Filming Day: Hannah's bedroom

Location: Hannah's house

Date: 18th of January

Group members present: Hannah Martin, Jade Dibble and Jasmine Greene

Our inspiration for some shots we filmed on the occasion came were inspired by scenes in Panic! at the Disco's music video for their song "Miss Jackson". A key theme within this music video is emotional trauma and self-conflict, which is why we wanted to draw inspiration from what was demonstrated in their shots. 

As with the shots we filmed in Hannah's bathroom, we wanted to use Hannah's mirror in her bedroom to film shots that had depth to them, and would be interesting for the audience to look at. A mirror was also used in the "Miss Jackson" music video, and we thought this was effective for the purpose of showing the emotional trauma of the protagonist. The use of mirrors in our video would also be symbolic, as it would represent how the protagonist is constantly looking at themselves and finding fault in who they are. It would signify that she is trying to look for a way to change herself, and to hide who she is. As we were positioning the mirror in place to film, the mirror got broken. As a group, we initially saw this as a big problem, as we had no other mirror which we could use. However, after discussion, we saw that we would actually still use the mirror in our piece. We thought that the broken mirror could serve two purposes: it would be representative of how the character feels broken, and how that she feels her sexuality means she is broken, and it could also serve the purpose of planting a narrative enigma. How did the mirror get broken? Was it in an argument between Josh and Hannah's character within their unhappy relationship?

We found that the artificial lighting was once again a problem. The light in Hannah's bedroom produced very yellow light, which made Hannah and Jade, and their surroundings, look a very unusual colour. This highlighted to the group that with very limited filming equipment, and without the budget that there would be to create a professional media product, it is very difficult to create certain shots that look professional. The nature of the time of year that we filmed mean that we could not use natural lighting, as it had already gone dark by the time we arrived at location in the early evening. To add to the insufficient lighting of Hannah's bedroom light, I attempted to use the torch from Hannah's smartphone, as can be seen in the image below. I was attempting to film a birds eye shot of Hannah and Jade lying on the bed, to mirror the one that I had filmed of Hannah and Josh, so that the audience could draw a direct comparison between them. Therefore, I was stood on the bed above them. The artificial lighting created unusual shadows on Hannah and Jade's faces, which meant we could not film. As we could not achieve the desired shot, despite our various attempts to create better lighting, we had to attempt to create a similar shot, but from a different angle.

Here you can see our attempt to make the screen brightness of Hannah's phone right so that the camera could focus on it properly:

Detailed Planning During Editing

During the editing process, we needed to make a lot of changes to our music video in terms of the order of the footage and what footage we included. We discovered that we needed more suitable footage in order to fill certain sections of the video, so we had to plan what this would be. In order to do this, I created a 'second count' of the video that included all the shots that we had placed into the timeline, and also included the space that we needed to fill. Being able to look at this on paper allowed us to make clear planning decisions in terms of what footage we though we needed. There was also footage that we had not put into the timeline yet, such as the shots of Hannah and Jade in Winter Wonderland, and this method of planning allowed us to figure out where we thought this should go. 

'Second count' of the video:

Final Storyboard

 Here are pictures that show the final storyboard of our piece:

As a group, we believe that our final storyboard outlines a music video that will be very successful if it is executed well.

We used a template to create our storyboard, which included sections for us to plan the shot duration, the visuals of the shot, the camera instructions, what sound will accompany the shot, and allowed a section for us to make any additional comments if required. This storyboard template was more advanced than the one we had used during the creation of our thriller opening sequence at AS level. On the storyboard that we used then, we only specified the visuals and the camera instructions. However, our experience last year taught us the importance of detailed storyboard planning, as we felt that the information on our storyboard then did not give us enough guidance, hence making the process more difficult for us. A more detailed storyboard, including the more fine details, such as shot duration, really help you to get an idea of what the product will be like when it's finished.

Some things that have changed since the draft...

• We have added titles to the first shot in our video, as this is a common convention of music videos. It allows the viewer to establish the artist and the name of the song at the very beginning of the piece.
• Overall, shot lengths have decreased. We had initially planned for quite a few shots to be around 5 seconds in length. However, we found that shots of this length became uninteresting, as they felt unnecessarily long. 
• Shot order has changed, as when we started filming, we realised that in order to tell the narrative effectively, the shots should be in a different order.
• Some of the shots that we included in our draft are not in our final storyboard. This is because, as we started the filming process, we realised that some of the shots we had planned were not effective for the purpose we wanted to use them for. This meant that we had to substitute those shots with new ideas, which we came up with whilst out on location, and during brainstorming sessions. 
• We filmed a shot of the word "Sorry" written in the sand with the sea washing over it, which we intended to use as the titles. However, we then decided that we actually still wanted to open our piece the way we had initially planned. We really wanted to include this shot, so we decided that we would put it at the end of the video, as though it was the conclusion to the apology that was the song itself.

Our final storyboard may be subject to change if we need to employ our contingency plan for any reason, or if we think it is necessary during the post-production to phase to improve the final quality of the piece.