Lesson 1: Skills Development

Skills developed in research:

• Looked at the conventions of music videos and what is stereotypically featured in music videos of certain genres.
• looked at a wider range of media products
• looked at different theories relating to music videos e.g. Laura Mulvey, Andrew Goodwin, Carol Vernalis
• researched more into target audience – looked at it in greater detail (core audience, wider audience)
• looked at what makes a good music video by analysing student music videos and normal music videos
• looked into cross-media and synergy amongst their products
• looked into costume and props in more detail as they are of importance in a music video

Skills developed in planning production work:

• looked into the different aspects of our artist in more depth (name, age, personality, influences)

• looked into songs and chose the best one that suited the person that will be performing
• adapted our video to suit the genre of the song
• planned our locations carefully (where exactly in Richmond)
  
• planned precise outfits that our artist will definitely be wearing
• any specific make up or hair styles
  
• plan what props will be needed and when (guitar diary)
  
• planning in advance of how we want our ancillary to tie in with music video
  
• established our core and wider planned our music video around this
• looked into any scenes or styles of edits that could influence our music video
  
• chose a record label where our artist would fit into by looking at the other artists signed to it
  
• made an animatic to give a basic overview of how our music video will look like

Skills developed in producing the work:

• experimenting and filming with a variety of shot types
  
• useful ways of adding movement to shots
• adding filters to our shots (colour correction)
• adding our own text with our font into our video (editing in Photoshop for a transparent background then importing into Final Cut Pro)
• chopping and screwing and slowing/speeding things up if certain lyrics were out of synch (simply because it was sung in time while filming)
• marking the sound track to establish the beat so we can edit to it

I think my skills have developed greatly over the two years of studying media as I have been able to build on the basic knowledge that I did have. In AS, the research and planning was more or less looking at clips on YouTube and screen grabbing the shots that was relevant for what we needed and googling things. In A2 we looked into things at greater detail and went into it in more depth at made sure we understood why chose certain things. During the production stage, I would say that A2 was more challenging as more things needed to be done in terms of filming and editing. For example in AS we just shot the different shots and just pieced the bits together, added titles and sounds if it was needed. Whereas in A2, we shot PLENTY of base tracks, cut to the beat, established a structure and cut to that, shot any additional shots or cutaways, made sure that the video was in sync to the soundtrack and much more!

Post-Production Development Timeline