Prelim Edit

My Audition

Personal Achievement

What do you personally want to get out of the whole A2 prelim experience?

I would like to gain confidence when acting in front of a camera. At the moment I'm very uncomfortable when people film me but this project will force me to overcome this and act like the character I have been cast as. I would also like to gain teamwork skills. The team working on this project is larger than any team I have filmed with before and it will be interesting to see how it is different from working in a small group. There is also a very tight schedule to stick to. Again, I have never worked to a schedule as precise as this one and it should be interesting and challenging to do so. 

Is it a challenge for you or within your comfort zone?

It will be challenging to act in front of a camera in a studio setting as it is different from anything I've ever really done before and is quite daunting. However, I am pleased about the fact that I am playing the drummer as I already play drums so it will be easy to make the drumming look convincing and this should make me more comfortable. 

Have you achieved/learnt anything so far?

The audition video forced me to practise lip-synching and generally made me a bit more comfortable in front of a camera because I was forced to just get on with it. My acting wasn't very convincing and I much preferred being behind the camera to being in front of it but I got on with it and in the end it was fine. I have also learned how much work goes in behind the scenes for actors and how much preparation is needed to portray someone convincingly. Even after the 4 hour session where we did acting exercises and prepared for the shoot, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

My Role

Describe your role, how you feel about it

 

I am the drummer for 2 of the locations: the shots by the pool and the shots by the car. My character, George Daniel, generally looks disinterested in what is happening and plays the drums fairly unenthusiastically as he is unhappy about the video being so 'poppy'. The shots that I am acting in are shown below.

 

Car Scene 

 

Pool Scene

 

In all of these shots, my character is generally looking down at the floor or around the set. He doesn't move much apart from the occasional head-flick. During the pool scene, he only has one drum as is clearly not really playing along properly with the song.

 

 

 

Everything George Daniel is wearing is black. His hair is tied back in a ponytail and he is wearing a t-shirt under a blazer with the sleeves rolled up, skinny jeans and boots.

 

Is this a challenge for you, or something within your comfort zone?

 

I think this will not be too challenging. I already play the drums and have learned the song so playing it convincingly will not be a problem. As long as I can pull off the bored look, I'm sure I'll be pretty comfortable with the role. I also don't have to look at the camera at all which is a relief. 

 



My Costume

Describe or list the specific costume/look you are aiming for

 

As I have said in my previous post, I will be wearing a blazer over a t-shirt with rolled up sleeves, skinny jeans and boots. All of these will be black. George Daniel, (the drummer in the video), has his hair tied back in a ponytail. My hair isn't long enough to do this so I will probably just have it spiked up a bit or have something interesting done to it. In general, I am going for the indie, casual look.

 

Do you have the items you need or are you planning to beg/borrow? Is there anything that may need to be bought?

 

I don't have most of the clothes that I need. All I have is a black t-shirt but even this may not be suitable as it is old and doesn't look very good. I don't have black skinny jeans, boots or a black blazer. I'm fairly certain that we should be able to find people who would be willing to lend me the boots and the jeans but the blazer may be harder to find and possibly may need to be bought.

 

 George Daniel (my character)

1. Did you enjoy the workshop day? What are your best bits and why?

The workshop day was a really enjoyable experience. It was really interesting to see how many different roles there were and how everyone worked together. The scale of the production was very impressive and much bigger than I had previously anticipated. It was great to see the make-up department getting the look that is seen in the music video, while other worked on the lighting (which was much more complicated than I expected) and others worked on changing the lenses and the positioning of the camera so that the final shot was framed just like in the original music video. Despite how tiring the day was, everyone really seemed to be enjoying the shoot and there was a really positive atmosphere throughout the day.

The view of the set from the lighting desks

I got to use the clapperboard for a few shots and helped to re-position the sets. It was good to be involved in the project instead of just watching while everything happened around me. I also enjoyed acting a lot more than I thought I would. I wasn't nervous because everyone was relaxed and having a good time so I just played drums and tried to look disinterested to mimic the drummer in the 1975. Dom was friendly and supportive so it was very easy to act convincingly as we were all comfortable in front of the camera.

Me doing the clapperboard for a close-up shot of Kayvon

I would have liked to get more involved with camera. I've already worked with lights a lot as I'm on the Sound and Light team so I was already familiar with the technical side of lighting. However, it was still interesting to see how many lights were needed and how they were all used. Some were bounced off the back wall and floor and others were shone into a diffusion sheet so that there was a soft light on the actors' faces. Getting more involved with this side of things would have been great but I didn't want to get in the way of Dom and the rest of the team so I let them get on with it.

Diffusing light onto the poolside scene

I'm not at all artistic or good at making things so I was very impressed by how closely the sets mimicked the original music video. I thought everyone involved with the set design did a great job and all of the setups looked really good. The same applied to make-up. While I have no interest in in, I thought the make-up artists did a great job, especially with the girls in the photography scenes near the end of the video.

Overall, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I learned a lot from it. Seeing so much fancy tech in one place like the camera, all the lights and the 4 monitors was really cool and seeing everything come together to get the shots was fascinating. The day basically inspired me to pursue a career in the media industry and I hope I can work on many more sets like this one in the future.

2. What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks?

We had to complete 5 tasks during this project. From each of these, I gained skills and confidence that will benefit me next year when I am making my own video.


Task 1: Audition video

• Learned how to lip-sync convincingly
• Became more comfortable in front of a camera
• Started to become familiar with the song

My Audition Video

Task 2: Learn and practice your performance

• Became familiar with my character
• Learned how he moves and his overall attitude during the performance
• Learned the song on drums

Task 3: Help to plan and organise your costume

• Thought about how to achieve the same look as the character
• Made me realise the amount of planning and effort that goes into how a character looks

My role

Task 4: The shoot

• Realised the scale of the shoot and  how many different people were needed to achieve the shots that we wanted
• Learned about the importance of using different lenses for different setups
• Learned how important lighting is for achieving certain looks and how complicated it actually is to achieve these looks
• Learned more about all the individual roles
• Realised just how tiring a full-day shoot is
• Became much more comfortable in front of a camera
• Used the clapperboard for a few shots
• Made me realise how much planning is necessary for a shoot when working with lots of people
• Got me thinking about my own video, what is achievable, how I could achieve certain looks and how much planning I will have to do prior to the shoot

My final costume

Task 5: The edit

• Realised just how much work goes into putting a music video together
• Learned how important quick cutting is to keep a fast pace for the video
• Learned about how important multi-track editing is for staying organised when editing
• Learned how much grading can change the overall look and mood of a video

Overall, I am now more confident in front of a camera and I am more familiar with the style of editing required to make a music video. I am now also aware of the amount of work that needs to be put in for a project of this size and I have started to think in advance about my video as I know that next term will be fairly hectic with all the required planning.

3. Are you pleased with the footage and your edit? Is it how you expected it to look?

Overall I'm pleased with the footage and my final edit. I was never expecting it to look as good as the final video as we aren't professionally trained actors and replicating something is harder than creating something original. Despite some shots not being identical to the ones in the real video, our remake looked really good and we worked with the space and the resources we had. I'm particularly pleased with how the bike set-up looked. We obviously didn't have a car and we had a smaller set to work with so instead of trying to copy the shot exactly, we put our own twist on it by using a bike instead and rearranging things within the frame so that they looked as good as they could. While the shot looked smaller, I liked that it seemed like we used all the space better and the band (including me) was more in focus and a more important part of the shot.

The original shot

Our attempt at replicating it

I found that some of the lighting was different to the real video. This meant I had to try and compromise with the overall look of the shot in order to replicate the look of the characters. I was particularly pleased with my grading on the bike scene as I managed to get a nice grey look that was quite similar to the original video. However I had to have a lot of contrast in some of the plain white shots of the band in order to get the white background and this made the shots look worse. These problems are only caused by the fact that we were trying to replicate a video instead of making our own and I'm fairly certain I won't have this problem while making my video.

I don't really know how I was expecting the video to look. I never thought that we would be able to perfectly replicate the video but I was genuinely surprised at how close we got in the end considering the whole thing only happened in the space of about three weeks. Overall the video, while not perfect, is pretty close to the original and is better than I expected it to look which is pleasing.

4. How do you think your prelim experiences will impact on your approach to next term's music video coursework?

The prelim opened my eyes to lots of possibilities and got me thinking on a bigger scale than before. I've only ever worked in small groups with no budget with fairly mediocre cameras (compared to the one we used in the shoot). Seeing the whole studio with all the lighting, props, make-up and costumes made me realise that I can be ambitious with my music video.

It also made me realise that I will need to do a lot of planning if I want the shoot to be successful. I'll need to plan every detail about how the characters look and act and exactly which shots I will need. On top of this, I need to plan what order I get these shots in and how I will achieve them. In other words, I've started to think on a bigger scale and have realised the importance of precise planning.