Music Video Filming Blog

Filming is the process where people who want to make a film will get their media. This is done with cameras. Our group however did not schedule to film over the weekend. We scheduled all of our filming for during the Thanksgiving break. We found that this was the perfect time to film because we would all have flexible schedules. The weather was also supposed to be nice and sunny. This will be perfect for our shots at the beach. It will really show that our video has an upbeat theme. It would fit much better than if it were dark and gloomy outside. We plan to film on Wednesday, the 27th. We will all need to bring our props and costumes. This includes the beach goer outfit, sunglasses, beach umbrella, beach towels, sunscreen, a plush lobster and a bottle of water. The props will also help bring out the theme of the video. My group plans to use the cameras provided at school, however if this does not happen, we can always use the cameras on our phones. I also happen to have a camera that we can film with. However, it would be nice if we could use the school cameras, but I am not sure if we will be allowed to use them on a long holiday break. Using the phone camera can also be easier to transfer to computers (we would not need to use SD card readers.) With the phones we can just email them to our own email. From our email we can just drag it to our desktop. From the desktop, we can put it in Pinnacle Studios to edit. This is much easier than having to wait in class for a SD card reader. We will also be able to send each other the clips in our group chat.

Our filming locations will be:
Fort Lauderdale beach. This is the most convenient beach to go to for all of our group members.
Group member's house. We are thinking of some shots that would fit in the video that do not have to be in any specific location.
Restaurant: We have a specific scene that we want to be in our video. This will be easy to get because my family does own a restaurant.

I am sure we will not need to get together to film more than twice. We will get together to film on the beach, and at a group members house. We will make sure to get as many shots as possible to make sure we have enough.

Music Video Storyboard Blog

My group and I did a storyboard on the music video that we have been planning. We are going to film this later, but the point of the storyboard is to have an idea of what we want to film. We had fun coming up with ideas on what song to pick and what the theme should be. I did not draw the storyboard, but our whole team did contribute to the ideas. The storyboard consists of what props we want in the music video too, including a Publix lobster tank. Our song that we picked was "Rock Lobster" by B-52. We believe this song has the perfect combination of humor and a story that can go behind it. 

The storyboard starts off with a man sitting on his towel at the beach. He hears music and then realizes that there is a lobster with a boombox in front of him. He gets annoyed and gets up and walks away, but soon realizes that there is another lobster dancing in the distance. He gets nervous and splashes water on his face to make sure he is not seeing things. However, it happens to be sea water and not normal water. He spits it out because of the saltiness. The man is now feeling harassed by the lobster and runs away and tries to get help. Then the storyboard shows many shots of the lobster dancing to the song "Rock Lobster." We hope to include footage of the live lobster tank at Publix in our actual video. The beach goer comes back and gets a chef with him. The chef puts the lobster in the pot and the song turns off and the pot is carried away. 

We will use many camera angles that will make the scenes look better. At the beginning we were thinking we would have a medium shot on the beach goer and the lobster. When he gets up we will have a two shot because we count the lobster as a person. An over the shoulder shot on the life sized lobster in the back ground. A medium close up on the person drinking the salt water. An extreme or regular close up on the tag of the bottle that says "salt water." We will have a wide shot on the shore as the beach goer runs by. We will have a wide variety on shots when the dance/tank scenes are show. With the lobster tank, we will have a pan from one side to the other. Finally, when the lobster gets put inside the pot, there will be a close up on the pot and the lobster rand the music will end. 

Music Video Planning blog

In AICE Media, we are currently doing a new project. It is a music video. In this project, we will have our choice of music playing over a story. Our group chose the song "Rock Lobster" by B-52. We think this song will be able to play a story while also being humorous. Because of the songs theme, we will mostly be filming on the beach. We think the Fort Lauderdale beach will be the best beach to film at because it is the closest to all of the group members. We will also film smaller shots at a group members house, as well as at Publix. In order to do the shots at Publix however, we will need to be granted permission by Publix. We plan contact to the Publix manager before and ask them permission.

Health and safety is the most important part of this project. During this project and all of the parts, (filming, editing) we will make sure to not play around and stay on task. While going to the filming locations, we will make sure to wear our seat belts, because we will not be able to act and film if we are dead. It is also required by law. On the beach, we will make sure we are not there too long in the sun to reduce the amount of sun we get.

Props are the element that really brings life to our video. For props we are going to need beach props. This includes a beach umbrella, towels, drinks, and sunglasses. These will all help bring out the beach scene. We will also need a plush lobster. We have all of these except for the plush lobster, which costs about $8 .

For costumes, we will need a normal beach goer outfit. This would just be a tank top, beach shorts, and sunglasses. All of the other outfits are just going to be ordinary outfits. The outfits will help bring out the theme of the video.

Schedule- We want to have our storyboard(s) done by next class, which is November 20th. We plan to film next week. We want to do it in a timely fashion, so we do not have to worry about filming at the end of our Thanksgiving break.

Music Video Intro

Things that worked well. things to change during first commercial.

We have finally finished the commercial project and are now moving onto a new one. I want to talk about the first project. We had many things that worked out. First of all, our storyboard did help. Our project ended up looking exactly like how our storyboard looked. We also had great success with our filming. The conditions outside were great (lighting), and everyone brought what they were supposed to. However we did not have success with the editing process. We had too much film that we wanted to keep, but it did not fit the time limit of 30 seconds. These are some things that we want to change while filming our new project. The new project is a music video. We are going to have a mini story play out with music that corresponds to the story.

Our group chose the song Rock Lobster by B-52. We got the idea when I just listed out funny songs. We thought that this song could be funny, unique, and have a story that plays along with it. We are planning on having a beach theme which means that we are going to have to plan our mis en scene to fit this theme. There are 6 parts of mis en scene that we are going to use:
C- Costumes. Like I said before, we are going to have beach themed costumes, and maybe a lobster. However this seems very expensive so we may rethink that.
L- lighting. We are going to use natural lighting, because we do not have any of the materials to have professional lighting. It would also fit with our beach theme.
A- Actors. We plan on having most of our group doing the acting. We may also ask some friends on my swim team if they want to participate. Many of them have fun personality that we think would fit  well in our funny video.
M- Makeup. We probably will not be using makeup for our project, unless we want to dress someone up as a lobster.
P- Props. We will use beach props like beach umbrellas, beach towels, sunglasses, hats, a rock, and a toy lobster to make our scene come to life.
S- Setting. We will have a beach setting, and maybe another place. The setting will bring out the elements of our film.
The camera angles that we will use will be simplistic and can easily follow the story, such as medium shots, close ups, and establishing shots.

We will use mostly digetic sound, sound effects, and score. The digetic sound will fit the beach theme. We can use sound effects throughout the film to make the film pop out more. Obviously, we will use the music that plays over the other sounds.

To edit, we will be using the same editing software, Pinnacle studios.

Final commercial blog

The commercial project was a lengthy but fun process. Our task was to create a commercial on any type of item. We chose to do Wendys Hot and Spicy Chicken Nuggets. There were a couple rules we needed to follow when doing the commercial. It had to be 30 seconds or shorter. We also needed to use a various amount of angles. There was 4 steps to making our commercial. They were: planning, filming, editing, and exporting.

The planning consisted of discussing with our group members and storyboarding. Communication is key when doing a group project. After our group agreed on something to do a commercial on, we started brainstorming ideas. We had to go with the one that was the most reasonable. After we did that, we started our storyboard. Story boarding is a technique used by all film makers.They are used to plan out a film by drawing out your ideas into boxes. These boxes show what 6 seconds of the movie will be. For example, if you want a 30 second  film, you would do 5 drawings of the story. The drawings consist of what you want to be as your film, as well as dialogue. Looking back, our storyboard match what we actually did very well.

The next step was doing our filming. Before we started however, we needed bring in our props. This consisted of outfits, and the actual product. We had about an hour to get all of our clips and footage. We successfully got everything we needed, with a few extra shots. We used a school camera, ssd card, and tripod to get our footage. After we filmed, we went back to class to start dumping our footage onto the computer. This was done by taking the ssd card out of the camera and putting it into a sd card reader, which goes into the computer. We had to put all of the footage on a flash drive, so it not be lost. This is where we would start the editing process.

The editing process was new to most of us, so there was some difficulty. We were using a software called Pinnacle studios. It was hard to do our editing because of the technology we had to use. However, we managed to edit our video and put transitions and some cool effects.

The final step was exporting our commercial so that we could be done.

Commercial Editing Blog

Last class, all of the technology in our room was not working. We were not able to edit our commercial. Today in class, we did our actual editing. We were editing the commercial that we were working on a couple classes ago. We learned how to edit a couple classes ago, but now was our time to apply our skills. We are using a software called pinnacle studios.

Our class was able to edit today because we got a new computer cart with our editing software on it. However, our class had to take turns using the laptops because of the limited number. Our group was able to edit for about 40 minutes. This was enough time to go through all of our clips and sort them in the way that our commercial will go. However, we did run into a problem.We had to make sure our video was within the 30 second time limit. This was a challenge. We had too many clips, and when we first assembled the video with all of our clips, it came out to be a minute and a half long. We had to trim and cut out many of our clips. We made sure not to cut out the important clips, like the intro and outro. We managed to get our video just at 30 seconds, but there was another challenge. To give our commercial a little spice, I was planning on putting video transitions. This includes, dissolve effects, and zoom effects. This would for sure make our video stand out from the rest of the class. However, with the 30 second limit, I was not sure if we were going to be able to pull this off.  

I plan to work on this project some more on a software called adobe premiere pro, which I am more familiar with. I do not know how to use transitions in pinnacle studios, so I will do it on premiere pro. 

I learned a lot about editing today in class. I think the most important thing was just exploring on pinnacle studios and trying to find a solution when I am not familiar with something. I think it is very important to know many things, including how to use different software. If I could have done something different with the project, it would have been the filming process. Our group needs to work on making our filming more concise, because we had too much, and as a result had to delete and trim many clips to make the 30 second time limit. This made the editing process much harder, but we managed to get it done. We were also able to make our commercial look nice.