30 Second Preliminary task

The chosen song is Are you ready to be heartbroken – Lloyd and the Commotions. By creating a 30 second music video, it gave me an insight into the production and editing techniques required for when I produce my main piece for coursework.

The introduction to the song is 20 seconds of instrumental, which I felt wasn’t a challenge, so instead chose the second verse and chorus. I began by matching lyrics to visual ideas, and also contemplated beats in the song where I could transition the shots.

As we only had 2 days to complete this task, I spent an hour on my storyboards; keeping more time for filming and editing. I made sure that I included all the shots that I was going to use during filming, and wrote a small description of the direction.

My idea was to have a male and female character, portraying his heart ache and to be hurt by her indifference. I decided to include rota scoping and stop motion animation. My reasoning for this was because I had hope of including the techniques in my coursework, so wanted to experiment and visualise their effects on the video. At the beginning of the prelim video, Nick (male character) was to draw an ‘invisible’ question mark with his finger to match the lyrics “Are you ready to be heart broken?”, then once I’d uploaded it, I was to rota scope a a draw question mark to the trace of his finger. There was also a scene where nick sends a letter to Demi (female character), and I visualised a white dove taking the envelope from his hand to deliever it to Demi. I achieved this by using an actual envelope for Nick to hold up into the air, then by pausing and re-filming the shot without the envelope the second time, I was able to rota scope the dove and envelope into the shot with Nick and for it to appear in Demi’s hands. The white dove symbolised Hope from the bible story; Noahs Ark.

I imagined using stop motion animation by using sissors to cut through the letter whilst Demi reads it, suggesting her negative response towards his attempt to woo her. I began by taking a sequence of 77 photos of the sissors opening and closing, then to ensure I could impose it onto my previous footage, I placed them on a green screen background. The effect worked and I acheived what I imagined, however it was hard to establish the letter being destroyed by the sissors without Demi actually doing it herself. Instead, I just left the sissor movement imposed on the footage to suggest her thoughts, not an actul action.

I made it my main goal to ensure that the visual film corresponded exactly with the beat of the music, a clear example of this is (00.04 – 00.08) where Nick walks with a slow motion effect to fit with the slow tempo of the song.