Rachel Leveney A2 Media Studies Portfolio

We have messaged each location we have used to request permission to film on the premises. These are emails we sent to Alexandra Palace, where we filmed our performance, and messages to parents to request use of people's houses. It is important to get permission to film in certain places to ensure that people are not inconvenienced and that it is okay to film there. This is an email we sent to the record company that produced the song to express our intentions and request to use the song. We tweeted the artist and got a response giving us permission to use her song. This is important as her music is copyrighted to make sure no one else gets credit for her work so it is important to ask permission to use the song.

I have used the Web 2.0 tool Slideshare, to explain why we have used the props we have used in our music video. All the props we have chosen are for a metaphorical or intertextual reason and this slideshare explains the reasons behind our choices.           Props ppt from RachelLeveney

I have used the Web 2.0 tool Emaze to present the costumes we chose for our characters to wear in the music video. I have detailed and photographed the costumes we chose for each character and explained the reasons behind each one.        

I have used the Web 2.0 tool Powtoon to create actress and character profiles for the people we cast in our music video.  Because of the fact that our storyline involves personifying the mental illness of the main character, we thought the use of identical twins would portray this in a way that the audience would understand the message we were trying to get across. We cast appropriately according to which part of the character each twin would be able to portray the best. 

I have used the wed 2.0 tool Padlet to present my research into different adverts and digipaks of the same genre. I realised throughout this research that as 'Pop' is such a broad genre, I have to be sure I am looking at adverts and digipak that are aimed at the same demographic as mine. This may include certain artists such as Demi Lovato who's albums are aimed at a variety of demographics. For example, her first albums may be aimed towards younger children, whereas as she has developed her image to match her original demographic as they grew older, her newer albums are aimed more towards an older teen audience. This matches the demographic that my album is aimed towards and Demi Lovato's album 'Unbroken' is my main inspiration.

I used Final Cut to edit these animal clips to the audio. This task was very helpful as it allowed me to practise using Final Cut as well as practise cutting to the beat which is a skill that will be especially important when I come to editing my music video. I feel like my skills using Final Cut have improved a lot since completing the cutting to the beat tasks.

For this task, we were required to choose a clip and a piece of audio, unrelated to each other, and edit the clip to fit the beat of the audio. I chose the clip 'Be Our Guest' from Beauty and the Beast, which I edited to the song 'Naturally'- Selena Gomez. I used features such as speeding up and slowing down clips, and reversing and repeating them. This task has really helped to practise my editing skills which will help for when I come to edit my final music video.

We have filmed Maya lip synching to part of the song we are using as she is playing the artist/performer in the video. We used Final Cut to edit this footage together with the original audio so that the timings matched up. This task was helpful because I was able to practise my editing skills and being able to match lip synching to audio is an important skill for when we come to edit our final video as the performance sections will need to be edited the same way.

We have created a swede of the music video 24K Magic by Bruno Mars. The brief was to recreate 1 minute of a popular existing music video with no budget. In order to do this we had to draw out a storyboard and write a shot by shot list to make sure it was planned properly as the more planning we did, the easier it would be to create the final product. I learnt a lot during this task- We were working in partners and as Noa was featured in the video, I had to execute a lot of the camera work. Through this, I became much more familiar with the way the camera worked and learnt how to make sure the camera was in focus, that we had the right lighting amongst other things. When it came to editing the video, I had only used the editing programme Final Cut a couple of times before and was unsure of how it worked. Through creating this swede I was able to develop my editing skills using Final Cut and learn properly how it worked, in preparation for creating my music video. After creating...

My group and I came up with a list of names that we liked for our album that we thought had a connection to the music video and portrayed the idea behind it. We created a survey using SurveyMonkey, and asked our target audience their opinion on our name ideas and these are the results: 85 members of our target audience completed this survey and the favourite name chosen was 'Fracture', this is the name we have chosen for our album. The idea behind our music video is portraying someone suffering with mental health problems we believe a name such as 'Fracture' depicts this perfectly whilst still remaining a short, catchy name that will catch the eyes of people and will be remembered. 

We have created a detailed list of all the shots we need to film that we can follow while filming to ensure we stick to the filming schedule and maximise our time. We were able to think about how we would like to frame the shots beforehand, and what shot types and angles we were going to use.