Nicole Melia

Music Video Evaluation

I was asked to create a Music Video within a group; we each had to share our pre-production and film our idea together but then edit our final production in our own way. Straight away I knew what idea I wanted to do and so I shared with my partner my idea and we both agreed we thought it would be different to what everyone else was planning. As it was my idea I thought it gave me a better advantage in pre-production, filming and editing as I had the image of what I wanted it to look like in my head- but as I came to the end of my editing it was also a disadvantage.

As me and my partner Megan has already decided what we was going to do pretty much the same day as the assignment was explained I started looking through music videos of people in the gym, working out or any type of exercise to give me ideas on equipment, camera angles and shots, this helped allot when doing my story board as I knew which shots would look effective. My idea was based on a man in a Thai Boxing gym working out to the song Robert Miles- Children. I think Robert Miles Children was a really effective song to use as it doesn’t have any lyrics but has an extremely catchy rhythm and beat, with it not having lyrics people would focus more on the video than singing along. A big disadvantage of this song was that it was approximately 7 minutes long and when it came to editing we didn’t have enough time to edit on average a 7 minute song so both me and Megan had to edit the song down.

The song starts with a long intro which is slower but still upbeat, this was really effective as we chose to do a music video which was a narrative- telling a story, so it helped with the suspense towards the audience. The tempo starts to increase and the rhythm of the songs starts to pick up this was when you could see the fighter begin working harder and progressing into a faster pace adding more techniques. I feel as though our pre production all went very smoothly. Me and Megan both spilt the work half and half and as much as it was my idea we both had our say in what we thought would look good and more professional and as this task involved allot of team work I couldn’t of asked for a better partner to work with.

When it came to filming this is when our team work became a bit of a struggle- as we both work and had to film our footage outside of college. We had to film our footage all in one night due to this problem and as my dad was the starring role (The boxer) we had to also make sure he was free and the gym was free(Our location). As you can see from my storyboard my final production doesn’t look exactly the same this was mainly because of not having enough time to film everything and also some footage didn’t look as good as we hoped. Another main problem was in the holidays when we had to film I was on holiday so this caused another problem and as we’d planned on filming when we was back my dad then had an injury to his foot- from training at the gym. So we couldn’t film the rest of the footage. Luckily we both had filmed allot of footage that night so we could still make our final music video looked a bit like we hoped.

Nicole Melia

As I said at the beginning it was a strong advantage to me but also a big disadvantage as I had an idea in my head what I wanted my final production to look like and with me not having enough time to create this I felt as though it didn’t look as good as I had hoped. On the plus side it has taught me a lesson and if I was to film my footage and edit it again I would know what I would do differently such as get all of my footage done straight away and make sure I was happy and had everything on record I needed. Also give myself allot more time to edit which would include increasing and decreasing the speed of the footage and also experimenting more with the colour correction and editing the song down more professionally. As I wasn’t familiar with the camera I was using- this also wasn’t a great advantage as I didn’t really know how everything worked. As our footage goes on you can see how I realised there was the focusing of the camera to make things much more clear- One of my favourite shots is at the end with The boxer on the punching bag, You can see his reflection in the mirror in front and straight away I knew this angle would be effective, especially as we turned all the big main lights off.

When it came to editing as I’ve said I didn’t give myself enough time to do everything which I was really disappointed with as I think if I had much more time I could have made it look allot better. Colour correction was a big thing in my head as I wanted the colour mainly to have a red tone throughout the video to create the colour symbolism ‘Red’ of power, anger etc. When it came to editing this it looked too much as the gym is mainly red- this then was another problem I had to decide on. I also wanted to create an opening title for my music video which again I didn’t have enough time to do.

Here below is a print screen of my final production and as you can see I have used more of a cooler tone:

Nicole Melia

I think altogether my pre production, footage and idea’s worked really well, I think when filming me and Megan thought about the different angles and shots such as close-up, long shots, bird’s eye view etc and I am happy with my final production but I now know how time consuming this project was and if I could go back I would spend more time editing my footage than the pre production.

Shots:

Extreme Close Up

Long Shot

Nicole Melia

Mid Shot

Angles:

Nicole Melia

Bird’s Eye View

Panning