Caught in the act..

SO yes, here are a few snappy snapshots from the work done this weekend;

Evie setting up some snazzy camera shots

Anna being a good girl and blogging our progress

And me getting the calendar dates shots :)

Props and To Do list -

I forgot to upload this the other day, so some of these we do have and have sorted out, but this is the props and to-do list that we wrote last week:

- A clothes rail
- A LARGE selection of books
- Clocks
- Finalise costume designs – then get costumes
- Location – making the set
- Main characters - CONTACT
- Book Camera's for the week
- Get Sheets/boards for making 'studio' set
- Sort lighting
- Possible heating for pavilion
- Vinyl player + vinyl (will design with our logo)
- More clothes + accessories etc for 'eye for fashion darling' scene
- Face paints/colourful make-up
- Plants/dead leaves/Chicken??
- CDs
- Gold picture frames
- Anything else we have forgotten!

Music-Magpie Advert

Ok, this is a bit random, but I when watching TV recently I saw this advert for MusicMagpie.co.uk



I was amazed that this is the perfect and ONLY example of the stop motion-ish effect we wish to create in our book scene that I've been able to find. I'm not sure what this technique is called and I've tried to find out but it's SO hard to explain nobody I've asked really knew what I was talking about. ANYWAY the newly named 'stop motion-ish thingy' features throughout the advert, with the CD's. The section that is most relevant to us is at 0:15, where 3 piles of CDs are seen moving up and down - this is exactly what we have planned to create with piles of books in our music video. So yes, it's a bit random, but I thought it was great when I saw this, and it's the only example of what I imagined for our scene that I've been able to find ANYWHERE!

24/10/10

DISASTER STRIKES - Today we were supposed to go to Anna's and begin making our set and possibly get in some practise shots of our storyboard - I live a LONG way out from Anna's house, which was fine because I would get a train from Stansted to Saffron Walden, then get picked up and taken to Anna's in Ashdon - HOWEVERRRR public transport is evil and has a grudge against me and the trains weren't running! (I found this out once I had already ran from my house to the station..) and my parents are away and buses don't run on a Sunday! I was literally stranded here! This is reealllyy annoying because I will miss out on part of the process, but I've heard their day went really well and they established some good ideas of what will and won't work for the video. I am also not available this half term because I'm going away (SO ANNOYING) but Anna and Evie will continue to practise some shooting and potentially start getting some actual footage if Charlie (main mannn) is available - and then after half term we will analyse whatever footage we have got by that point, and decide what more we need to do, or maybe what we need to change, and will then go back to complete the filming when I am there.

23/10/10

Today was our first round of test shooting, set designing and general sorting out. We brought together all the props we had each dug out (including a vinyl of 'Nick Nack Paddywack'.. yesss Evie) and decided which ones we were going to use, what scenes they'd be in and which of the lyrics they link to. I also went through the song with a fine tooth comb to note where every change in the music occurs, so we can make our editing and camera shots perfectly in sync with the song.

We didn't have as much time as we hoped but we did get to film a small section of the storyboard - it was the shots of a wooden block calendar. We took a still image of every date between October 1st and November 10th - when editing we will play these shots really fast one after another, at the part of the song that says 'let the days go by..'.

We did a small amount of practising of lip syncing; we will have to get this perfect and smooth for our final video, otherwise it'll look unprofessional and scruffy.

We are planning to meet again tomorrow at Anna's so we can go to the cricket pavilion and begin setting up our 'studio' and maybe even get in some practise filming - we cannot start capturing the real footage this weekend because Charlie (our main guyyy) isn't available. But this is a good thing because we can practise and plan exactly how we want each shot to go and what we want to achieve.

Practise Editing

In our last media lesson we were shown an example music video made by some A level students last year. In their video they used a 4 way split screen with the action in each screen interacting together - this looked really effective and we were set the task of recreating this split screen effect for our preliminary task. Here is a screen shot of the example we were shown:

Me and Anna worked together and filmed each other for the four sections, then uploaded the footage to the mac. In our next lesson we were to start editing, we weren't told how exactly to do the editing so we were supposed to try and work it out ourselves. I hadn't done this exact thing before but I practised something slightly similar last year within my AS project, so I just went in for it and did what I thought was right. It seems to be working so far so we are rather impressed with our work!

Relocation Relocation..

We've had LITERALLY HUNDREDS (three) location changes now due to all sorts of complications. Ideally we would love to use a professional studio to set the video in, but as this was impossible for us, we decided to make our own impression of a studio with painted white wooden boards and white sheets. Originally we were going to try and set it up in either mine or Evie's garage, but they both turned out to be SO full of clutter and general garage-y things that it would have been ridiculous to even try and empty them out. So Anna suggested a room in her house that they were going to paint white anyway so we could use it as our white box, but she is having some building work done so we wouldn't be able to use the space. SO we are now going to construct our D.I.Y studio in a cricket pavilion near Anna's house, as it's not cricket season we won't be disturbed by unruly cricket balls.. Hopefully this will work out and we won't have to relocate again..!