So, for my A2 Advanced Portfolio, I need to create a main video piece, which in my case is a short film, as well as creating two ancillary tasks, for which I have primarily chosen to create a radio advert.
I decided to choose a radio advert as I knew that it was unlike anything I have completed in Media Studies so far, and for that reason I wanted to try it out and see how successful I could be.
As an example of what radio adverts for films are like, I found a compilation of all radio adverts aired for Star Wars, which you can listen to below. While the structure of the adverts is not how I wish mine to be, I still feel that it is a good example and one that I should share!
In terms of what I would like the structure of my radio advert to be, I would like it to have excerpts from the audio of my short film, mainly parts where the action sounds interesting and intense, in order to draw in potential viewers. As radio adverts are typically 30 seconds long, I wish the excerpt section of the advert to last around 15-20 seconds, with the final 10 seconds to be used to say the title of the short film, where to find it, who is in it as well as the creator, as this is fairly typical of a radio advert.
As you may have noticed, for my practice piece of media work
I completed in July, I made a music video, however this year I will be creating
a short film. Here I am going to tell you the skills I gained through creating
a music video which will be useful when I am creating a short film.
Firstly, I learned how to choose the best shots to
storyboard. I did this through checking the location several times before I
began storyboarding, and then I sat down with the lyrics and decided what I
thought would work well in order to keep in line with both the feel of the
music, the lyrics as well as any creative ideas that I had. This has helped me
with my A2 production, as I have a very clear idea of a location to shoot the
short film, and because of this, I have been able to create a fantastically
vivid idea of what I want to happen in my short film, as well as thinking about
how I will achieve it.
Secondly, through creating a practice music video, I gained
the skill of colour correction. Even though I added colour correction to my AS
Foundation portfolio piece, I do not believe that it was as good as it could
have been. This changed when I created my practice piece, as I put quite a lot
of time into making sure the colour correction had been done well, and I
believe that the difference can be seen when you compare both my AS piece, and
my practice piece! I cannot wait to use these skills in creating my A2 short
film!
For my audience research for my A2 media production, I decided to do it in a slightly more unconventional way, and I decided to do it on Twitter. I put out a series of tweets, and asked people to either Retweet, Reply or Favourite the tweets in order to give their opinion. You can see the tweets below.
Time to do some audience analysis! I'm going to do a series of tweets, and would like you to either RT or FAV the tweets, based on choice!
— Daniel Haynes (@DannieyMedia) December 4, 2013
1st Question for #A2Media. What is your ideal length for a short film? RT for less than 10 minutes, FAV for more than 10 minutes.
— Daniel Haynes (@DannieyMedia) December 4, 2013
2nd Question for #A2Media. Would you rather an apocalyptic situation have a single or a group lead? RT for single, FAV for group.
— Daniel Haynes (@DannieyMedia) December 4, 2013
3rd and final question for now for #A2Media. How many short films do you watch a month? Reply with how many and your age!
— Daniel Haynes (@DannieyMedia) December 4, 2013
Virus is a 6 minute short film created by Simon Hynd. It was
created in 2002 and was featured on a
DVD series of 3 short horror films
entitled ‘The Kamera Books guide to horror films’. It follows a man called
Andrew as he tries to call his partner, only to find she has sent him an email.
This email contains a video clip of her death, and while Andrew is watching it,
he too is approached by a hooded figure and murdered. The short film ends with
the hooded figure sending the video clip of Andrew’s death to his email
contacts.
There is clever use of different camera shots in the short
film, the viewer can see shots varying from long, establishing shots down to
extreme close ups. Most panning/moving shots are smooth, with the exception of
a couple which are slightly jerky. The close-ups in Virus make the viewer feel
uncomfortable due to how zoomed in they are.
In terms of Mise en Scene, Virus is very simplistic. There
are minimal props used which adds to the overall mysterious and unnerving feel
of the short film. The costumes in Virus are very stereotypical of a normal
office. The security worker is in a white shirt and black tie, and the main
character, Andrew is wearing a black shirt and tie. Scenes which feature Andrew
all have black background due to the poor lighting in the office. This does not
detract from the feel of the film, but it in fact gives it an extremely scary
feel.
There is clever use of continuity editing in Virus, as all of
the shots feel like they fit in with the overall feel of the short film, and
none of the transitions feel jerky or out of place. All of the editing in Virus
is very fast paced, and the only transition used between shots is a cut, with
no fades or wipes anywhere in the film. This adds to the sense of urgency that
the viewer feels throughout watching Virus. There is also evidence of Shot/Reverse
throughout the film, more specifically, it occurs when Andrew is looking at the
computer screen. This is used to give the viewer more of a sense of what is
going on, as due to the time restraints in creating a short film, it can be
very difficult to create a believable story, and through the use of
Shot/Reverse shot, I believe Virus is one of very few short films which manage
to do this effectively.
The sound in Virus is all diegetic, and because of this the
film feels very believable. It can be very difficult to create believable sound
for a film, but Virus has done it well. Even during the end credits, there is
no music, all the viewer can hear is a dialling tone for a phone, which, as
Andrew has just died, leaves the viewer feeling afraid. There is also no
speaking in this film, and the action is purely done through actions and
diegetic sound, which makes the short film very appealing to those who enjoy watching
slightly more ‘weird’ films.
Overall, Virus is an outstanding short film, and definitely
one which shall influence the creation of my own short film through the use of
shot/reverse shot and the clever use of lighting.
Today I had the bright idea of uploading my script to Google Docs so that you can see the progress I am making on it when I do it, you can find the link to this below.
Yes, I may have posted something similar to this yesterday, but this is a really good video with tips on how to create short films, thanks to Nicola for the link!
Around the world, there are hundreds of short films created every day. They could be considered easy and cheap to make depending on the quality you're wanting to achieve. For this reason I believe that the short film 'industry' could be considered one that takes advantage of the 'Long Tail Theory' by Chris Anderson in 2006.
The Long Tail theory states that while you have the big 'hits', which in this case would be the obvious well-known short films like the 'Tea Chronicles' or 'Project:Library', the demand and consumption of the lesser known short films, like 'Virus' by Simon Hynd, and 'The Anti-Social Network' by Shae Lee Shackleford, can equal the demand and consumption of the 'hits' due to the large number of lesser known short films and 'niche' market in which they fit.
So, I have begun the scripting for my short film. It is currently nameless.
The film centres around a somewhat apocalyptic theme where there are warnings that England is running out of power, something that has been documented in real life over the past months, and the film revolves around a single family, 2 adults and a mid-teen daughter. It follows them for the last hour before the power goes off at the end of the film.
Throughout the film I would like to include a timecode at the bottom left hand of the screen, counting down from one hour all the way down to zero. Of course as a short film is anything between a few minutes and three quarters of an hour, I aim to cut down the hour into the 'memorable' events. All in all I would like the short film to be around 5-10 minutes in length, something I believe is very achievable if I manage to script it right.
Below you can see a snapshot from the first section of the script, which itself is currently in progress.
Since returning to school I have been contemplating what song to do a video on, but then our teacher decided to give us a choice of what we wanted to do for our Advanced Portfolio, and upon hearing that we could do a short film, my mind immediately began thinking about short films.
A few days later I finalised my decision to do a short film as opposed to a short film, due to the wider scope and creative freedom you have when making one, especially as there are no set themes or rules apart from a minimum length of 5 minutes.
I have begun scripting my short film, with a scenario of the UK running out of electricity, and the final hour before it does so.
Anyway, I shall update this blog with a fleshed-out version of the story, which I'm sure will interest you very much!
Lately I have been seeing a ton of music video parodies going up on YouTube, with some of them giving the original video creators a run for their money.
There are some real life parodies such as this one from Bart Baker which basically take the mickey out of everything in a music video as well as praying on the artists stereotypes, and while I find these interesting, I feel that there are better types of parodies out there.
Then there are the other types of parodies, which are not real life, but in a game, these game parodies are quickly gaining ground against the real life parodies, and even though it may seem that they are fairly easy to do, some can take months, and can arguably take more talent to create than real life parodies.
A fantastic example of this is the Minecraft parody of Usher's 'DJ got us falling in love again'. Created by a cast of extremely talented people and fronted by Captain Sparklez, the parody, titled 'Revenge' has gained 115 million views, and this makes it more popular than the original video!
I have even created a Minecraft music video parody myself, and to date it has garnered 14,000 views on YouTube, and has been recognised by the current lead coder of Minecraft, Jeb. I currently have another in the works, due to be released in the next week!
I'd say that this is a pretty convincing case for musical parodies, and I believe that they should be more widely accepted.
In recent weeks we've heard loads about different artists doing weird things that are completely unlike them. We've heard Miley Cyrus doing inappropriate things at the VMAs, to Katy Perry wearing weird things to music award ceremonies.
And, even weirder, Lady Gaga has turned somewhat normal?!
Does this mean that the fame is getting to these 'celebrities'? For example, Miley Cyrus was Disney's golden girl as Hannah Montana, being a huge role model for a generation of young girls, was she given too much influence over people?
I honestly believe that we dump too much fame and power on these young 'stars', which causes them to often go off the rails, I mean Justin Bieber, the teen heartthrob, was recently seen spitting on his fans.
Why do teens idolise these horrible people, forcing them to go close to insane?!
One thing missing in the current music industry is originality, and it's something that is needed for the music industry to continue being as prominent as it currently is. I have seen far too many videos of someone dancing around, in skimpy costumes, and quite frankly it makes me want to turn off more than I want to watch it.
A good example of originality is Ylvis' newest contraption 'The Fox', which is something unlike I've ever seen before, and I believe it is a very good example for other music artists in the future, so come on...
In today's world, we see new artists popping up left, right and centre, most of them dying out after one song, but a couple hanging on to their fledgling audience.
As more and more songs are beginning to get more repetitive, it really begs the question of WHY people actually like the music. Let's take an example.
One Directions's new ultra-popular song the so called 'Best Song Ever' was heralded as the... well, best song ever by their 'fans' - which surely stands for fanatics - and when it emerged that One Direction actually stole the beginning of their song from The Who's 'Baba O'Reily', most of their fans reacted angrily saying that the Who had actually copied One Direction.
Another example, this one possibly even more worrying, Katy Perry's new single 'Roar' is topping the charts currently and people are saying it's the new 'Teenage Dream', well, they are actually right...
Roar uses the exact same chord pattern as Teenage Dream, and, when played together at the same time, they sound identical. Running out of ideas Katy?
As time is passing, I find more and more of the 'popular' music which is released has been getting more and more sexist, especially in devaluing the female population.
A good example of this is the questionably popular 'Blurred Lines' by Robin Thicke, Pharell and T.I., which contains enough sexual references to make anyone cringe or at least feel uncomfortable. Not only is the video awfully explicit, but the lyrics are as well, for example 'I know you want it' which is repeated many times throughout the song, and, although somewhat vague, anyone with half a brain can work out what he is implying.
It's not only the 'male' artists which are doing this, but it seems the female artists are beginning to do it themselves, for example Miley Cyrus' 'We can't stop' and 'Wrecking ball' are just as bad at portraying women, and it just begs the question: Why?!
Over the last week we have managed to finish our practice piece, finish the covers and put it all together.
I believe that we have created a very convincing piece of media which could compete with real industry products.
Furthermore, the difference in the standard of work I've completed for this practice piece compared with my thriller piece from last year is astounding, I've taken more care over smaller, finer details such as the different types of shots I wanted to use, and how much care I spent making the music fit the way we wanted it to!
Lastly, we have finished an evaluation for our practice piece, using questions which will actually come up on our real A2 piece next year.
Well, something else I found on the still camera were pictures of our storyboards, which, much like the behind the scenes shots, I wish to share with you!
As I said a couple of posts ago, we managed to finish all of our filming within two days, but whilst we were filming, we let Jacob and Nicola loose with a camera, so it appears that we have a large quantity of photos from the recording sessions, and I'd love to share them with you!
Well, on Wednesday we began our filming for our practise piece, and due to the fact we knew exactly what we wanted to do, we finished our filming on the Thursday.
We then went back up to the editing room and checked all of our footage to ensure it was up to scratch, and realising that our footage was fine, we decided to mix the music so it fitted our needs.
As we were only using the first verse and the final chorus for our music video, we had to modify the music quite a lot so it sounded near-enough seamless, which the finished music is.
That took us to the end of Thursday.
When we returned on Friday, we began adding in all of our video clips, and editing them together so that the transitions occur when we planned them to, and to synchronise the lip-syncing to the music.
We also modified the colour-balance on all of the shots to represent different things, for example our piece consists of 2 main time periods, real-time, and various flashbacks. For the flashbacks, I created a preset which made the video clips more red and yellow, by changing the colour balance, and for the real-time I created a preset which made the shots more blue and green, to signify that the flashbacks were in happier times than the real-time shots.
Once we had finished adding the colour balance modifications, we made some finalising touches such as some glow transitions when going into and going out of a flashback.
Then, when we were sure that we had done everything we wanted to on this piece, we rendered the piece out, ready to be exported at our next convience.
Once we have done this, finished our CD cover and insert and back cover and finished our advert, we have completed the practice piece!
Today we're working on finalising an advert for our practice piece, whilst keeping things consistent with our CD cover and insert.
Ways which we can do this are:
Using the same colours for pictures, backgrounds, font etc
Using the same font across documents, which we have done.
Using the same image across all the different media pieces, which again, we have done.
By doing this we can create a consistent brand across different mediums, from CDs to newspaper adverts, and this allows consumers to recognise brands, songs, or media products, which leads to increased sales, and more people listening to your music due to a consistent brand.
You can see on our advert a consistent font, colour and picture throughout all the documents for our practice piece.
Well today we created a back for our single, and we created a single cover which is nearly ready to be printed off.
We made sure to include information such as a barcode, logos of stores which the song can be bought from, and the logo for Passenger.
I'd like to stress that this is not the finished version, and we will work on adding a few more industry standard conventions over the next week to provide the back cover with a realistic look.
We have also scouted for people to appear in our music video, and I am pleased to say that we have found 2 actors, Hollie and our teammate Dom.
We will begin the filming of our music video tomorrow, and we hope to get a good way through the filming process for this practise piece.
So, today we worked on the insert to go inside out CD digipack, and we managed to create something which we are happy with.
I created the image in Photoshop, using things such as adjusting the light levels and colour saturation to create a nice scene with stars in the sky.
I then imported the file into Publisher and we begun adding text and thinking about what to put into the insert.
I believe the product which we have made is one that complies with most industry conventions, and unless we feel that we want to add more pages into our insert, I believe that we will use this one as our finished CD insert.
Last week we went out and got some photographs of potential locations for our practise music video, and today we have just got them uploaded onto the computer.
We are definitely moving towards a more natural feel of a video, as you can see from the images below. Today we will be storyboarding ready to start filming either tomorrow or Friday!
Also today, we were set the task of creating an A4 advert for our new single which we are creating a video for. I am very please with how mine has turned out, as it shows all of the information required for a good advert and also contains all industry standard information.
When I come to do this for the real practise video, I will ensure I get all the information regarding the video's marketing platforms from iTunes to Android, maybe even YouTube, as YouTube is fast becoming a recognised media and marketing platform for new media products.
We are creating a preliminary piece as a way of practising our methods of researching areas to do with music videos, to further our knowledge and skill in terms of recording the videos and to experiment with different methods in editing a video. We have to film, edit and export a short 1-1.5 minute music video, which must feature lip syncing. We also have to create a CD digi pack, which includes a back cover including spines and an insert booklet for the CD. Lastly, we must create an A4 magazine advert advertising the CD.
The song which we will be creating a video for is 'Let Her Go' by Passenger, you can find the official video for the song below. We chose this song as I had a very good idea of what I wanted to do in terms of the video, and due to the song being a first hit for passenger, I felt that it would be perfect, I then pitchedd this idea to the rest of the group. I did this by realising that the official video is fairly simple as it is mainly performance-based, so we decided to feature more of a narrative but with elements of performance such as lip-syncing, and maybe some guitar playing due to the guitar being the main instrument in the song.
We also chose this song as, due to the fact we must record the video on the school site, we knew areas of school which would be perfect for filming the video, such as a small area of trees, a bit of an open area which I feel would suit the feel of the music, due to the music being very calm and relaxing, we felt that a serene setting would be the most suitable.
After taking all of this into consideration, we did finally decide upon this song, and we are currently in the process of creating the CD digipack and coming up with a storyboard for our music video. -Daniel
