Note to the moderator

Thank you for taking the time to look through our coursework that we have been working on this year, we hope that you enjoy looking through our research and planning. All posts are labelled and can be found on the blog at the top right hand side. We have enjoyed this course over the past 2 years and have collectively come together as a group to produce a video that we are all proud of.
Once again, Thank You!

Final music video

FINAL MUSIC VIDEO DRAFT

Importance of Assigned Roles

As we are developing our music video, we have now decided on who will have what roles within our shoot. It is so important to clarify to everybody with what they will be focusing on because otherwise everything could get out of hand and we could all be trying to do the same job. I (Lauren Bolton) am going to be the Camera Person and also the Art Director, these jobs kind of intertwine so this is good for me because then it allows be to be focused on what I'm doing and how the whole video is going to look. The music video started from one of my ideas so that means I do have a very clear vision in how I would personally like the video to look and the style that I was pitching to the other members of my team in the first few weeks of the course. Therefore it was decided that I would be Art Director and make sure that the overall look of the shot and what it consists of is exactly what we as a team are trying to achieve.
The next role established was the role of the Director and Director of Photography, these roles were given to Lauren Roberts because she isn't going to be the one filming and we need a member of the team who can look at the storyboard and also control how the lighting looks and the sound (so the performers can hear the music they are dancing to). This is an incredibly important role and determines how the whole video looks because if the shots I am being told to do are not what we need then that could be a problem, which it hopefully won't be. Also we need to get the lighting spot on because we are creating a black and white video so the use of the lighting needs to be incredibly dramatic and impressive. Without this role the rest of the team would be lost in what they need to do and so we have to make sure that this all goes together without a hitch.
The next role given was that of Costume and Makeup, this was given to Sophie Beeston because she is also one of the performers in the video and already having experience within the dancing community then that means that she has good knowledge in how makeup and the clothing should look for performances such as these. Also because she is performer in the video then it means that it is harder for her to be controlling lighting and sound as well because she won't be able to do everything all at once.
We have balanced the roles very evenly between the three of us and we are confident that what we are going to produce will live up to the research and planning we have done previously. As we are getting nearer to filming the video the anticipation is growing, so it is important that these roles are established early on because then we can become more confident in what we are going to be doing separately so that hopefully when we come together to finally film then everything will fit into place and be done to our most professional standard.

Story Board Development

Throughout the past week and whilst we have been developing our music video, we have seemed to have hit a bump in regards to creating the story board. There are many reasons in why it is taking us more time than expected to be creating this, and even though it is being developed slowly, there is still a lot of holes and gaps that we are struggling to put together. Our music video is primarily going to be a performance of the form of dance and because of this and the amount of time that it takes into creating the dance we have found that putting the ideas that we currently have for the dance hard to translate onto the story board because it isn't set in stone just yet and there isn't anything that has been completely made chronological yet and everything is still very abstract. However, in saying this, we are still drawing our story board and making sure that we are getting down all of ideas that we currently have. This has been a difficult task for us because we are struggling to know yet what the dance is going to be and because we know what kind of shots we are going to do it is hard to bring these to things together to be producing what we need to have done.
During this time, we are still building the dance and because one of our team members, Sophie, is going to be one of the dancers in the video then that means that she knows the dance better than the rest of us and she is able to help us completely build the story board. This is really helpful because if we didn't have this guidance then we would be completely lost.
We know that this story board is crucial to how we film and we have two weeks until we film the video, which means we are planning to get this aspect done by the end of this week so we are prepared to start planning what it is that we are actually going to film. We are excited at the prospect of starting this video and want to do the best job we can in making something incredibly professional. It is important to all of us that we are committed into giving this task all we have and we are sure that what we are going to be making will be an indication of how much effort we are putting in and in the film industry they have to manage all of these stages and set backs like what we have experienced last week. Not having the dance completely lined up is something that we are dealing with and trying to build up and use as an experience to not let ourselves be blindsided by what the finished result is going to look like.