One minute recreation

This is our completed recreation of 'Popscene' by Blur. It It took 2 hours to film and around 8 hours to edit altogether. It also has a colour effect over the top of the whole video in order to 

Filming Popscene

Today my fellow worker and I filmed our Popscene recreation. Our filming location was the school hall, and in order to make it seem as though it was not in a school hall, we tacked many black sheets of paper side-by-side to make a background. We brought our own instruments and booked out the hall to use at a time when we could get the footage we needed without interruptions- which happened to be after school until closing time.

CD cover ideas

CD Cover

Along with our one-minute music video task, we have also been set the task of designing a CD cover for our 'single'. For this task, I have been trying to analyse the lyrics to 'Popscene' and from there, try and visualise a CD cover that would be appropriate to the song's content. Blur itself is a band who, at the time of Popscene's release, were primarily releasing singles that fit with the 'baggy' and 'britpop' scene, along with bands such as The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Initially, the reception of Popscene was not successful, as it was a single that fit more within the genre of punk and grunge, for which, the band Nirvana took the main spotlight at the time. The song allegedly illustrates frontman Damon Albarn's distate for the music business, believing that there are 'too many indie bands'.  The lyrics are as follows:

Popscene

A fervored image of another world
Is nothing in particular now
An imitation comes naturally
But I never really stop to think how

And everyone is a clever clone
A chrome colored clone am I
So in the absence of a way of life
Just repeat this again and again and again

Hey, hey, come out tonight
Hey, hey, come out tonight, popscene, all right

I'm leaving town to run away
Run into your twisted arms
No queues and there's no panic there
Just dangling your feet in the grass

My lack of natural luster now
Seems to be losing me friends
So in the absence of a way of life
Just repeat this again and again and again

Hey, hey, come out tonight
Hey, hey, come out tonight, popscene.

Popscene- one minute recreation.

Popscene

As a follow-up task to our 30 second recreation to 'Happy', we have been given a task to recreate one minute of a music video of our choice, for this I have chosen 'Popscene' by Blur. I have chosen this music video as it is a simple setting: in one location and, as footage, consists mainly of a performance piece, which means that in terms of practicality, the recreation of the setting is achievable. However the creative part of the video exists in the experimental camera movements and editing.

In the first minute, over 200 cuts are shown in the music video, most lasting for less than a second, perhaps even less than half. A lot of these cuts are repeated and looped, making the music video very fast-paced and hard to follow with the eyes. I think Popscene is a good music video to recreate as it will be fairly quick to film but most of the work will come in post-production, meaning that I can practice editing further and show my knowledge of PremierePro through the task. It will also be a chance to practice editing for music videos, for example getting lipsyncing to be in time with the music.

Happy Storyboard

Happy Storyboard

The shot begins exterior to the room and pushes through the door into the room on a dolly. The door seemingly opens by itself making it appear as though the camera is a person who is opening the door by themselves. 













Next the camera will continue on a dolly to move into the room and begins a panoramic shot around the classroom, which will be yellow in order to suit the atmosphere of the music.










At the end of the panoramic shot, a subject comes into view and the camera fixes when subject is the at the centre of the image. up until this point there is no music playing in the video.

 As the music starts, beginning with 5 beats, for 4 of these beats, there are 4 separate cutaways to different stills, these stills will be showing four different types of footage to the original narrative, as with the music video, and there will be continuous cuts to the different footage for the duration of the 30 slot.

There is a cut back to the main narrative on the fifth beat, where the subject is now stood on the table which they were originally sat down at.

Finally, the camera cuts to a low angle shot from the ground of the subject stood on the table. They mime the first lyrics "It might seem crazy, what I'm about to say" before jumping off of the table out of shot. There may also be a match-on-action of the jump.

Premiere Pro tutorials

Premiere Pro CC.

In preparation for the A2 course, I have started to research the tools within Premiere Pro in order to be able to edit videos myself. For my AS thriller, my group had delegated responsibilities for which they took full control: as I was director, I seldom used Premiere Pro and was often consulted on editing via email, and so with the exception of my preliminary task, my knowledge of Premiere Pro is limited. Today I watched a 30 minute tutorial on the 10 basic tasks to know to begin using Premiere Pro, I have learned how to create sequences, make my own animated titles on After Effects and other elements of Premiere Pro which will help me in most of the projects I create on the software in the future.

Filming 'Happy'

'Happy' filming- Friday 24th June

Today we filmed a part of our recreation of the Happy music video by Pharrell Williams. My group and I found a free classroom and changed around the tables and chairs until we had a mise-en-scene which we were able to work with. We had to get creative when it came to wanting a dolly-cam shot of entering the classroom we were in, and used a swiveling desk chair which one of us sat on holding the camera whilst another person pushed them in. We are likely to be re-filming this shot as there were aspects that we were not quite satisfied with, for instance the camera, though on a tripod, was rather unstable and produced quite a shaky image.