The task at hand for our first entertainment project was to find a, school appropriate, music video and recreate it. This included having to do a beat sheet, a type of outline special for music videos, a mood board, and a story board for all of out frames. Our music video had to be shot with all the technical aspects we have learned about as well as tell a story. My group and I had agreed on doing the music video for Lana Del Rey's song Love. Once we picked out our song it was to get to work.
Putting at the Gears in Motion
The first thing we had to do was assign jobs. My job was editor which means I'm responsible for editing the final video but I still took part in pre-production and production. Once we had that done we started to watch the music video for Love to get ideas for ours. After watching it a few times through we started to work on our beat sheet and story board. On our beat sheet we wrote all the information of the song like producer, singer and company, other music videos to inspire ours, etc. Then we started to draw out the frames for our music video on our story board. During this step, we kept coming up with so many ideas that it was hard to get them all down. Eventually we had a really good illustration of the frames of our video. Now that we knew what our video was going to look like, how we were going to do it, where we were going to do it, we needed to figure out who was going to be in it. We had thought up a list of people, mostly our friends, and started asking them, my group and I now had our people. Now we filmed. This part was pretty easy and take very long since we had a specific and detailed vision of what we wanted everything to look like. After we had everything filmed we started editing. Like filming editing didn't take very long since we had a pretty detailed idea of what everything was to look like but we did run into some changes and discussions. The hardest part of editing was getting the person who was lip syncing lips to line up with the words, but once they did it felt really good. The final part of editing was adding some cooler filters and then were done.
Learning Through Experience
Throughout this project I learned how to work and communicate with people who were going to be in the video and not just my group members. This was different because they had no idea what we had planned so we had to be very clear in explaining what we wanted them to do as well as when and where we would be filming. As the project went on, however, I became better at this and it was easier to communicate what was needed of them. On the technical aspect, I learned how to use color filters and how to scale a video to a certain size. I can use these skills later in my film career if a shot isn't looking quiet right or if I need the clips to look a certain way. These skills will, overall, make me a better film maker.
Change it or Leave it
Overall I felt this project went really well especially since it's my first entertainment assignment and I wouldn't change a lot. The only few things I would have changed is making some shots not as out focus so they didn't look messy. This also goes with stabilizing some shots to make them less shaky because it can look sloppy and make people sick. While I would only apply this to some shots I would like to make those changes. Another change I would make is picking the people more carefully. Our coffee shop couple was the only couple that wasn't dating in real life and the whole thing came off as awkward in the video. It's not a big deal but I think fixing this problem would make the video even better. I can apply these lessons to my next project by paying a better attention to the really small details.
