19/09/2022 Progress

 Long Weekend Goals:

• Record all musical instrument shots. Piano, guitar and vocals, including a fret-board shot for the guitar riff in the song.
• Record more general footage of my main character for the second half of the song.
• Finish recording / reach a conclusion to my music video.

At the weekend, I accomplished two of my three goals. I now have a complete master track for the guitar, guitar closeups, fret-board closeup and vocal aspect of my music video Each element that I recorded can be swapped in at any time, with all of the audio synced successfully.

As well as this, I continued with more of my editing and filming. My timeline as of this weekend looks like this, with the left section being film I have decided upon and am happy with, with a few tweaks and adjustments. 

My timeline last week looked like this, with a concept I was less happy with.

Alongside editing, I am also sketching out the rough lines for my animation. I have decided against properly animating anything as things may come up or I may have to make adjustments to my clips, so I should not commit to anything until I am sure it is final. While I have not reached the conclusion of my video yet, I feel more confident in the direction it is taking and will continue animating and recording in my spare time. During the week I have found a video I wish to analyse further, and hopefully reference in my video - Happiness by McFly.

I am struggling with finding intertextual references to use in my video, so I aim to speak with my peers soon to see if they have any ideas or references I could include.

I have not started my website yet, but am continually taking images and drawing pictures for when I do. I have a generally good idea of how my website will appear and I will aim to begin planning this next lesson.

Photos taken 06/08/2022

 

Music Video Draft - No Animation

 

This is the second/third draft of my music video with an adapted storyline. Whereas before I had a storyline that appeared too niche and specific, I have expanded it for a broader theme of Eric exploring the day around him. This draft has some animation, and some sketches outlining the animation that will go atop of it - which will be finished at a later date.

Photoshoot #1 - Out the Window

 

Taken - 1st August

I intend for these images to be used as posters and promotional material for my website, as well as using it as an opportunity to test out my camera and the method of shooting. A tower was assembled outside of my window in order to shoot from my first story window. In these images I will superimpose my animated characters around the main character.

^ The tower that was used.

Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #2 - Take on Me, a-ha

This music video is a combination of video recordings and pencil-sketched rotoscoping animation. The narrative is simple - a girl is sitting alone in a cafe reading a comic. The comic comes to life as a hand reaches out to take her into the cartoon - where the narrative then tur
ns to a love story. They get chased out by the other characters, ad the lead singer (one of the cartoons) comes into the real world with the girl, and the video ends. Throughout the video there is a theme of the "love conquers all" stereotype, a popular theme within the genre - and the narrative itself is reminiscent of a comic book narrative, with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end - a hero and an enemy who are somewhat caricatured.

This video is heavily narrative based, providing a sense of escapism for the audience. It is in accordance to Andrew Goodwin's music video theory, as there are multiple close ups of the main artist/singer's face. There is a clear representation of lyrics, but rather than having a literal representation, the director has decided to use more direct means of addressing the audience, creating a self-contained story.  The video is a hybrid of linear narrative and performance, but focusing heavily on the romance narrative elements. The audience of this video are the observers, who get to experience the romance unfold, and the target audience would be male and female equally due to its themes of love- primarily middle classed young adults, who would come under the Aspirer psychometric.

There is a clear opposition in mise-en-scene throughout this video, with a stark contrast between the naturalistic, beige and brown tones of the cafe, and the contrasting black and white of the pencil sketches. This creates a literal escape from reality - the neutral colours give an impression of a mundane setting, whereas the drawing is extremely visually impressive.

Costumes are casual, yet stylish, and befitting of the New Wave genre, and helps accentuate the importance of the animation elements-  they are not presenting themselves as particularly flashy. This is something I wish to achieve in my video, to not overshadow my animation elements.

The way performance and narrative are hybridised in this video, as well as the style itself of cartoon interacting with reality - is very influential to how I wish to approach making my music video. Obviously, my scale is much smaller, and I will be avoiding the rotoscoping process as it is much more complex than what I can achieve, but it creates an exciting mise-en-scene that I wish to reproduce in my video, and I may choose to make intertextual links to this video (for example, my main character could look through a comic-book, similar to the one in the video) as it is an extremely influential video in the world of animation and music.

Generic Research - Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1

 Close Textual Analysis - Music Video #1 - Fell in Love With A Girl - The White Stripes

The White Stripes “Fell in Love with A Girl” music video, which is well known as being a masterpiece of stop motion. It is a fun, ingenious music video that utilises stop-motion animation entirely through LEGO bricks. The video itself is extremely abstract, using only red, blue, yellow, black, and white bricks, with the classic rectangular LEGO shape – so no special parts such as minifigures or bevelled bricks.

The camera is static throughout the whole video, and camera movements are simulated only by moving LEGO bricks. Occasionally, match cuts are used to hide the transitions between different styles as well. Due to the movement of the two-dimensional blocks, the images are very hectic and lively, but still provides the typical stop-motion appearance with the flickering of the camera and the slight imperfections in the bricks.

The video itself is almost entirely performance based but has a very slight element of narrative in the beginning that sets up the entire video. It briefly shows a little boy – the director’s son- building a wall of LEGO bricks. This is the only scene in the video that shows anything other than LEGO bricks, and very briefly creates a narrative – these bricks are meant to be the creation of a child, or more accurately, are fun and meaningless in nature, simply meant to create an interesting visual effect. The video also follows a cyclical structure in the sense that the boy creates a black screen of bricks and the video ends on a black screen as well. The simple technique of narrative creation used in this video is very inspiring and has highlighted the importance of getting my narrative elements across in as short a time as possible.

Importantly to my research, the video upholds a very solid brand identity with their use of colour – staying entirely within the brand identity of Jack and Meg White’s signature red, black and white. While this is seemingly a simple design choice it greatly influences the mise-en-scene of the video creating bold, striking visual effects that are befitting of the White Stripe’s music and genre.

Planning - Storyboarding on Adobe Animate

Rather than creating a physical storyboard using paper and pen, I decided to use Adobe Animate to create a rough storyboard for the shots that I should include, and how long they should be shot for.

However, I have found that in several areas I have timed things wrong and the animatic is too fast- but I should be able to correct this and get the same ideas across.