A1. Informing Ideas
A2. Communication Skills
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A5. Approach Method
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Oliver Burch's
Level 3 Creative Digital Media Music Video Webpage
A1.1 Investigation
Research, exploration and experimentation to inform understanding of practise and development as the project progresses.
A1.2 Communication
Communicating ideas, intentions and development through practical work.
A1.4 Development
Use of creative development processes to refine and review work and personal skills.
A1.5 Approach
Engagement in productive ways of working. Both interdependently and with others
A1.3 Practical skills
Through selection and manipulation of media, techniques and material to progress, produce and present work.
My initial thoughts on the project:
When we first started 6 weeks ago, the task of creating a music video seemed daunting from all the choices we had to make; from the song choice to the themes to the deadline already rapidly approaching.
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Luckily, the group and I had been pondering what to do for our music video module well before it came around, producing a handful of seedling ideas waiting to be watered by the groups' approval and nurtured with our careful consideration.
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Unlike previous productions, this time I decided to put myself in charge of the camerawork as well which proved a challenge but also a valuable learning experience.
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I feel a music video is an important factor of a song as it personifies otherwise meaningless lyrics into something someone can visualise when listening. Not only that, but it adds context to the music as well as implying a certain way to interpret the song.
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Both the music and the video accompanying it share a special bond where they compliment one another.
Now the big question is...
"How did we get here?"
Section one;
Preproduction Planning Phase
Creating something like a music video is like getting from point A to B in a car;
You have to plan your route first otherwise you shall get lost.
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With a music video, this carries over only metaphorically.
This section will focus on everything before the production phase.
The first thing I had to do was to talk to my group about what we wanted to do for our music video; the topic, lyrics, tone and themes were all decided before anything else and took a couple of days to carefully consider what will work and what won't.
Our group decided it was best to rapid-fire ideas and see what stuck for us
Reasons why we turned down some ideas:
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1) We did not all agree on them
2) Some of them were poor taste/could end up being offensive because people are affected by these issues
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3) These ideas did not give us much depth to work with
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Once we had decided on the idea of making a song about the things we like and hate, we borrowed the structure of another program called "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared", but altering the ending style.
After we had our script, the next hurdle was to create a storyboard to visualise my idea of the music video to share with the group so we were all on the same page.
Here is a screenshot of the previsualisation I have made in Blender. Blender is a 3D modelling-sculpting-animating hybrid that was a skill I developed even more this module. The two top windows are the viewports where you can see:
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The placed camera's perspective on the left,
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and the editing window on the right.
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At the very bottom, you can observe the dope sheet, which is
responsible for tracking the key frames of the animation. Key frames are points in time that hold information on where an object resides.
Pressing play on the timeline runs the timeline from left to right at the speed of the framerate (which means that this animation is 24 frames per second, 24 steps pass in a second), and this makes the objects appear animated.
Once this is finished and compiled into a video where happy, it looks a bit like this...
As I am not skilled at drawing, but luckily I found that I can make significantly better
storyboards in a 3D plane rather than with paper and a pencil. Digital animation allows you to flesh-out a good quality animation at twice the speed it would take a good artist to do so, as well as being able to undo mistakes in an instant.
As I composed the music, I also wanted to record vocals in college, so I did.
"I hope I look the way I sound in the music video."
Recording the audio took longer than expected, probably due to the fact that I kept messing it up due to being nervous, being around people and laughing or the occasional knock at the door halting the recording...
...Although I blame the Macs.
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As every computer everywhere else is on the Windows OS, it was quickly figured out that there will be and was compatibility issues; just saving recordings was a hassle on top of that because of the layout change and the lack of a right-clickable mouse.
I learnt 3 things that day;
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that recording lyrics is hard for me,
that recording lyrics is fun for me,
that Mac computers are very different from Windows and that it slows down production to use them.
As a part of our music video research, we had to analyse 2 different music videos and then compare the two at the end.
Here is mine on
"Gorillaz - Humility" and "Why Can't We Be Friends? - Smash Mouth".
We also decided to make a questionnaire to gather viewer's thoughts on what they valued in a music video:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/M2KKXX5
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Here we can see that the everyone agrees that music videos should have a coherent plot as well as special effects, dancing and multiple locations. It is also visable that the need for celebrities and lip syncing isn't such a high priority for viewers.
We also took notes on aspect ratio and resolution to help us decide what is right for our music video:
Head-hunting
Pre-Production
Research
Scripting
Planning
Writing the plot
Location Scouting
Financing
Pitching
Writers
Risks assessment
Production
Camera Operator
Pitching
Filming
Lights
Actors
Directors
Location
Pitching
Props
Post-Production
Editing
Distribution
Audience
Screening
Chroma-Key
Feedback
Now we have the planning down, it is time to pitch the idea properly to get the green light of approval.
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We Are Trapped! - A music video proposal
For our music video, we have decided to make our own song. This song is called “We Are Trapped” and has been composed by myself and sung by the group. The song in full is 4 minutes and 10 seconds long but will be extended by a few seconds for a suitable outro/intro. The song will fit around the music video and follow the narrative that the main character (name yet to be decided), is holding the other two hostage and is forcing them to perform the song forever. The genre of the video itself will be a black comedy piece that draws inspiration from a popular web show turned television show “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” The music video is projected to take at most 2 days to record and about a week to edit as the recording is done in one two locations very close by and the editing days are due to the research and development side of our editing skills; we intend to use skills we do not yet fully understand such as color keying with green screen technology. Since we have four people in our group, one shall handle the camera whilst the others will be actors.
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My Music Video Mood Board
Section 2;
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The Production Phase
Now at this point, we had the framework set down to begin the second-longest phase of making the music video.
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This section will contain the filming and anything on-set.
Once we were in the room of recording, we decided to turn on the camera to get to grips with its mechanics.
We also wanted to get footage of the camera before editing it's settings.
If we had not changed any of the settings, our music video would have looked more like this:
Instantly did we realise that we would have to change the settings on the camera, increasing the exposure by increasing the ISO to let more light into the camera's sensor, making the image brighter.
Once we had sorted out the camera settings, we then decided to build the scene. whilst the scene was intended to be set up with a greenscreen, the scene wasn't entirely false as we needed a table and three chairs. This simple setup mimics the "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" layout that we were trying to parody.
Before we started filming, we had to get into characters. We spent around 10 to 15 minutes doing my makeup where I wanted to become a clown.
Our music video was filmed almost fully on a tripod as we were missing our cameraman, this meant that we had to keep the camera on between takes, draining the battery faster and causing the editing to take longer as we had to cut down the footage. We gathered a total of 4.45GB of usable footage.
The filming overall went smoothly, took us one day to record as we had close proximity to all of our locations. Each separate scene took us (surprisingly), under five tries to get it right and we had a lot less bloopers than usual.
Section 3;
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The Editing Phase
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This phase took the longest, was the most stressful but was the most fun overall. The editing phase is my favourite part of any production. I feel that I have a passion for editing and seek to improve and change my style with each project.​
After filming all the scenes, it was then time to add all the effects we wanted...
...Otherwise some scenes would look like this.
Here is my project still in editing in Adobe After Effects, this is how I figured out how to have multiple of myself on screen at the same time. You can observe three clips in the timeline, the timeline being the horizontal line with three lanes and a blue needle going through it. Each clip has the same colour keying effect but cropped down to their own screen quadrant respectively.
Observe the void behind the actors, this is the lack of a background which has not been added in this screenshot. Every other scene at the table got this same greenscreen treatment.
An issue that occurred with all greenscreened shots was that some body parts and objects ended up being translucent, an issue that I am not sure what caused. I will take this as a learning experience.
For this project, I had decided to try and pick up a few different skills. One of these skills was "Data Moshing".
Data moshing is, and to put it simply as I do not fully understand how it works myself,
takes two videos,
does not clean up pixels from the last video and only overwrites them when movement is on screen, taken from the first video.
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This was not done in Premiere or After Effects, but another third-party software called "Datamosh Studio", a free software. Below is a screenshot of the layout and the file I used to experiment and figure out how to work the program
(finished product not added due to storage issues).
Here is that same scene, only this time in Premiere Pro. I used to do all my editing in Premiere Pro until I learnt that After Effects has stronger editing and rendering as well as more effects in general.
Here we can see the datamoshed scene surrounded by the rest of the scenes in the timeline.
Premiere Pro handles final compositions better than editing.
Another screenshot from Premiere, only much earlier in the music video's editing phase. For one scene, I wanted to have arms protrude from an unexpected part of the screen, so I had to use the "mask" tool to remove the background from an image of my hand holding a gun.
Originally, I would have taken the image into Photoshop and cropped and cut out the parts I didn't need but this would have taken longer. My methods have improved.
You can see here the previous attempts of green screening in Premiere Pro and finding out that it is not up to the task to our standards. It was about a day later that we thought to try out After Effects for green screening and found it exceeded Premiere's ability.
Finding out what doesn't work is crucial to finding out what will work.
I also wanted to test my hand in creating VFX such as 3D modelled characters and objects. Above and is a 3D modelled loaf of bread, an early version of the bread featured in the music video. The bread was made by extruding a cube and rotating it's various vertices to where fits. The final version includes texture and a plate, as well as text above reading "Bred".
As well as 3D modelling, for my storyboard/previs, I worked in Blender again to build a 3D scene that roughly mimics how I wanted the video to turn out.
The bottom of the screen represents the animation timeline, a one-way sheet that saves separate points (or keyframes) of data to be played in sequence, just like a camera but more flexible.
Another animation, only this one was scrapped as it didn't fit the video anywhere.
A list of techniques we used in the music video;
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Datamoshing - we used for a transition
Chromakey - we used for the backdrop
Cutting to beat - to keep a sense of pace
Multimage - to show multiple people on screen at once
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Reception of the music video
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the reception of the music video was very good, it appeared that everyone watching enjoyed the video and the music was said to be "listenable".
My Music Video Evaluation
My final thoughts:
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This module has let me explore more of my creative side again, from the directing to the acting to the editing.
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I feel myself leaning into more serious and professional roles for acting and directing because I feel I am limiting myself to the easier, funnier content. A way to improve my creative outputs would be to broaden my genres and themes which could help me in the future.
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I hope you have enjoyed my works and continue to enjoy them, past or future. I aim to outdo myself with the next one.