Music Video

 

   

Pre-Production

For this project, my team and I chose to do the song Pompeii by Bastille. We wanted to copy the music video for this song as best as we could, but we deleted many scenes in our video that were in the original because of the location or due to time constraints. We wanted to portray "the end of the world" which is the main theme of the song.
     During pre-production, we went through a couple music videos, and ultimately decided to do Pompeii because we thought it'd be easier to do and manageable. As a team, we decided not to do a lot of what was in the original video, mostly because our video had to be around two minutes and thirty seconds. One of my teammates was the director due to her confidence and assurance in what to do. I carried around and mostly manned the camera equipment, but the director took over controlling the camera from time to time. I always checked to make sure we were following the rule of thirds and the 180 rule. In the beginning, my team kept asking who would be the actor.

Production

     Production was rough. The director wanted to film at a park about twenty-five minutes away from where I live for one of the scenes, but they wanted o film early in the morning because the shot in the original video looked like sunrise. The first time we filmed there, our director showed us around the park and possible areas to film. We started setting up the equipment, and I put the battery in the camera along with the SD card, and tried turning it on but it wouldn't. Filming was cancelled that day. We all planned to film at the park at least four times. The first time was the one I just talked about. The second time, we got majority of the scenes based off of the original video done, but the actor was late. Third time, our actor never showed up due to illness. Fourth time, the roads were so icy that our director spun out twice and both our actor and director had a difficult time driving.
     Continuing on with more production, we also had to film at a "restaurant" with an elderly woman. Luckily, our editor's grandma was willing o let us film at her house and would be in the video. Unfortunately, our director couldn't make it, so I was "director" for the evening, and our actor got lost on his way to the grandma's house. He was at least forty minutes late. We eventually started filming. I felt confident in all but one scene, but we tried doing a couple retakes, but our actor had to leave, so we had to deal with what we got.
     Another place we filmed at during production was at a parking garage.  Everyone was a little confused as to where we were meeting, but we eventually found each other, and started location scouting there for a bit before finally filming. We got what we needed from that location, but we did plan to re-shoot there again.
     Due to the weather, we weren't able to re-shoot anything and lost a couple day where we could've filmed more scenes. Once we started filming, we stayed on track and tried to get as much done as possible. We did goof off  every once in awhile, but we did get back on track right away.

Editing

     Finally, editing. I didn't edit the video, but from what the editor has told us, they were editing for an hour and Adobe Premier Pro crashed. They luckily saved the project before it crashed but it was still bad. After that, they said Premier kept acting weird and would crash on him about every ten minutes. They eventually got it done, but I could tell it was exhausting for them to edit the video.

Overall

     I got to work the camera quite a bit since I was responsible for carrying equipment around to and from places. My team and I had a group chat so we could communicate when and where we wanted to be someplace. I tried my best to communicate what times worked best for me along with what times I could film. I did become the director temporarily at the grandma's house because our director wasn't able to come.
     If I could do something differently, I could stress the point to my team about showing up early or at least on time due to at least two people showing up late consistently. I'd also do this project during any other season than winter.
    I would still delete all the scenes we originally deleted due to the difficulty of location. I'd also do the same song because unlike other groups, I haven't gotten sick from listening to this song yet. IT's an okay song, in my opinion, so I wasn't ever annoyed when we had to listen to it over and over again.
     For my next project, I'd make sure we pick someone who is reliable and will show up on time for filming to be the main actor. I'd also make sure communication is clear as to when and where to film.
     Overall, this project was a bit stressful due to weather conditions and scheduling. I'm glad this project is done. I am really proud of what the video looks like and how much we actually did. We didn't get the video to two minutes and thirty seconds, but not a lot of groups did. My two favorite shots in the video are when our main actor looks off into the distance with the sun setting and there's smoke blowing out of a building in the distance, and when the Grandma looks at the main actor because her eyes are black due to the magic of editing, which took our editor an hour to do. Again, I'm impressed with how well the final product turned out.