A2 Music Videos

In our original plan we wanted to make our own club scene using lights, actors and props. Realising that this was harder to create than we thought once we started planning it out, we ended up using footage from our chosen artist Galantis's concert that me and my partner attended. This worked out much better as it fitted in with our style of video, had many more people along with proffesional strobe lights and flashing lights.

For most of our shots we ehanced the saturation in order to make the colours more vibrant. Depending on the most dominant colour in the shot, we would enhance that colour. For example, in the picture below, we heightened the saturation and also enhanced the red gain to give it more of a sunset look It also allowed the shops within the shot to stand out more as their lights are more vibrant. I feel that using this technique gives our video a unique feel due to how colourful our shots were to begin with and enhances our EDM image. One fault with enhancing the saturation was when it came to having a shot of me or my partners face in it. If it was put up too high, our faces would turn incredibly orange and look unrealistic, we therefore had to balance it out by altering the blue or green gain to reduce the bright orange.

Me and my partner both loved the image and feel of central London so that was our final location choice. We didn't want to film in typical places such Big Ben, London Bridge or The London Eye as we wanted to avoid the video looking 'touristy'. Instead we chose places that you could possibly only recognise if you have visited that area.     

An example of what we tried to recreate can be seen in Demi Lovatos video for Sorry Not Sorry. She has a few handheld camera shots which we feel really enhances the party atmosphere and vibe of the video. I hoe that by taking notes from this video, our outcome will be the same. https://youtu.be/-MsvER1dpjM

This process I found to be quite different from when I last done it at As. At both As and A2 I researched into my genre and found inspiration from existing films and artists, but only at As did I create a storyboard. Due to specific scenes being needed for a film opening it was vital that we had a plan in place, compared to my music video which was more 'in the moment' scenes, it was easier for me and my partner to not have plans so set in stone. Instead we chose our locations and type of shot we wanted e.g. Panning shot of buildings, and played around with how we wanted it to look.

Once finished presenting our pitch, we then got feedback off of our peers.

Although in our original plan we wanted to show a story of relationships and embracing sexuality, it came more natural to me and my partner to film something more effortless, or to capture shots that were not staged. We found that this style of filming and video was best suited to us. We wanted to represent love, happiness and peace by capturing shots of people demonstrating one of those three elements. As an example we caught a stranger taking a photo for someone else who he had never met (love) and both me and Kira at different times laughing when we didn't know the camera was rolling (happiness). We wanted to show the peaceful and beautiful parts of London which with a deeper meaning, we wanted to show the beautiful parts of life where people are happy and places are peaceful.

When filming we had to think cleverly about our lighting. We looked at our lyrics and thought about where we could place particular shots. For the lyrics "6 o'clock again the night is at an end", we inserted a shot of London buses turning a bend for one verse and a tilt shot of the sky during the day for another, this was to highlight the transition from night time which were shown in the clips beforehand. Once it  proceeded into the chorus, night shots of bright lights and 'club' scenes then came back as this is where the pace picks up in the song.

The setting/location for EDM videos tend to be in lively places such as clubs or popular holiday locations such as beach parties in areas like Miami. These locations also appeal to the people who are listeners of the genre as they tend to be of the younger generation who are most likely to visit these places. The typical mise en scene for this genre often show crowds of people and generally a few clips of the DJ at work or scenes from their shows, the people involved tend to be dressed to suit their locations I.e. Swimwear for a beach party, bright lights and fast paced moving lights are also heavily popular with this genre as a 'club vibe' is being recreated. Montages of shots are used quite often which match the beat of the song, this is to go with the tracks fast pace which also means that the way the video is edited is also jumpy. The narrative for EDM videos are not strong at all and tend to just show young teens and adults enjoying life and how they dance, if a narrative ...

To help explain our points when writing essays it's important that we use theorists. One that I was given to research was Roland Barthes. He was a French literary theorist and came up with the theory on semiotics. One of his codes, the semantic code can be used for our music video. Although it may seem that random scenes have been put together, there is a meaning behind our video, that being love, friendship and freedom which people may not initially see.    

Our style of music video is that of a montage feel, or vlog. To achieve this effect we used both an iPhone 6 and 7 to film on instead of the camera we were given. This allowed us to have shots that were not perfectly still to go with our theme of 'a day in the life', or yet again vlog style. We feel that not filming with a tripod also corresponds with the EDM genre of being all over the place yet each shot fitting in perfectly with each other.

Due to our music video not having a storyline, it is important that we make our visuals as striking as possible. This means that our location and angles in which we shoot in have to be perfect. We are looking to film mostly at night in order to achieve shots of bright lights so we can further enhance them using the saturation tool in iMovie, this will give us our party theme that we wanted to carry through from our original plan. We will contrast this using day shots which will still include vibrant colours.

This is how we wanted to set out each scene, we took the shots from the storyboard and placed them around the lyrics we wanted to match them with.

This is our storyboard for our original plan as I have mentioned before. This is at the opposite end of the scale of what our new idea has become. It also differs as we have not used a storyboard for our new idea of a 'montage' style video as we couldn't pin point what scenes we wanted to place at each point in the song. When it came to deciding locations, actors and props, we came to the conclusion that our idea was not realistic due to some of the scenes we came up with. Factors which affected us were the little amount of people who were actually willing to be part of it, this was not helpful for our party scene. Another factor was the weather, we enacted to film in a field which just like at As, we had to make sure that the weather was consistent throughout.