Strangling Scene Change

In the end of our video, it is imperative that the main character has to strangle the girlfriend/drug, which is going to symbolise how he will have finally beaten his drug addiction. In our rough cut, this seemed to get quite a confused response from people who weren't too sure as to what actually happened to the woman, whether she had been killed or just vanished into thin air. This most certainly wasn't our intention.

To change this, we have been researching music videos which have had a strangling scene in it and we found that the video video for the song, 'Spacebound' by Eminem to be extremely useful as there is an effect in it which we would like to achieve in our video. As Eminem's character appears to kill a woman with his bare hands, the editing used shows the woman being strangled, however, by crosscutting between two shots, one with the woman and one without. This shows both the perspective of him and reality which works really well with the video's narrative. If we could do something similar to that, we could really make this scene not just emotive, but shocking and impressive.

This is what our rough-cut strangling scene looked like. As you might imagine, getting Orrin to strangle his girlfriend proved to be quite difficult as we wanted it to look realistic without him actually causing her any harm. Fortunately, they achieved this with Laura pretty much unscathed.

We also want our strangling scene to be much more brutal and terrifying which this Eminem video carried out effectively because currently, the clips in the rough cut seem rather staged. With a bit more practice I think we can get the right levels of anger and fear in our actors to make this scene really realistic and uncomfortable to the viewer. This is the scene in our video that gives away what the whole narrative has been about really clearly so this has to be exactly how we want it otherwise it may not be as obvious as we need it to be without there being any confusion for the viewer whatsoever.
Therefore we will be sure to film Orrin strangling Laura, but also film him strangling nobody. When we come to edit we will experiment with which clips we use to see whether the clips of him strangling no one are imperative or if the story makes sense without it.

Subverting Band Stereotypes

After shooting our rough cut, we have made the decision to change a few of our band members. Some of our band members performances weren't entirely convincing and we think it may be easier to shoot the performance of the band if it is made up of three people, rather than four. This is due to the main singer Alex being really tall, therefore the other band members could not stand behind him, restricting where we could position the band. We also wanted to use a female in our band to help communicate the idea of female power throughout the whole video, in narrative and performance.

As a result of these ideas, we have recruited Kara and Annabelle to be in our band as the drummer and bassist. This may or may not work to our advantage but we would like to give it a try to see how good the footage turns out. We are making this decision knowing that we have time to change our mind if we decide that we don't like the heavy female lead concept. Not many bands of this genre are mixed sex. Therefore we are trying to subvert this stereo type. However, one band that does include both male and female members that is also fairly successful is Paramore. Therefore we may watch some band footage of them to see how they work as a band.

A lot of theorists that we have studied throughout the process of this video have suggested that females are often portrayed as being passive and voyeuristic, however we want to contradict this theory throughout the whole video, including in the narrative which we know is already very clear. We think that including this subversion of stereotypes and theories will work to our advantage based on the idea that we are trying to create.

New Bedroom Location

In our rough cut, we filmed all the bedroom scenes in Orrin's (our main actor's) own bedroom. However one thing we have picked up on is how it doesn't create the effect we want. Obviously our character's room should reflect his situation which he is in.  This is that he is a frequent drug abuser who doesn't have his life together. Orrin's room did not create this effect therefore we need to seek out a new location for the final video. We want our video to look as professional as possible and Orrin's room didn't create this effect.

We need it to look less homely and comfortable and more grungy and run down. Playing with effects in Premier Pro will be something else to experiment with in order to create the effect we want. Our character isn't likely to have a lot of money due to his drug problem therefore the place he lives in needs to reflect that.

For some inspiration we have looked at past music videos including bedroom scenes to see what type of location they use.

Here are some stills from Eminem and Rhianna's 'Love the way you Lie'

In this video the room is very dark in colours, the furniture and decorations look very cheap and old creating a run down and dingy look. There is also no harsh light, the room is quite darkly coloured but lit by artificial lights and a crack in the curtain. We need to try and style our room to replicate this one.

New Location For Our Band Performance

It was quite clear to us that we needed to reshoot all of our band footage in a new location. It became apparent that we must film in an edgy location which most likely needed to be outdoors or a run down warehouse. After much discussion we came to the conclusion to film at what remains of Fenwick Colliery in Earsdon. We were informed that part of it had been knocked down after having been abandoned for some time but that one building still stands.

We've chosen this place for a few different reasons. Firstly, because we feel like it suits the mood of the video, with the graffiti now sprayed on the walls, making an excellent backdrop for our band. Secondly, it's supposedly abandoned and so should in theory be available for filming whenever we want. Thirdly, because it's at Earsdon, equipment can be transported fairly easily by car as the place is right next to a road. This will help should we need to film there more than once. This is far more preferable to taking a drum kit into Newcastle on the metro and should take far less time.

We are going to go there next week during half term and film most (if not all) of our performance there. However, this is somewhat of a gamble for us as we're not sure how accessible this place will be and we are short of other ideas for filming locations so it may be that we need to think of somewhere else quickly if filming here isn't possible. Hopefully, it will all go to plan.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Fenwick+Colliery/@55.049892,-1.5133116,17z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x487e6df82398484b:0x1a129beea5d48c41!8m2!3d55.0505046!4d-1.5130609

Rough Cut Class Feedback

We have received some feedback for our rough-cut in paper form as demonstrated in the last blog post, however we also decided to record the discussion between our peers after watching the video twice through. There were some more in depth and more interesting things said on this recording that weren't communicated as well through the questionnaire sheets filled in during the viewing which we think is quite helpful. We anticipated this and so to show just how much feedback we received, we have uploaded this audio so you yourself can get a taste of what was said.

In this recording we have feedback from peers in our class as well as our 3 media teachers, so there is a huge range of feedback from people who really know what they are talking about and  who also happen to fit into our target audience which makes this even more valuable to us. We will hopefully use as much of this feedback as possible in order to make our final cut the best that it can possibly be. Implementing this advice shouldn't be too difficult as everyone who contributed raised a number of extremely important points, leaving us with a number of new ideas as a result. This can surely only benefit our project greatly.

The main points we took away from this are -

1. Change the band location, possibly to somewhere outdoors which matches the theme of the video

2. Make sure the band members look like they are actually playing the instruments, it needs to be a convincing performance

3. Use the tripod more on pans and tilts to create smoother lines

4. Use shorter shot lengths in the chorus to match the pace of the song

5. Reshoot the argument scene as it isn't aggressive enough

6. Lighting needs work

7. Focus on the central metaphor and her violence whereas he is more passive

8. Everything needs to be reshot due to lighting and graininess, maybe use the fixed lens to increase image quality 

9. Direct Orrin more

10. More close ups of the band

Rough Cut Feedback

Today was the presentation of the classes music videos. This meant we would receive feedback from our teachers and class members, we produced sheets for everyone to fill in as they watched our video in order to gain feedback in the areas we wanted it as well as getting a range of peoples opinions.

We have scanned in all of the sheets filled in by our peers and our teachers so that we can have it here on our blog permanently to analyse and refer back to when we are filming our final cut.

As you can see from these images we have a huge amount of feedback and it is all incredibly helpful and we will look at it all in lots of detail to ensure that we make our video the best that it can be.

The main thing we are really happy with as a result of this feedback is that everyone seemed to understand the narrative that we were going for which was a huge relief for us because it is quite a hard narrative to communicate. Therefore we know that our actors and choice of shots were able to represent the things we wanted to well enough for everyone to understand.

One thing that we were aware of already before our feedback was that our performance footage wasn't as good as it could have been. We knew that this needed to be re-filmed but this feedback confirmed that for us. We also got some more specific points about it relating to band members, costume and the mise-en-scene which we have found really helpful as it has shown us things we haven't really picked up on ourselves.

Overall, we are really happy with the feedback we have received and it has highlighted some key issues for us which will really help us work out what we need to focus more on to achieve the desired effect. We will be referring to this blog post throughout the project to ensure we meet the feedback and improvements we have received here as best as we can.

Urban Rapture - The Kids Aren't Alright - Rough Cut

This is our rough cut of our music video for the song, 'The Kids Aren't Alright'.