Filming blog - the school

For this blog, I will speak about my journey and role in the music video for fly me to the moon by Frank Sinatra. To begin, the first part of the film was coming up with a song. Although it turned out well, I will admit it was not my first pick but when we all agreed and listened to the song, I realized it would come out well. The next step was planning. I did put my input into a couple scenes we could take and how we could put it all together. Personally I do not like the planning part since the way we hope it goes does not always go according to plan. Including in this music video, when it came time to film, there were added scenes that we had thought of on the spot.There are both positives and negatives when it comes to unexpected scenarios. That is a main reason I am not a fan of planning. Many of the things we faced brings to my attention only a portion of what people in the film industry deal with.

When it came time to film, I was an important aspect since I was one of the two actors. I do not mind being on film so I volunteered for the role. I was to dance with another girl and act like we were in love to fit with the love song. For many scenes, it was awkward, luckily we were laughing throughout the filming. One of my favorite scenes came from one of our weirdest shots. We were behind a tree and then we both came around it and smiled at each other. The location we shot from gave us many opportunities to shoot scenes we had not discussed. This taught me that picking a good location is important for filming. For example, during filming there was a thanksgiving set up behind the curtain of our first scene. We did not like this nor did we want the set up there since we thought it was ruining out shot. But, we decided there was no way to move it and we will try our best to angle out the setup and have the film focus on us instead.

Overall, the three main factors for this video was planning, filming and editing. If I could change something it would be my focus on editing and planning. I feel like I enjoyed getting the easy role even though I was an asset. However, I would like to focus more on contributing to the big picture. The one thing I was important in doing was adding to the big picture. The detail within a film could make or break it. The way I put my input into detail for the film definitely affected the way the film turned out. For example, I recommended that we shot with the trees to fulfill that feeling of love which matches the song.

Story board

This is the story board we created for the music video. It includes scenes of dancing, walking, the scenery. We have a couple angles that are important of the scene. There is a close up of our hands to signify the love between the actors. The wide angle shot is used for the opening scene where the actors are introduced. It is the scene where we are dancing and its purpose is to be able to see us both and what we are doing. One thing we are trying to include in our editing is jump cut. We are hoping it turns out smoothly and we are going to try our best. We plan to jump cut between a couple scenes. From the stage to outside and from the outside when they jump off the ledge. There is a zoom scene where me and Victoria are sitting down together and it zooms into the sun. For sounds, since it is a music video, we will only focus on the song. There will be no added sounds or voice overs.

planning blog

We have chosen our song, Fly me to the moon. It is time to start planning the music video. The first thing we discussed is the theme of our video. We want it to have an old rhythm to it, like old style clothing specifically the 1950's. We are planning to make our film black and white after edits, to give the music video the right look. This will  Our group mutually agreed that we should have a dancing scene within the film. When it came time to chose a location we all had different views. Since the song brings you to an emotional state and makes you think of love, i thought a scenic location would fit best. I recommended the beach or a park but a girl in our group had another idea. Her mom works at a middle school near us and we decided to go there after school. The location seems useful since there is a stage ( with a curtain), an open section with trees and an open section with benches. We plan to drive over to the middle school together after school and film everything there.

The next area we focused on were costumes. To fulfill the look of the 1950's we decided we needed dresses, specifically long and flowy. One of the girls in the group had some dresses that fit the description perfectly. She brought the dresses and we tried them on and they were perfect. We plan on doing our hair but it is not a definite plan. For Props we did not have many, the location and the costumes were good enough to create the theme. The one prop we are using is a dvd player to shoot our first scene which is somebody pressing play on the dvd player to, "start the music".

For the filming schedule, we came up with a plan that seemed to flow best. The first set plan is to all meet after school and drive to the location together. The two actors are me (Andrea) and Victoria, so we will be the ones in the music video. After filming we will drop the film onto the laptop. On the 25th of November and the second of December we will have already filmed and edited and we will blog about the filming. On the 22nd of November, we should be able to begin editing the film. On the 9th we will officially turn in our music video.  Lastly, the health and safety aspect of filming was important to us. Our music video did not have much at risk in the first place but there will still some factors, like being aware of our surroundings. For both actors, myself and Victoria, we were sure to remain at a safe distance from the stage, incase of falling. When dancing, or climbing on something, we also had to remain careful of tripping or misplacing our step. This was the main focus concerning safety.

intro to music video

We are finally finished with the commercial and we are now moving onto the music video. I am with the same group and we have already chosen our song. We chose fly me to the moon by Frank Sinatra. We chose this song because its different and simple, we did not want to do a pop song but something more significant. The purpose of choosing a song with history and purpose is to make the music video  mean something to people watching. The goal is to hope for people to have a deeper understanding of the lyrics and really appreciate the sounds behind jazz music. The music video will probably be a dance since that matches the song most. We are still not sure if it will be a group dance or a dance between two people to enhance emotion. The Genre of the song and most of Sinatra's music is jazz.
When researching jazz music videos and seeing the general concept of that genre of music, I have come to find that there are not many videos with jazz music. Most likely due to the calming nature of jazz, the music is usually found focused on the music and not on what is playing on the screen. Since jazz is also music from the 1900's, most film was in black and white and old fashioned. Fly me to the moon was released in 1954, this plays into the way people dressed, acted and looked. Our music video will try to achieve a look from 1900's by making the video black and white and also trying to adhere our costumes and makeup to the way people used to look. In the 1950's women wore mostly dresses or long skirts. A common theme for wardrobe was colors, polkadot, long dresses or skirts and gloves. The popular colors for women were red, floral, polkadot and colors that weren't usually worn. Emily will be focusing on costumes when the time for filming comes. Men mostly wore suits in the 1950's, about two or three pieces.  For makeup, women tended to look natural but had a dark shade of red or purple lip-sick. The props will be added in when our theme is more developed, we know it will focus on a dancing scene and the look from the 1900's.
Some main camera angles that we will try to focus on is eye level angle and birds eye view. Hopefully our camera angles will follow with the movement of the dance. That will probably be the most difficult part of the film. There is not much to follow when researching jazz as many of the covers are a scenic picture and no video. This does contribute to the idea that whatever we film it should have a calm essence to the film and there should be something scenic within the film. The one thing that will stand out from our film then from the film in the 1900's is the inclusion of LGBT expression. Back in the day, being gay was not ever rationalized nor expressed by the media. Since Frank Sinatras music is still beautiful we wanted to add something in it to modernize it.

Final blog

The end is finally near. We will be submitting the commercial on Monday and I am very excited. Although this was fun, I will admit the due dates tended to stress me. Today we had a PSD so classes were cut about 45 minute short which was not helpful for our editing. Last class there were many issues with getting our film onto pinnacle studios in the first place but eventually we figured it out. We watched our film and came up with a layout. It was only two people in our group there but we managed to at least set a layer of what we want to see in the commercial. Today, even though we have a short class, we got a lot done. We cropped the videos and tried to blend them together as much as possible. We have not done audio, since there is much to take out and add in. Hopefully we can work on it during our free period tomorrow and finalize the commercial. We are currently fixing up the titles and aligning them with the right clip.
As of now, the commercial looks good. There are some things we had to change from initial thought. The scene where the guy counts down the race and shoots into the air is being cuz from the commercial. This is due to the fact that the commercial was already long and the scene did not match the rest. We also put a lot of thought into the running scene because we had two separate clips and they both had good shots but we could not seem to blend them well. Figuring out how to crop clips was pretty simple. I am glad I have worked with Imovie before and that my group has also worked with creating videos because it made the process easier. Many of our clips were very long, which made cutting the clips to its best fit very important. A positive feature of our film are the angles within the filming. We did a good job having shots that represented a certain angle, for example the close up and the two shot.
Overall there were many aspects to creating this commercial. Looking at the earlier stages, the importance really enhanced now that I am almost ready to submit it. The planning stage really is important to have a good understanding of how we wanted the film to come out. Ive learned that although every shot may not be exactly what we want, the idea is what is vital to coming up with a good commercial. To have a backup plan is also an important step in filming. If it had rained or the field was being used, the entire plot would have changed and the commercial would have turned out very different. This shows how important having another plan was. There wouldn't be much i would change except having more film. Even though time was a problem, doing a couple more shots for each scene would have been helpful for editing.