Changes to our Music Video

Our group have decided to start a new music video and there are many reasons for this change, one of which was the problem that we encountered after uploading our footage to the Macs.  The editing software that we would be using, ‘Final Cut Express’, didn’t allow us to successfully create a split screen which was an affect that was very important in our narrative. This was to portray the very different lives of two characters and split screen was required in order to make this as clear as possible and also understandable for the audience. However, the split screen effect that was available on the programme didn’t work out the way we had originally hoped and this would have left our video with only two very small boxes opposite each other for a large proportion of our film. This would considerably affect the meaning of the narrative and the message that our story gave which would create confusion for our audience.

A problem that we found with our footage was the mise-en-scene. We found that we had not paid enough attention to how each character should be represented through the mise-en-scene and in particular, the difference between the two houses. An error that we noticed in these scenes was that we realised that we didn’t take down the family photos that were in the background which, although were perfect for Doug, weren’t ideal for Dougie’s scenes as we wanted to portray feelings of isolation in his character. Another problem that we found was issues with lighting. As the majority of our scenes were filmed indoors, it was difficult to make the scenes with Doug appear lighter and the scenes with Dougie appear darker. We found that many of the shots appeared dull when we saw them on the screen and soon realised that we would have to re-film a large proportion of it. We then believed that the video would still not reflect our true potential and therefore after a discussion with our group and our teachers, we decided it would be best to start a new video and a new narrative.

We began brainstorming ideas that were similar to what our previous idea was based on where we discussed using the song 'Fireflies' by 'Owl City' as this song portrays themes of childhood. We debated many different ideas and eventually settled on the song ‘Jar of Hearts' by 'Christina Perri.' Although it greatly contrasted from our previous song, we found that this song had a slow tempo and sorrowful lyrics that would create a more meaningful message.

Our final idea consists of following the journey of a letter, written from a boy to a girl, that originally gets thrown away by the boy but the letter makes its way to the girl. We decided to keep our original idea of using stop motion, which we have incorporated into our new idea to make the letter travel from different locations and we found that stop motion would be the best method in which to do this. Also, we liked the idea of using stop motion in our original idea and therefore wanted to keep the technique in our final product.