Planning

Having completed the research, I now feel I understand what makes a successful music video. The planning section is one of the most important sections, as this is the point where we have to decide on an idea, location, actors, times and then storyboard it all. If any of this is incorrect or just slightly wrong, then the next stages will also be wrong. The planning stage is where we pool all our ideas together, thinking about different concepts and ideas that we could use, trying to relate them to our chosen song, which is written by Ryan Adams and is called sylvia plath.

Idea

From the start of this coursework we have always had an idea of what we wanted to do, so it was just a matter of fine-tuning the idea, so it would work and flow together. The whole idea only involves two characters, one being female and the other male. The general idea starts with a man reading a book, then cuts to her as if, he is picturing what is happening from this book. We have to make the audience realize, what is happening as soon as possible and try and get them recognize the main themes behind our idea and what we trying get across to them. The themes of the song that we are using, are indulgence, excess and self destruction and theses will be some of the themes that we will use throughout our music video.

Location

For our music video, we would like to use one of our friends house to film a stage of the video but there a few problems with this idea. We want to use our friends basement to film the a scene with a bath tub and the female character but we will have trouble finding a bath tub then carrying it down the stairs, fitting through the door then filling it with warm water. We need to try and figure away around this problem that matches our ideas but hopefully we will be able to complete our original plan. Also we need a large house, as this will give the impression that the actress is of a higher class but the house must have a large staircase and our friend’s house fits both these needs. Because we want to use our friend’s house, this means we won’t have think about available time that we can film or how long can film for as we can use his house any time.

Props and Equipment

For our music video we need to identify what props and equipment we need when filming our music video. This is a very important part of our music video because if we do not portray the right image across to the audience they will not understand the video. These are the props and equipment we need:

• Bath tub
• Costume – long black dress, long gloves
• Make up
• Book
• Cannon XL2 or Cannon XM2 and tripod.

Storyboarding

The standard of the storyboarding from AS to A2 has to be improved and to do this instead of drawing them out by hand, we could have the option of drawing out the images then scanning them onto the computer and colouring and editing them through Photoshop. This process of editing the images through the computer is time consuming and I think the standard will be to a lower level compared to hand drawn storyboards. The storyboards need to help us get an idea of the shots needed with a variety of different camera angles and will help anyone viewing them to understand what we are trying to achieve. These storyboards have to depict exactly what we want to be in our music video, which will help us when trying to film. The storyboards need to show our thoughts and how they change and adapt depending on different situations.