. Once we had them we laid them all out and watched all of the cuts together. We were really impressed at what we had. We were contemplating on what sound we should put in our commercial. At first we were trying to put the McDonalds jingle in the background as our music. there was just one problem we have never tried to make a sound into an MP3. We tried to turn the music into an MP3 but all of the sites that we tried to use did not work. Then, the bell rang and we had to leave.
     Which takes us to today Thursday, 11/7/19. Today my group and I knew that we had to get our butts in gear so we could turn in our commercial on time. Today we only had 45 minutes to work on our commercials. This is because it was a PSD day. Once we entered the class room my group scattered. We knew what we needed to do, I was on computer job. I got the computer and put in the flash drive to start working on our commercial. We decided to instead of putting in the McDonalds music in the background. We wanted to add a school bell sound effect to make the scene more realistic. Once again we came across the same problem with trying to turn the sound into an MP3. This time we got some help from a fellow student. He showed out a site that actually worked. We added our sound to the first part of our commercial and finished editing. And by the end of the period we were done with our project and turned it in.