Scheduling Rehearsals

We sent an email to Dave, who is in charge of the music tech department, who has and gives permission for people to borrow the studio rooms. We asked if we were able to have a room so that we could rehears our band.

We wanted to do a full rehearsal because we had not seen the entire band all together as we had taken the boys in together and Laila individually.

Copyright Requests

In this lesson I was alone since Anne-sophie and Lavinia were on an art trip so I decided to find the copyright holder of the song “Cities in Dust”.

I then saw that there was an original version of Cities in Dust which was originally made by Siouxsie & The Banshees.

I then looked further to find the copyright holder of the Junkie Xl version and went on their official website and found the contact email. 

I then sent them an email requesting permission for using their music in our student film. This is the email:

Then I looked further to find the Label company of Junkie Xl on Wikipedia which turned out to be “Artwerk” which is a dutch label company. 

I went on their website and sent them the same following email:

Our teacher told us that we did not need to receive the approval for using the music but we just needed to make the request. Which we did. 

Editing the animated video

Lavinia had filmed the shots for the animates video, we went to the edit suite to edit the shots together according to the song, according to length and the visual. To edit this we used the Final Cut Pro editing program for Macintosh. 

To begin with we re-named all of the files we had according to the shot order we had so that it was more organised and easier for us to handle the different shots effectively. 

The song for our music video is the one I chose and therefore I had it on my computer. I then used my usb to transfer my Itunes file to the computer we were using for editing. There is Itunes on the computer and I had to write my code for the music from my iTunes. 

We then realized that the computers in the edit suite are not connected to the internet and can not me connected.. therefore the Itunes registration could not be processed. We then had to find an alternative for editing the music as we did not find a website we could download it from temporarily. I then tried to see if it was possible to play the music from my laptop and editing on the computer next to it. Even though it will not be in-synch we tried to make an effort to make it possible. It did work for a tiny bit but it was hard to keep up. 

The storyboard and editing computer

Here after we realized that we should buy the music on a cd, which is avalible on Amazon.com. It is called “Original Music Feauturing Gossip Girl”. As the song has been used on the American series. 

We decided first to pursue buying the CD or another form of the song and then return back to the editing of the animatic video. 

Websites

I compared some Websites which are in the same genre as the song in my music video..
I started out by using the "Genious" function on my iTunes, which basically can take a song and then create a playlist with similar songs.. This is what i got:

I found that some of these were a bit similar to the song we are using, but i wouldn't say they are in the same ballpark.. So i did my own research through my iTunes of song that I think fit our category.

The ones that I found most similar in my iTunes that my "Genious" didn't come up with was "The Kills", "The Pierces" and "The Veronicas". I went on the different individual websites for the bands and the first thing that hit was how similar their star page was.. they 2/3 have their new video on the front page which begins immediately as you press the link, and the last website had their newest photoshoot on the first page, as so.. 

The Kills had their newest photoshoot come up and following you would have to press a button to enter the rest of the website where the first blog on the website is that you can buy a package deal with several of their cd's etc.

Then The Veronicas and The Pierces both have their video on the starter page, which is a smart tactic because as soon as you enter the site you will listen to the song and it might make you interested in looking further into their music or into buying that particular song. 

All of the websites have a similar feel to them, they are all quite dark and have a slight Rock/Pretty feel to them which relates to their music which is what the have to sell also through their image of themselves..

Further more all of the webpages have a clothing tab, tour dates, downloads, picture galleries and live events. This is very basic in every website you get for a band, and they all present themselves as being very approachable in the sense that that they have plenty of tour dates, and pictures from their events..

I really liked this picture as it is quite similar to our music video, in the way that we are also using the image of fakeness and where also thinking about using doll masks in our video.. 

This is a link on their website so that their fans can follow them on Instagram which is a way that their fans can feel really close to them as you can post any kind of pictures and tag them with different things you are doing in the moment.. 

This picture below is also a great way to show that they are emerging into the bigger world of music as they are going with Coldplay on a tour. This also means that a lot of Coldplay's fans will want to look into The Pierces as they might find it similar to Coldplay or that they are just interested in downloading a couple of songs. 

Here is a look at the different bands Myspace pages, which allows anyone using Myspace to listen to there music and then after you can also get a link to buy there music.

And here is a look at their Twitter pages, which is a website that countless celebrities use to get close and in contact with their fans. Their fans can "Follow" them on this website and when they "Tweet" everyone who "Follows" them will get this message. So if your a fan of The Kills and you follow them you can "personally" have an update on all the different tours they have, new music or just what they are up to..

I have found it very helpful looking at these websites and I am now more sure of what has to be on the Website that we create for our band and what kind of edge it needs to also express the music through the visual, I am also more sure of what kind of photographs we need to take with our band so that we can use them for our website and to create a gallery. I'm not sure if it is possible to create a Twitter, or something in that direction but there it has definitely helped me see the way in which the artist has to connect with the fans which refers back to the business model I studied over the summer which is Connect with Fans + Reasons to Buy = $ The business model 

Emailing The Cast

Here is a screenshot of the email that we sent to the cast.
With the email as you can see there is written about costumes, a pre-rehearsal before the shoot and the song + the chords for the guitar, and the lyrics as well.

Here are the attachments shown.

The costume for the boys:

Laila's Costume:

This is Laila performing at the Hurtwood Concert, which is almost the exact look we want for her in our music video, this is all her own clothes which is great because we don't have to worry about buying clothes and then not being sure if it will fit or not.

Digging into the Details

I went to see Laura today to ask her about how we are going to do all of the glitter sense we want to and if we had any material at school we could use, this is what we figured out..

For the performance element where the glitter is falling on the band, we would need to use confetti instead of fine glitter, because confetti glitter is more visible on camera and the fine glitter is not. The confetti is also easier to control as we want it to come slowly down in the beginning and then fall more rapidly towards the end as so.

For the see-through wall we want the men in morph-suits to push through we found that using latex material is really stretchy but you will not be able to see the actual glitter on the "glitter men" and we found that buying a wall made out of clear plastic was really expensive, so we went with the best decision which is in media you can cheat what the audiences sees and what they don't know does not hurt them. We decided to use big rolls of see-through film used for catering that we would wrap around two polls to create our wall, and we know this is going to be thin and will break easily but if it does we can just wrap more onto it and we have three drum screens at school which we can use for our close up shots where we want the glitter men truly to push the wall and the glitter will rub off which is a nice effect we wanted.

As I talked to her for the idea about having glitter come out of a hairdryer there was no other way that to test it, we took a hair dryer and put glitter into the head of it, we decided to blast it on cool so that the glitter would not melt inside of it and then burn. I am happy to say that it actually did work when we tried it, so we know this is going to be a success on our day, I also though for some close up we might blow the glitter on a fan to create the same effect.

For the face mask sequence it was very easy, we are just going to take something clear as shower gel and mix it in with glitter so that it has a creaminess to it when the facial is being put on. 

For the bath tub sequence, the best thing to do would be to actually fill the bath with water and then pour glitter into the water so that it would float on top, and then we would add coloring to the water so that even though the glitter isn't completely thick in the bath tub it will look like it on camera. We wanted to do the same thing for when we do a closeup on the tap we need some colored water where we add glitter and we need a kind of pump, to pump it from wherever and into the tap so that it can pour out. (not as extreme as this picture, but you get the idea)

For the morph suits we though about actually buying them in a gold color so that the gold glitter would really solid on the costume, or then have a colored one but having the effect of color showing be on purpose. We saw there was multiple was of making the morph suits covered in glitter. We could use glitter spray, glitter gel or roll them in contact glue and then in glitter after which I think is probably the best idea. 

Then we talked about our mini city that we want to fill up with more and more glitter throughout the video. We googled some webpages that sold 4d models of cities, but most of them hand towns or rather than an entire set it would be houses individually and just one cost 15 pounds which if we need 40 of those our budget would cut it. Therefore we thought of alternative ideas like making it ourselves and cutting it out of cardboard, buying one from a toystore or building it out of lego. We are going to see if we can find a solution to this otherwise we might have to cut the scene unless we find something that we can use in the same way but will still look good on camera. 

Set Design and Storyboarding

In the lesson we started to cut out our storyboard drawings to put them in the right order and so that we could film them with the camera so that we could start to create our animatic storyboard. We also created a big cardboard paper where we stuck on our set design ideas, where we also wrote down what we wanted to use for different scene and props and what colors want to use.

Storyboard

Set Design/Props/Colours etc etc.