JUST A COUPLE OF UPDATES.

This song can be interpreted in so many different ways, there isn’t actually a right way to interpret it. It can mean something different to everyone but who are we to say that its wrong?

The lyrics are captivating, and you can create a strong narrative from them as they are so metaphorical. For example, the lyric “And friends don’t stick around, they go which way the wind blows”, we had the idea of having a big group of people surrounding the main character and one by one they’d disappear. We actually did get some footage of this, just to try it out, and it works, we just need to get the technical aspects of it right and it should look really effective.

I know a lot of people that love Gabrielle’s music, and I know for a fact that they all have different ideas of what this song means. I know what it was written about, but my idea of what it was about, is completely different to the what Gabrielle wrote it about, but that’s okay because it means she has captivated her audience, and her lyrics actually mean something and people like it enough to actually listen to it enough to try and get a deeper understanding.


I experimented with a couple of fonts to see which looked the best.

ANCILLARY TASK PLANS!

We are starting to plan our ancillary tasks (a poster and a cd cover). We've started looking at photographers that we can get inspiration from and base our ideas on.
The first photographer we have looked at is Tom Leishman, a talented, young photographer from London. He has worked for people such as The Saturdays, and other well known artists, but his personal work and album artwork is just beautiful. We've looked through the majority of his work, and we've come across some pieces that are really eye catching.

Here are some examples of his work that we really love.

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From looking at the pictures and deciding on which we both like, we've found out that we have really similar taste as to what we'd like to achieve with this.

We also looked at a photographer called Tom Barnes. He is well known in the music industry but also produces some really beautiful portrait shots. We cannot link or print screen the work that we love from this website, but the link is there so we can refer back to it whenever we need to.

ENGLISH WEATHER!

We can't film today as it is pouring down with rain. Unfortunately, because we live in England, this isn't something that is rare and it's just annoying that it stops us filming as the majority of our shots are outside.
So we've decided to use this lesson to figure out our targets for what needs to be done.

TARGETS:

Filming to be completed: This includes performance and narrative shots.

The performance shots that we've produced so far have looked quite good, we've cropped them down so that less of the background is shown, so we need to keep in mind not just the focus of the shot but what is in the background too. We need to film some more performance shots and refilm the performance shot that is sat at the window as it was out of focus.
The narrative shots that we have are minimal, all we have is the rough version of the leaf throwing which needs to be refilmed anyway so we need to crack on with the refilming and filming of completely new shots.

Start Ancillary Task: A poster and a CD Cover.

We need to take photographs of me, or something that is relative to the song. We then need to edit them to look like a poster and a CD Cover. We need to edit them to the best of our ability to make them look professional.

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A LITTLE PROGRESS!

Last week, we got a few people from our year together and filmed the part of our video that was massively influenced by Lisa Mitchell's Clean White Lve video. We went outside and looked for a good spot to film our idea. We found a huge tree surrounded by lovely crunchy brown leaves and decided this was the perfect spot.

"Friends don't stick around, they go which way the wind blows"


This is the lyric that we want to focus on for these few shots. Myself, and a few others positioned ourselves ready to start playing with the leaves together. I really like this idea because it looks cool and it's relative to the lyrics.
To get the 'disappearing' effect that we wanted, we stopped and started the filming process. When we had a little bit of footage with 5 people, we froze, stopped recording and one person left the scene. We repeated this until it was just me left in the frame.

When we got back to the lesson, we uploaded the footage and had a look at it. Unfortunately, we can't really use the footage even though it's quite good because the sun is shining down and it ruins the shot. We are going to refilm the exact same thing because we really liked the effect that it had but we will probably with people that are more willing and less negative about the ideas we have.

CHANGE OF IDEAS.

Unfortunately, because I spent so much time outside of college this term, we've had to compromise and change our ideas to fit the time we have left to do this video.
We've made the video much simpler, as it was relatively complex before. We've taken out most of the fiddly bits, and unnecessary complexities. Although, they would make our video look amazing, we just simply don't have the time to work out how we'll do it, film it and edit it to produce an amazing quality video.

We want to keep a few more difficult ideas so we've got a bit of technique and it'll look awesome. We would like to keep the 'friends don't stick around, they go which way the wind blows' idea. I had an idea that if we used 2 people, including myself, throwing leaves around and having fun, then each of the other two people just vanish leaving me stood on my own. I thought this would be a good idea because it would look really effective and it gives more depth to the video itself.

We want to make the video flow, and look amazing which is why we've taken out the difficult bits to film. This means we've got more time to plan, film and edit the bits that we will actually use and make it look really professional. We can piece this video together quite easily, as a lot of the shots are outside, but a few are inside. It should, when it is the editing process, fit together like a jigsaw.

I'm feeling quite positive about our change in ideas for this video, though it would have been nice to have had those cool ideas feature in the video, I know that we can make it look amazing without them.

PROGRESS: HOORAY!

On Tuesday 2nd November, myself and Abbie started planning what type of shots we were going to use to start filming our video. We decided that a shot with me, as I am now the actress in our video as we couldn't find anyone else, sitting on the window pane looking out the window, wishing she could be out there too. We experimented with pull focus on the new camera, and having the background out of focus, and slowly pulling it into focus makes a really cool effect, so we will probably use that in our video somewhere. We also looked at Lisa Mitchell's video for Clean White Love to gain inspiration for types of shots we'd like to use. We then uploaded the footage that we had taken and looked at it on iMovie and just looked at what worked and what didn't work.

On Wednesday 3rd November, we started filming properly. We got into the lesson and wrote a plan of what we wanted to film. We wrote what type of shots we wanted inside, and then what shots we wanted outside, and the specifics of where we wanted them filmed. We got the camera and tripod and went outside to film, we found two rows of trees that looked really awesome because they were symmetrical. Our teacher told us not to film complex bits yet, so we only filmed a little bit, the first verse, to see what it looked like. We then filmed me sing the entire song sat in a tree, so we can use bits and pieces from that shoot. The results of that shoot were actually really good, we might have to crop it so I'm in the frame more, but what we got was a really cool shot. Then I sang the entire song in front of the camera, it was a close up, and it was a shot similar to some of the Clean White Love video. These types of shots are useful as we are able to portray a significant amount of emotion through facial expression. It then started raining and it being a brand new camera, we didn't want to risk getting it wet, so we came back inside and uploaded our footage. We were happy with the progress that we had made in the filming aspect. We still had an hour spare after watching our footage back, and looking at what we could do with them whilst editing so we decided to set up shots to film inside, the window scene. It took about half an hour to set up the exact shot that we wanted, and it ended up being a low angle mid shot, which we then changed the focus to me, and the trees in the background were blurred. We didn't really like the lighting on this shot, so we got the natural light box and turned it on and it automatically made a massive difference to how it looked. Once everyone had left the room, we played the song, and filmed it from this perspective. I always sing when we're recording, because I feel that if I mime, that it will look really bad! Apparently, I looked out the window too much during this time, and we filmed it again with me just looking at and singing to the camera. In between filming these, we filmed some narrative shots of me just looking out of the window - again inspired by Clean White Love as Lisa Mitchell had some shots of her doing something, and the exact same shots of her doing the same thing but singing.

I'm really impressed with how much we got done today, next week I think that we are going to be refilming some of the shots we did today, as we accidentally left the camera on manual focus - oops! We will then probably film some more narrative shots as we have a lot of performance and then talk about what else we want in the video, and the ancillary tasks.