Pre-production: Shooting Schedule

Booking a day for our shooting day was not so difficult as we didn't have to worry about the lack of travel distance as our location are in our local town, rather than somewhere that is difficult to get to like Bristol.
Our actors are kids, which means they have a set schedule that is similar to ours and can work with. Seeing that their free time for the shooting could only be during the weekends or after school.
This will help us to the book our shooting schedule on any weekend that would suit all of us. We prefered to work on weekends so that we will have more flexiable and longer time (as long as we need) for our shoot. It will also mean less rush during the weekend as everyone would be usually home taking a day off work, which gives us more time to book a spot for our venue and work on it as long as we need. This is an adventage to spend more time setting up and making sure the lighting is perfectly lit as how we wanted it.
We decided the perfect and suitable date to do our shoot was on Sunday 13th of September at 12pm. However on that day, there was an event taking place at 1:30pm on the stage we booked, which means that it was available for us about one hour and a half to shoot in the Nordern farm location. We were luckily to have two DSLR cameras with us, which will increase the speed of the shooting process. This will also help to get through all of our shots we planned in different set-ups on time.

Pre-production: Lighting

Lighting is very important for any type of productions, especially for our music videos. The use of lighting is important for more than one reason, ranging from making it easier to see everything, to portray a certain mood/ genre. Also, it is very important in revealing certain feelings that the song is trying to explain. 

For example in our music video the performance base we considered to use a lot of different colour lighting, this gives the impression that what we are watching is a happy, upbeat, energetic, lively and enjoyable moment. 

It is imortant to create a perfect lighting for our music video. This is important so we have a fair equal amount of lighing and exposure. This means that we dont want our lighting over exposed or under exposed, which means the shot wouldnt be grainy/vintage look, so that we as an audience can see whats going in the scene very clear. To add to that, we need to mae sure that the lighting is perfectly lit on our actors in our music video. The lighting can also help provide the perfect depth.

Indie-Rock genre concerts are usually well lit and bright colours of studio lighting, this would be perfect to incorporate in our music video during the performance base.

Finally, we will nned to consider the lighting in the bedroom for our narative shots. For this location we need to show the real-life (reality) side of lighting. It is very important to get the right lighting and colour, as well as it is imporat to keep our actor well lit and doenoting the natural setting of a bedroom. Thi will help the audience eyes immdeiatly drawn attention towards our main artist. The lighting is also important that our audience recognise our two different locations. The colouring of the bedroom is perfect for connoting warm and homely atmosphere, which is a perfect colour scheme for this location. However, we need to make sure that we do not fall of mistaken the colouring on the camera, we need to make sure that the colour is not too red because it will be quite difficualt to take out the red colour and adjust it to reality lighting in post-production.

Pre-production: Costumes research

The costume worn by particular bans and artist reflect what type of genre they are trying to portray to the audience. The Jacques band consist the 'Inde rock' genre. We decided to research and study couple of similar band that does the same genre, and pick out the similarties in between the different bands costume. I did a small collage of my research:

I found ou that the costume worn by bands relating to Indie Rock genre are 'roughed up' articles of clothing that are often old. the costume worn can be seen as representing a rebellious nature towards the mainstream fashion trends. For example all the members would wear some kind of skinny fitted trousers whether they are jeans or smart trousers. They will all have some form of jacket on and usually sport some 'tatty' vintage footwear (however it could vary from trainers to boots). Most of the band members costumes that are worn, they are usually never the same colour and never worn in the same style as the next members. This reveals that people associated with Indie Rock genre are comfortable and confident with expressing their individuality without going overboard. However, they do it in a simple way with variation of the same style, this further increases their 'cool' reputations as they don't try too hard to be something they are not. they all know that its going to be hot a sweaty so they adopt the attitude of "may as well wear the week and thin old t-shirt, am going to be sweaty which means i'm going to be smelly', this attitude represents a maverick lifestyle.

We all decided that most of Indoe Rock genre wear darker clothing that gives a 'hipster' look.

We then looked at what sort of cloting/costumes The Jacques typically wear. This is because after finding our sutable actors, we need to make sure that the costumes are spot on, so that it fits well with The Jaques iconography. We had to think very clear about portraying the artist and portraying the age of young teenagers.
The Jacques typically wore baggy tops, skinny jean, some sort of smart shoes, dark colour jackets and somtimes they wear some sort of funky hats.
For our final costume decision we decided to incororate dark costumes of skinny jeans, trainers/ converse instead of smart shoes (this is beacuse nowadays young teenagers prefer to wear trainsers as they are more confortable to walk and move around in, also they prefer to wear the recent fashion trend), baggy t-shirt or thin baggy jumpers and a hat for our lead singer.

Pre-production: Props Research

We conformed and decided our final locations which were the Art centre and our main artist bedroom. We need to make sure that the props we are using for our music video suits the 'indie rock' genre. Also, what is the most important props that can represent The Jacques band and perhaps represent their iconography in some way during the music video.

Our first location- Nordern Farm- This location is the set for our performance scene, we decided to use some props that they easily offer/ allow the public to borrow during their booking of the stage. We decided to use their special microphones and drum set. However, for the rest of the instruments we decided to make hand-made instruments out of cardboard (three hand-made guitars, and part of the drum set by using the actual drum set and cover it with cardboard to be the structure of the drum set).

Second loction- Our main artist bedroom- As a homely and friendly atmosphere for young teenagers we decided we would leave all of the props that's already inside her bedroom. This will represent a stereotypically young teenagers bedroom. Though we left props in the room as they were we decided to add some extra touches by adding some props for our music video. The extra touches will engage our audience with our main artist and show them her interest/ love in music, that represents the main artist might want to be part of a musical band. To make this happen we thought of adding music/ band posters, instruments, accossories to be able to hear the music such as Beat headphones/ an ordinary earphones and musical devices that plays music.

Pre-production: Test shots on Chosen Location

Shots in the venue/ Art centre called Norden Farm: We went to visit the Nordern Farm to see if their main stage meets our standards for our performance base in our music video. While we were there, we took couple of test shot from our storyboard to see if our visuals or camera angels and movements will meet our requirements. We took couple of low angle and high angle shots, wide shot, side shots. We also tested the stage lighting but unfortunately we didn't get a chance to capture the lighting. We were to excited too explore more what's behind the back stage that could add extra touches to our video.

Pre-production: Applying Audience

Our music video is based on a narative and performace base. Our idea was that the opening of the music video starts with a nrrative of our main artist walking aggresively up the stairs towards her bedroom as if she is unsatisfied or wants to be alone. She then plays the song 'Weekends' on her phone and place the heaphones onto her ears. We would then see her drifting away to her imagination whilest she is enjoying the song. The audience immediatly see's her performing on a great size stage in a band as if she was performing lively. We decided that during post- production we should jump cut couple of times back to her bedroom throughout the music video so that it gives a clear pictuer of the artist emotions/reaction of her imgaination towards the audience as well as to remind our audience that the performance is not happening in the real-time.

We started with a narative so that our audience is focused onto one clear nartive and understand whats going on in the music video. The jacques are categorised as 'Indie rock' style genre as their music is not widely known, therefore given their unique and distinctive sound to their local audiences. Due to this, their target audience is mostly upon teenagers and young adults who enjoy Indie Rock style genre. Age rand would be roughly around 13-25 of age, mostly this is because younger adults prefer to go out spend and enjoy the concerts/live performance of rock genre with friends or in their indivdual free time.


Our prouduction target audience is targeted to both genders of femals and male young teenagers. Due to our music video our actors are kids represending the actual Jaques band. This idea would influence the younger audiences as the actor is the similar age group as them, also this will make our music video attractive (towards our target audience) to watch as they would be more interacted with the narrative and the performace base.

Pre-production: Chosen Artists & Research

We were specifically looking for an actor to be the lead singer to represent the main artist from The Jacques band. Our initial idea was to have our chosen young artist imagining herself/himself with their friends as a band performing lively. We needed a suitable child actor, to respresent and play the role of the lead singer 'Fin' from The Jacques.
It was fairly easy to find our artists to act and play the role of the band. Our group member immediately came with idea to use her sister in our music video. Her name was Martha. Her appearance was perfect for the lead singer role. She had identical looks/ she looked very similar to the main singer 'Fin'. This could connote that the actor could be Fin as a child, that then grows up and become part of The Jacques band member. This was a high advantage as she was perfect actor to play the main artist part.
Fin has long blond hair that is most of the time covering his forehead and blue eyes. Similarly, our chosen actor has dark blond hair and hazel/green eyes. To be precious her hair is similar length to Fin's hair.

It is important to get at least the main artist looking like Fin the lead singer, as in our music video our lead singer will be driving the narative. We needed to present most of the band as who they are, from what we have and access to. This will allow our audience to recognise our artist looking like Fin at his early teen-age, as well as meeting the iconography of the band (such as having the lead singer in front and centre of the band, also presenting the main artist more throughout the music video).

We also decided to find an actor that could represent and look like the drummer in The Jacques band. We were luckily to find Matthew, who is a close friend to our chosen lead singer. He looks very similar to the main drummer from The Jaqcues band, that there was a clear resemblance between the both. He also had basic knowledge and skills of drumming which is perfect for his chosen role.

Lastly, We need last two actors to represent the rest of The Jacques band, that would play the guitarist and base guitarist. Two girls friends to our chosen artist came forward and offered to be part of the band in our music video. Despite the fact that The Jacque band members are all males. However, we didn't have a problem to use the girls to represent the rest of the band members.

Pre-production: Location Research

We brainstorned couple of chosen location from the start of the proction. We first decided on the most known/ideal venue in a bar or pub. The band is exactly located in the Bristol area, which means we wouold had to work our way around to work near their loaction to make the process as easy as possible for us and the band. Alsoto find a suitable venue that we probably never been/ seen before since the band agreed to be part of our production. However, a slight change and second thoughts, the band backed up and decided not to performe in our music video. Now that we couldn't use the band we had to think of similar location of a venue that we all can easily get to with a low budget.

Now that we have chosen our artists to represent the band (one of our groups sister and her friends), we had to find a suitble location for their age group which is around 12-13. We crossed out the idea of bar/ pub from our minds due to age access and the danger of kids in that atmosphere. We also had to think about the suitable time and date for us because our artists still goes to school which takes up most of the day time, therefore there wouldnt be a lot of time around the eventing to shoot our production.

We needed a venue near by and close that we can easily get to and with a low budget, so we decided to research loaction locally, perhaps within our town. Our venune needs to come with a stage for our performace base. We were luck that one of our group memeber's mum worked at a local arts ventre/venue called Norden farm, which had everything we need inluding couple of stages and insturments (such as the drum set). This was more ideal as we couldn't imagine having kids to performe in a bar stage. This location is perfect and extremely convenient, since it holds a great size stage and has its own stage lighting and mirophones. All these accosseries created extra touchs to create a perfect performance base, just like real media instustions (when they film their artist performing on a stage).

It is located in our town were we all can easily access to in a short period of time (so we dont have to travel a long distance). This will save us time to get there and set up our equipments for filming. To add to that, we found out that they let their main stage for booking out for the puplic use for a few hours at a time.




Finally, we decided to have a second loaction for our narrative. We decided to use our main artist (the lead singer that is driving the narrative) bedroom. The idea that we were using childern for our music videos, we wanted an eviromently friendly and homely atmosphere where childern in this generation usually spend most of their time, especically when they fell alone/ when they want to listen to music. The bedroom setting was a suitble loaction for our narrative, it meets well with all of our criteria. This means it is easy to access to and free.]

Pre-prodution: Risk assessment

Pre-production: Shot Listing

Pre-production: Storyboards

It was important to create storyboard for our production.It had to contain the needed visual of shots and shot types in detail briefe such as, depth of field (focus point) and positioning of artists. This will help us on the shooting day, which will save us time as we have storyboard of how we want to structure our shots.