1. Did you enjoy the main workshop shoot day? What role(s) did you take and what did you learn? What were your best bits and why?

I found the workshop shoot day to be a very long and tiring day but a very enjoyable one with a chance to experience a lot of new things. When I was in front of the camera, I played the drummer but my job didn't end there as when behind the camera, I was helping with cable bashing, using the clapper board and reflecting light.

Playing the drums

• I was the drummer for Band 1, which was one of the roles that I was happy to play. It was quite difficult to play as the drummer was the only role where you actually had to play the instrument rather than just miming it. This made it quite distracting as I have no drum experience so was pretty much just making random noises. However, after a few days of getting used to this, I learnt to ignore the sound and really focussed on the importance of gesture and facial expression.

Cable bashing for Shayam with Monica pushing the dolly

• Cable bashing involved keeping the cables aware from Jack, out cameraman, so he wouldn't trip up whilst filming. We practised in the lead up to the shoot and on the day, I did a lot of cable bashing. It was particularly important on the handheld shots where we had to be I had to be ready to move quickly to keep the cables away from Jack.

• Reflecting light was something new to me. It required me to hold a large reflector and keep still during the shot. This was sometimes quite hard as some of the shots were quite long and it was hard not to move.



The reflector on its stand

• Clapper boarding was nothing new to me but it was interesting that we didn't need to actually need to clap the board seeing as we weren't going to be using any of the sound in editing

• I tried to find out as much as possible about the industry as we were working with professionals. Jack taught us about a range of different lenses and what they did which I found very interesting.

Here is a timelapse showing what happened on set.

2. What have you learnt from participating in each prelim tasks 1,2,3 and 5?

Task 1: The Audition Video

For task 1, we had to lipsync the song and I realised the importance of really exaggerating our perfomance. However, as I was not that confident on the words, this came across quite clearly in the video as there was a bit of a lack of emphasis on performance by myself. It was also helpful for giving us a basic understanding of how music videos are created in the edit and the layering up of shots on the timeline.

Working with Jasmine to get into role

Task 2: Learn and practise your performance

I was assigned the role of drummer and I learnt the importance of warming up and stretching out before performance. Once this was done, the focus was on becoming the character. The drummer is extremely energetic meaning we had to portray this. There was a particular emphasis on body language and facial expression as this could really make the difference between an average performance and a realistic performance.

Task 3: Help to plan and organize your costume

Our headshots were sent to the make up artist

My finished costume

Task 3 involved pulling outfits together from a huge range of sources; all of us brought in items of clothing that could fit one of the roles of the band and we borrowed clothing from each other. I found that even though we could match the costume perfectly in most cases, sometimes, we did even more to enhance it. For example, I had an orange streak through my hair and wore guyliner to get more into the 'rock look'.

Task 5: Editing

Eddie and I editing

A shot after grading

Task 5 was really eye-opening into the amount of effort that goes into editing a music video. Syncing the clips to the music was only the beginning of what we had to do as after this, we had to flip, grade and add flashes to shots, all of which took a very long time compared to how long the desired effect actually lasts. I found the most interesting part of the edit to be the addition of the 'luma corrector' tool which we could use to add flashes into the shots. However, the amount of time that went into one shot was very surprising but very worth it in the end after seeing how our finished remake looked.

3. Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

Misery Business Remake - Eddie + Mario from Latymermedia on Vimeo.

Overall, I'm very pleased with how our edit turned out. I believe we did a great job in matching our edit to the original music video but we found a few issues where we hadn't filmed exact shots so had to improvise by replacing them with other shots. This process took a while as we had to look through all our footage to find a shot that would fit. There was a lot of excitement on the day and I feel this really helped to enhance the quality of our
footage.

I would say the edit is how we expected it to look as the quality of footage was really high and very similar to the original. This meant that it was down to us in editing to create a good remake which I feel we done. Eddie and I were confident in our ability to finish the edit and to a high standard.

Before and after the use of procamp

I feel we graded our shots to a particularly high standard and this gave our edit the polished look to make it feel very similar to the original. I believe our addition of flashes were also very good and worked really well.

In future, I would like to ensure that we get usable footage for every shot as this turned out to be a bit of an issue for a few shots for the remake.

4. How do you think your prelim experiences will impact on your approach to next term's music video coursework?

I think the prelim experience has really helped to prepare me for the music video coursework next year as I got an insight into how much preparation and work goes into creating a successful music video.

Getting my hair and make up done

At first, I gave very little consideration into the variety of different areas that need to be thought about. However, this experience enabled me to see all of the preparation that went into creating a music video. We had a fairly large crew to undertake all of this and the fact that we will have to do all of this for ourselves next term highlights that we should not underestimate the size of the task and it may be necessary to get some outside help in to help us with our shoots.

One of our documents

Sheet to help us with the edit

I believe the prelim will be particularly useful for helping us to be prepared next term. We saw how much preparation went into this shoot and how successful it turned out so if we put in a similar amount of preparation next term, we may also be able to come out with a great music video. We had comprehensive documents so there was no doubt about anything and if we can recreate this next year, it would be very useful.




A short behind the scenes video showing our experiences.