In starting this project I took on a strong directorial role. With a passion and love for Underground Hip Hop, I wanted to create a music video which embodied the typical conventions of such a genre. I did a lot of personal research into videos that I favoured within this culture and soon started drawing ideas and inspiration from them.
We decided to go with a very relaxed, London based theme to suit the track choice. I could envision my style of video so easily alongside the track 'Drink More Water' by Mick Jenkins who in contrast is an American Underground artist. This worked with the general footage of the film - following a young male as he seems to aimlessly stroll London - almost as though it is Mick Jenkins himself in London as he is on tour.
Prior to heading out and filming we actually did not have a set shot list, I wanted the film to be rather organic and almost have a sort of 'home-made' feel. I think in having too much of a direction, the film would almost have come across forced or even staged.
Whilst filming I used my Nikon D5200, in having such a portable camera it allowed me to take rather spontaneous shots at any time. The first place we travelled to was Southbank, here I could use the tall London buildings to take location-based shots over the Thames, I then began to explore altering the manual focus in order to create a nice focus pull effect which we ended up starting the film with.
Here I also had our actor do some walking shots as I paced alongside him, this proved somewhat difficult without a tracking device but again added to the natural feel of the film.
We also had a second camera with us in which my peer used - this camera would be used to take shots from different angles. It was a bonus having this extra camera, just in case we needed any further footage allowing us to explore angles etc...
We then continued to travel to different areas of London in which I could again collect more shots. I would film the actor as we walked to the station/get time-lapses of passing trains/escalators and even film the actor whilst we sat on the train - ensuring we left the location with enough footage to use later.
A big chunk of our time was spent creating a time-lapse which appears more than once in our film. My peer set up a tripod and filmed the actor as he stood still in Leicester Square for almost ten minutes. This gave us a nice lengthy time-lapse to experiment with. I also took a time-lapse whilst we had our lunch break, this gave us nice footage of candid pedestrians and traffic as they passed the window. I wanted to make use of the time-lapses with the alter of music tempo that comes with the chorus. This worked incredibly well and we wrapped up filming around 9pm.
After arriving home I began editing the video on a downloadable site which took quite a while. Not using the clips in any specific order I began feeding them onto the editing site to see what would fit/work where. This was successful and created a very well-flowing piece of work. A bit that I was particularly pleased with was the ending of the video. I had not quite realised it whilst filming but only when watching it back - When I filmed the artist going down steps, entering the underground station a crowd seems to follow behind and surround him until he is no longer seen. This was perfect for fading out the audio with as he disappears from view - I then decided to bring the natural sound back into the clip as though the music has stopped and normality of the world surrounding him returns.
If I could do anything better I would most certainly ensure the actor knows the lyrics of the song as I feel like that would have added greatly to the music video, and provided a bit of a diversion from the typical tempo and direction of the film. I also would have thought more about lighting - the shots within the well-lit areas looked brilliant however some of the shots on the bridges/pathways took away from imaging that could have been better with more efficient lighting. I would have also used a RODE microphone in order to capture the atmospheric sound better at the end, although this isn't a huge problem due to the muffled sound somewhat working with the footage. Finally I would not have edited the film using the programme I had - Simply because I wanted to make a draft, I used this editing software so I could start editing immediately at home and not wait to arrive at school. Whilst I did indeed get a draft, this process took up a lot of time and resulted in a draft which had a 'Free trial' banner appear throughout the clip. I will now have to re-upload and cut every single clip, in order, to Premier-Pro in order to recreate my final piece.
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