Narrative Theory

The second theorist we have been introduced to is Claude Levi-Strauss.

Strauss thought that to create a successful film or music video, you would have to have narrative that shows binary opposites such as good and evil, human and alien, and life and death.

We have looked at multiple videos, and a lot of them do follow the ideas of binary opposites and luckily this transferred over to our own music video as we have quite a few binary opposites as motifs. For example, we have sunrise and sunset, dark and light, time manipulation, locations, rich and poor, and work and play. We hope to expand more on these in our video to make them clearer.

Diary Entry: Wednesday 2nd November

Today we don't have any lessons so we used one of our frees that we have together, period 4, to get on top of filming. We filmed the running shots of the Homeless man in full Tea Party costume aswell as well as him finding his hat and tighing his shoe laces. For each scene we shot we used a variety of angles and ways of doing it so we would have enough footage to use for the final music video's fast pace editing. The location choices this time were more in fitting with our music video and the specific character as we chose a small field close by to school because of it's golden fallen leaves, and the wagonways pathway/backtrack due to its link to roughness and nature linking to the character. Both locations add to the video's unique and quirky vintage vibe of the video which act as like a build up to the extravagent tea party at the end of the narrative.   

At the end of the day I returned the camera but not before I retreived the footage from the camera and put it onto our hardrive.

Diary Entry: Monday 31st October

We have returned from half term and are adapting our video. We plan to re-shoot most of the video to improve it as much as possible. We intend to make the performance more intereseting, and link to the lyrics more by adding a sun set video being projected into the background. we also intend to create a faster editing pace through re-taking full scene's from different angles then merging this footage to make one scene seem faster paced. Framing the shots is something that we also inted to focus on through out all of the work we intend to do.

Rough Cut Feedback

In our media class, we all watched each other’s video and gave back feedback on what was liked and what they thought needed to be changed. This has been very beneficial to our group to see what other people like and whether our idea and actual video was liked and enjoyed.

When we got our feedback from the rough cut, people said they liked the narrative involving finding the clothes and the tea party which they thought was unique and interesting. We were very pleased about this as we had spent a while considering what other people would think and whether they’d understand the narrative. The only thing they said would improve the video would be to define who the characters were and what they do as a job; we agreed and thought we needed better footage.

The photographs towards the end of the video were split with our piers liking and disliking it. We took this into consideration and have decided that we would still like to do this to show the madness at the tea party but we would put it into a smaller part.

The location of our tea party and running scenes were thought to be great but our band performance location was dreadful. All members of the group agreed and we knew that we would have to reshoot and film somewhere more adhereing to the conventions of an indie band.

We were told that we had good angles, but perhaps needed a few more to vary to make it more interesting. This also linked with the pace. We were told that we should perhaps make the speed of editing faster to fit in with the pace of the music and adding angles would help this.

We also had a problem with continuity in the tea party. One minute Charlotte, one of the tea party guests, would be wearing a hat and then the next she wasn’t. This was a silly mistake by us, and we agreed to make sure that it would not happen again. Another issue with the tea party was that we didn’t have and tea and just had water, again a silly mistake by us. Also there was an issue with the how tame the tea party, and how it didn’t really fit in with the music. We have decided to remedy this by getting more excitable people to be in the tea party.

We want to completely reshoot the band performance as there were multiple issues. We had a acoustic guitarist and you could see the lyrics on the floor. We hope to improve this a lot by getting organised with musicians and a properly thought out location.

Framing was another thing we were asked to work on. By adding a variety of shots, especially in performance we will be creating a better piece of work. We were also told that we needed more emphasis on the motif of the sunset time-lapse. We are currently considering featuring it in our band performance.

In conclusion, we have all agreed to reshoot everything we have done to get the best out of it and have taken on these criticism and hope to remedy them with the final shoot.

 

Time plan for after Rough cut

Rough cut video

We have gotten extensive feedback from this video, which will hopefully allow us to improve our project from start to finish. These helpful insights came from our peers as well as the teachers, so we will consider each comment, and select the best ones then adapt them so that they can all fit together.

Diary Entry: Monday 17th October

Over the course of today I have edited the Performance and included it within our video, and it has complimented the narrative very well. We have had some trouble securing a band to play for us, as we wanted to use musicians who could actually play the song rather than rely on camera trickery and some miming. The only musicians we could find who would fit the part, and were available turned out to be unreliable. This was our fourth attempt to film the band, and we have finally succeeded. I believe that we have created a very good performance video within the confines we had. Unfortunately I am the only group member who was able to work for the next two weeks, as the rest of my group are away on an English trip, but they left me very little to do, simply finish editing the performance section.