WS - Mini-Vid

A task that we have been set early in the course is to take an existing piece of Music and make a video for the track, without knowing of any video previously made for the song. We started off with a list of three songs to choose from and brought that down to one idea, for which we had to make a music video of our own design.


Our three options included:

• Frankie Goes to Hollywood - "Two Tribes"
• Jaydee - "Plastic Dreams"
• Faith No More - "Falling to Pieces"

From this list we had to decide on one video to create an idea for and then carry out the whole filming and editing process. Our original idea was to use the song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but soon realised it would be exceptionally difficult to create the effect of two tribes realistically, as would have been our idea if we used that video.

"Falling to Pieces" by Faith No More was another option, but we weren't sure we could accurately carry out a narrative for the video. A performance video at this point would have been exceptionally difficult so we wanted to stick to a narrative based video.

For this reason we began to look at Jaydee's "Plastic Dreams". There are no lyrics in the song leaving the narrative aspect very open to our imaginations. 

We looked at a number of ideas and eventually settled on a chase video through the woods. 

Here is the final video:

This task was and will be very useful for our coursework for a number of reasons. There were a number of errors in the filming and preperation for the task. While it is never good to make mistakes, the positives from this task include the lessons we will learn, and hopefully won't repeat. Below are some of the lessons we learnt:

• Preparation is key for success. We had to actually film twice because of bad organisation, despite the original idea been to just film the once.
• Plan what exactly we are going to film. We didn't have a clear idea for what to film, and ths delayed everything and meant that we missed some shots that may have been useful the first time we filmed. We had a basic plan in mind, but a detailed plan is required.
• Framing the shots is very important. We showed some examples of this in the video, for example shooting the footage through the branches of trees. However we didn't do as much of this as we should/could have done. This is another example of where planning would have helped.
• The quantity of shots to take is important as well as the quality. The more variation you get when filming the product, the better the eventual video has the potential to be. Shooting shots from different angles is also an effective idea, the inter-cutting them in the product.
• Costume adds verisimilitude. Again, a disadvantage of not planning enough was that we didn't have any proper costumes for the people in the video. This makes th video look amaeturish and is something we have to learn from.

All of these are mistakes that we can learn from, and we must improve them for our actual coursework. 

For comparison, below is the actual Music Video for the song. Please note that we had not seen this video when planning and creating our video for the song.