Phil Tidy: music producer.

Phil Tidy - is a producer in the music industry, who came up to our school to share with us his experience in making music videos. 

He owns a production company Squire, which produces music videos and commercials. He showed us some of his works, explaining how they've been created and giving different hints and 'golden rules' about the industry of music videos.

Music video - is one of the ways to promote new song or new artist. They were born in early 80s with the main aim to promote and sell records to the customers.

As Phil knows we are about to make our first music video he gave us a set of questions, which might help us to organise our work:

1) Can the production be made with the given budget?

2) What is the most efficient way to pitch your idea?

3) How to promote the product successfully?

He also showed us his favourite music video:

Choreography for the 2nd element.

These are the videos of people dancing along 'Chasing Highs' by ALMA. The dance is quite good, so we may use it as an inspiration for our second element:

Production schedule.

This is the PRODUCTION SCHEDULE   we've put together, which will help us to be more organised on the shooting day and make sure we don't spend too much time on any one element:   

Shot list.

This is a SHOT LIST for our music video and each of the three elements. This plan will be very helpful during the shooting day as relying on it will save us time:

 

Call sheet.

This is a CALL SHEET table with all of the phone numbers and e-mail addressees of the cast and crew. It's needed to keep in touch with each other in case of any last-minute problems like if one of the actors doesn't turn up on the day:

  

Set: changes.

After seeing the set designers we had to slightly change our third element.

Basically, now, instead of just bed or just sheets, we will film our main artist from inside the sheets from above on the bed with lights, that look like the ones on the pictures below. The lighting in the third element will change from white to red, reflecting on the mood of the singer and playing on the contrast. However, the rest of the feedback was positive, so our elements 1 and 2 remain the same. I appreciate the work done by set designer and the fact they are helping us. Overall, I am happy that our idea is slowly bringing to life.

Set: feedback from set designers.

Today we have met the set designers, that will build our sets for the music video. We pitched our idea to them and showed some photos. This is the feedback we received:

1) They said the red room for the first element is tricky, as there is no such thing as infinity roll in red colour. Instead, they said they might make it from some material or fabric, like the one used for making curtains. 

2) They said the bed in the third element would not look good in our idea, as we already have the sofas in the first element. They were more positive about filming her inside the sheets - it's simpler to do, but would look better on camera. They also suggested to stick the stick the sheets to the ceiling and film her from the top, almost at the bird's eye angle.

3) They said that for the first element it's better to have one sofa and just change the fabric from white to red when we need, rather than having two sofas. Also, the sofa should be big enough for her to stand, sit, lye on it. 

4) For the second element, we were told the bulbs might work, but it would be better to group them in one place, rather than spreading around the room. Also, for that element, we will need to have blinders if we want to make the dancers silhouettes.

Set: planning.

After discussing all of our elements and sets to each of them, Anastasia drew a brief sketch of those to show to set designers:

Legal letter.

This is the legal letter we wrote, in order to inform we will be using AlMA's track for our A-levels:

Storyboard: animated video.

This is an animated storyboard we put together in order to see roughly the shape of our music video:

Storyboard: final draft.

This is a final draft of the story board for our music video, which Andrew has embedded in the SlideShare:

Storyboard from Andrew Jensen

Storyboard: process.

I'm the lucky one in our group, as I'm doing a storyboard...

In order for me to have enough time to do it properly, I will spend every Media lesson the whole week doing storyboarding in class, while the rest of my group will work on other aspects of pre-production such as finding cast and costumes.

Mainly, it's not much of a hard work. The rest of my group have written the notes for me, which I just transform into pictures. Moreover, I have a timeline next to me, which helps me to fill in the times by seconds and create a more accurate storyboard, which will help us during editing.

This is the picture of me drawing a storyboard in the lesson.

I did 4/10 pages so far:

Storyboard: top tips.

This is the sheet our teacher gave us, which contains some advises and top-tips about how to create a good storyboard and why it's so important in filmmaking:  

Casting: emailing the full list.

This is the full cast list we e-mailed to our teacher. It contains the first choices for all three elements and the back-ups:

Casting: dancers first choices.

After a short discussion we decided to have Eden and Max as our first choice for the second element.

First of all, they dance together a lot, so its beneficial for us, as they already have an experience of dancing with each other, so it wouldn't feel awkward for them. Also, they both are good-looking and also look good as a couple, which is also quite important in the music video.

This is Eden and Max dancing during the test shoot:

Casting: dancers test shoot.

We asked a couple of people in our school to dance along with 'Chasing Highs' in order to see who we can use as dancers for our second element:

Casting: lead singer first choice.

After the auditions we met as a group to share the opinions about which girl is a best choice for being Cheri. We decided that we would go for a teenager, rather than a woman, so we didn't choose Lottie, even though she was very confident and looked good on camera. 

As a result, we decided our first choice will be Tea:

Despite from her pretty looks, she was very confident on the shooting day. Moreover, we saw the potential of creating a pop star image for her, based on her looks and attitude. We thought she would best fit our idea with the colour juxtaposition and red lipstick would look good on her.

Casting: lead singer test shoot video.

This is a video from the audition for the lead singer in our music video.
We've asked all of the girls to lipsync for 20 seconds and to interact with the sofa, as our Cheri would do in the 1st element. As I've said previously, we were looking for a pretty girls, who is not afraid of camera and knows how to express herself and engage her audience:

Casting: lead singer auditions.

These are all the girls we invited for the test shoot. All of them are from our school and one of them is our teacher:

Basically, we asked all of the girls to lipsync to 'Chasing Highs' for around 20 seconds, while interacting with the sofa. 
We were looking for the confident young woman, who can successfully express her beauty and communicate with the audience behind the lens. 

These are some pictures from the test shoot:

Casting: e-mailing the girls.

This is an email Andrew and Anastasia sent to our possible cast, inviting them to an audition. The email was sent to 4 girls and 1 teacher in our school:

Casting: braces.

 

Out of three girls we saw in the canteen, me and Anastasia, really liked the girl called Hannah, cause she is pretty and blond, which is exactly what we look for.

This is Hannah:

However, Andrew disagreed with us, only because she has braces. 

He said: 'Show me one famous star that wears braces'. 
Anastasia sent this: 

Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez:

However, this didn't help and after a loooooong discussion we decided not to take Hannah, but to look for more options, as during the lipsyncing part braces will stand out, which may destroy the image we have constructed for Cheri.

Casting: photographs.

C A S T I N G !

These are the pictures of the girls we are planning to cast:

After the discussion on the group chat we've decided to invite all of the girls to an audition, where we would ask them to lipsync to 'Chasing Highs' for around 20 seconds. This is needed in order to see how they act in front of the camera and whether they are confident enough to be a lead singer in a music video.

Casting: start finding.

We didn't want to bring anybody outside of school to be our Cheri, as it's just an extra effort, that might not worth it in the end. So we talked amongst ourselves in order to see if we know anybody from school who would fit and this is the list of girls we briefly wrote: 

I don't know anyone from above apart from Lottie, so we decided to photograph every girl and send the pictures to our group chat to decide, which ones we will ask to come to an audition.