Production Meeing



Story boarding process

Looking at the lyrics and interpreting them helped us have an idea of what shots we wanted where. Our video is an illustration to the music, in particular the lyrics and title of the song "my head is a jungle".

The process of interpreting the lyrics and creating the story board was simultaneous both helping the other progress. For the story board we used a colour scheme to signify scene changes (just like the animatic). It was helpful as it forced us to think about the details of our video, and find the most effective way to tell the narrative through shot types and what and who would be in each shot.



Album Cover Flat Plan

Focal image

As this is our artist debut album for the front cover we thought of having a face on shot in order to introduce them with the audience.

Style ( Font and Colour)

We wanted the font to be white and simplistic, possibly all lower case or capital. For the white to stand out the focal image would need to be colorful. We wanted the colors of the powder paint in the video to be reflective of the artist stylistic color scheme choices and we were thinking of using mainly pink/purple and blue powder paint.

Front

Focal Image

The back we wanted a naturalistic shot of a group of friends, possibly from behind. We were hoping to get this photo on the day of the shoot in the forest after the powder paint fight.

Back

Animatic

KEY:
Green- Forest Scenes
Pink- Perfromance
White- Seaward Studio
Blue- Baloons
Black- Neon Performance

 

The animatic serves as a combination of your mood board and shot list, together with the song. It helps to imagine how the video will look and raise issues from the story board such as what shots will look good together.

From doing this we realised that there were some head and shoulder shots of Georgie performing next to side on mid close up sots of Georgie in the narrative (eating the cake) which could look weird next to each other or alternatively become a graphic match if we made them both face on.

For us the changes in the rhythm of the music effect the mood, and we wanted to pick the best shots to match the mood. Therefore seeing the story board combined with the track was very helpful.

Pre Production- Test

After story boarding and creating our animatic we decided we needed to test out the beginning of our narrative. We originally wanted to use projections, but when checking with the technicalities it became clear that this would not work. So overlaying footage became a good alternative. Archive footage was something we talked about from the start, so it seemed like the right decision to use footage of The Alice In Wonderland production from 1951, in keeping with the themes of our video.

Here is the result of the video over layed with the Alice in Wonderland footage:



We are very pleased with the results and will use this technique in our music video.

Meeting: Sequencing

We are now starting to refine our idea, this includes creating a shot sequence. In our group meeting we began this process by listing the type of shots, props, setting, and actors we wanted for each set up. 

Notes

As we have a lot of props, we decided it is essential that we test these out first. We made a list of some of the things we came across that would need testing.

By doing this process some changes that would have to be made became evident. For example one thing we discussed was for the music video to follow the journey of just the lead female vocal, rather than the whole band, as it would be more practical and clearer for the audience, and then to establish the band in performance shots separately.

Developing the concept
After doing this we moved on to story boarding, when doing this we decided to follow the Alice In Wonderland reference throughout. Therefore we decided to open our sequence with the lead singer walking through a park, and noticing a tunnel (equivalent to rabbit hole) entering it (curiosity like Alice) and once inside, what would now be the studio, sees a cupcake on a stool and eats it ("Eat me" biscuits). This reference would run through the following dance scenes in some way in order to create a kind of "Wonderland". For example the balloon scene will feature mushrooms made of balloons and the performance scene will have arrow signposts in the background.

Meeting: Album Flat Plan

In our meeting we discussed the focal image, font, color schemes and stylistic choices of our album cover. We liked the white font against the background on MGMT's album cover, as well as the picture of the band on the front and a group of friends on the back. 

For the inside we wanted to thought about having an image of somebody blowing powder paint that stretched across the two sections. 

Production Meetings (First Week)

In our first meeting we brainstormed our ideas and shared our research. Some ideas that came up were to follow a group of friends around London and a powder paint fight. We concluded that a track of the dance genre would be best as it could work well with our ideas and all our research told us that it was very popular at the moment. Also we all had references to dance music videos on our blogs for various reasons such as color, camera angles, dance movement, but we figured this was a good sign.

Next we tackled the 4 key decisions: Track, Artist, Audience and Label (the decisions are in detail below on separate posts).

Then we put our influences together creating a "stealomatic", this helped visualize our video and establish the main themes.

Whilst creating our stealomatic we also researched into the practicalities of what we wanted to achieve, in particular the powder paint fight and neon scene. We found that we would not be allowed to have a powder paint fight in the studio as it would ruin the permanent white backdrop, therefore we developed our idea deciding to base it outdoors, in a forest. Also the department did not have enough black light to light the studio for the neon scene, so we decided to use a smaller space and use this for head and shoulders performance shots like this...