A2 Media Studies Music Video

15th, February, 2020

Moving onto actually graded work...

We begin with the music video I created for A-Level Media Studies staring my sister and filmed by my brother. You can check it out here. Or by clicking on the video above.

During this time period, I was incredibly obsessed with Life is Strange. I even decided on using a song from the game. In addition to this, I did kind of completely rip off the music video of one of those songs. So the story is a young girl who on a quest to find some sort of treasure. She follows a map to a spot and digs up a small little crate. Inside of it are some items of sentimental value such as a teddy. One of which though is an envelope. She opens it to reveal that its a picture of her from the Victorian era. Like whoa? Then we get a flashback of the ye old past version of her burying it.

The first shoot day of this film was a nightmare. The location we filmed was way too dense, making it so hard to walk around and I was itching from so many strange plant pricks. In addition to this, we forgot the sd card, so I had to quickly get my micro sd card out of my phone... this did not work at all. Not to mention I was so inept at filming at the time, I did not even realise you had to focus... I know I know. Biggest facepalm ever. I do not believe any of this shoot was salvageable.

The day after (I believe it was a Sunday), we were joined by Marco. We filmed it near him in Preston. Now using a camera op who actually knows how to hit the autofocus we could begin filming. There are some really nice elements that work. Mostly the ending. The match shot used to show the time jump was really good. We achieved this by sticking my dad's iphone into the little metal box. We started to run out of time towards the end of the day. The light was going down and my sister was growing hangry. Like really hangry, she had had enough! So we rushed and finished the shoot and made our way home. The day started great but ended with a lot of heated tension. Something also to note, we were able to get the Victorian costume from a local party rental place and I think it looks very good, especially in monochrome. We took pictures in my living room next to the piano to get those old-looking photos that are seen in the box. Funny thing is we had to avoid showing the back of them because they had they were freshly printed and clearly not ye olde.

Moving onto the edit. I believe it took me a whole week. I edited it all on this one program called filmora or something like that. I found a way to get the premium by turning off my WIFI and putting in an admin code. Yes it's pirating and that's wrong but I could not afford any software. Something which was a mistake was to not show the main character till the chorus. I wanted this epic reveal but it just building 30 seconds of nothing. When editing, I quickly realised I was running out of the song. I was so stressed out and I remember my mum just trying to calm me the hell down. I then got the idea to steal the end of another song and slap it on here and call it a day. this end of the song I used as the transition point for the time jump. I think this works quite well and helps you to forget how awful the beginning was.

Please watch the video and let me know what you think! Constructive criticism is appreciated! I need to learn how to do better!