Evaluation Q1 : Did you enjoy the main workshop shoot day? What role(s) did you take? What were your best bits and why?

Different Set-ups I was involved in

For me, our music video remake workshop day was by far the most fun I have ever had doing media studies and also gave me an immensely valuable learning experience, working with professionals, such as our Director Dom and Camera OP Ed. The entire process gave me performance skills I never knew I had, let me learn and work alongside professionals and have fun with my friends at the same time.

How the studio changed throughout the day

Throughout the shoot day, I took on many roles, such as the lead finger tutter, backing dancer for the hip-hop, cheerleading and end dance scene and the pianist in the band scenes. I also marked the ballet scenes with the clapper board.

For me there were 3 main parts of the workshop that I really enjoyed, they were:

• Performing my finger tutting
• Learning about the lighting desk from Eddie
• Being the pianist in the backing band

However, my favourite part was performing my finger tutting, because I had put lots of time into learning and perfecting the routine for the previous 9 days, so seeing it all come together so well was really satisfying.

Finger Tutting

My Finger Tutting Routine

Evaluation Q2 : What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

When completing the preliminary exercise, we had to complete many other tasks, other than just the main workshop day. These include:

• Task 1 - Completing an audition video (as seen below)
• Task 2 - Learning and practising our performance with Tash and Jasmine
• Task 3 - Helping to plan and organise our costumes with Olivia and Mrs. Dymioti
• Task 5 - Editing our remake video

The video below is Jerom, Gabriel and my audition video, to the Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk"

Below I have included a haiku deck which goes through each individual task and highlights key skills and ideas that I learnt and improved upon, whilst completing each task of the prelim. For me, I most enjoyed Task 4, which was not required for this blog post, but I also enjoyed Task 5 a lot, as I am a keen editor and enjoy learning new techniques.

An example costume shot of Gabriel with his Hip-Hop costume

Our Dance Coach "Tash" Performing my Routine

Olivia (Head of Costumes) adjusting my tutting outfit

Over 200 Shots across 7 Tracks, Our Editing Timeline

Evaluation Q3 : Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

I am very pleased with my final edit of our remake video for Taylor Swift's Shake It Off, which I completed with Alex Nicolaides. All of the footage captured looked really professional and sharp, which made it exceptionally easy to grade and edit with. 

Our Editing Workflow

Occasionally we could not achieve perfect shot-for-shot likeness with the original, due to complex dance moves or cinematographic techniques for example, however in these cases appropriate and good looking footage was captured instead, through guidance by our director, Dom and main camera op, Ed. Below I have Alex N and my completed edit.



Alex N and myself edited the video over the course of 2 weeks, both inside and outside of lesson time, using dual monitored edit suites and Premiere Pro CS5.5. The actual cutting and positioning of the shots took the longest period of time and due to the high quality nature of our rushes, grading only took a couple of days. I think our grading for some set-ups definitely looked different to how I originally imagined it would, such as the band set-up I did not expect to look so dark, however other set-ups such as the end dance scene definitely look as bright as I had first envisioned. Overall, I am still extremely happy with all the shots, however if I was to complete the remake again, I would have tried filming a few different shot types as slow-mos, as we often had close-ups, but not necessarily the wides or mids that the original used.

Annotated Diagram of Premiere Pro CS5.5

I really like how well some asepcts of the video came out in particular, for example:

• The tutting set-up
• The ballet shot's grading
• The slow mo ribbon dancing

I liked these most of all, as I felt they fully met, if not exceeded my expectations for how professional they look. For example, I think the grading of the ballet shots very closely mimics the cold, yet glossy hollywood look of the original ballet shots.

Before and After Grading

The ribbon dancing slow-mo

Evaluation Q4 : How do you think your prelim experiences will impact to your approach to next term's music video coursework?

I think one of the biggest takeaways from our preliminary exercise is the massive improvement to be found in our performance skills. Our ability to lip sync and perform in front of a camera is a massive asset to us now and could definitely be utilised in our actual music video. I also think I would pay far more attention to the costume, hair and make-up of our characters as good hair and make-up really improves the professionalism of our music video. I also think that all of the organisational work done by our 1st AD, Amy, cannot be overlooked and will definitely be imitated when we produce our own video.



Overall, I found our music video remake workshop extremely good fun and I learnt lots about making a music video that I could apply to our own video in September. I think the project has also inspired me to be adventurous with my own video in September and use a mixture of figurative and performance based footage, perhaps tackling the grime or EDM genres of music, whilst trying to utilise the immense possibilities available to us in the Seward Studio, through its lighting decks and cyclorama.

Our Media Class at the end of the Workshop 

Evaluation Question 1 : In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When producing our film opening, we took alot of inspiration from real films, for example Juno and Submarine. Firstly, I have produced a set of captions for the youtube video in English which discuss the thought processes of the team behind many of the shots.

Unfortunately, the length of the captions are limited so the last 10 or 15 seconds of the video do not have a commentary. However, the only major moment missed was the final punch. We included this as although it is a negative action towards our protagonist, it is very humorous at the expense of our main character and such humour is a key convention of Coming of Age cinema. To watch the video with captions, simply activate the English captions that are NOT auto generated and feel free to pause and rewind as necessary.

The aforementioned punch

The commentary makes reference to a few films that greatly inspired our opening, such as Juno and Submarine, below I have included the examples I was referring to.

Juno's Titles

Submarine's Soundtrack by Alex Turner

Submarine's Institutional Titling

Our Submarine inspired colour grade

Grading

An example of Submarine's colour grade

One important aspect of our opening briefly mentioned in the commentary was the grading of our footage. We really liked the grading used in Submarine and in a number of the sequences in our opening we really wanted to replicate it as best as possible. It seems like they tried to do a split, by pushing highlights towards a warmer orangey tone and the shadows towards a colder blue tone. This resulted in a very interesting, almost sepia looking grade which we really wanted to use in our sequence. I think this is best demonstrated in the shots by the lake, where the orange and blue of Craig's jacket really standout. I feel this grade really worked well with our piece and helped bolster it's indie aesthetic.

Narrative Structure 

Although narrative theories of Todorov and Barthe are explored a little bit in the video, these theories greatly impacted how we constructed our opening sequence and thus ought to be explored further. Below is a table detailing how each theory affected our opening, as well as a short summary of each theory.

Evaluation Question 2 : How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film aglet has a many representations of members of the LGBTQ+ community and more specifically older teenage gay males. We felt it was very important to portray them and the issues that face them in as true to life fashion as possible, given our acting, editing and cinematographic resources. However, we also felt it was important to not alienate the LGBTQ+ community and thus sought feedback from a few teenage members of the LGBTQ+ community on the representations that we had built within our piece.

Below I have included a Prezi with some examples of where and how we have represented the LGBTQ+ community in aglet. I recommend viewing in fullscreen for best readability.

Evaluation Question 3 : What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Quak Films:
Quak films are our invented production company. They are a small British production company who focus on films discussing minority social groups in British society and the issues that face them. British independent films have an ever increasing market share in British cinema, with a 16% share of the market in 2014 (BFI Film Fund, 3rd February 2015) , which is the highest it had ever been. Quak Films believe that the British Independent film style of ownership suits films with smaller nicher markets, therefore discussing these issues is better suited to a small British independent film production company than a massive vertically integrated media house, such a Warner Bros. Our film would also only require a small production budge of around £1.5 million (for scale, Submarine had a £1.2 million production budget), due to the unknown actors and little to no CGI and VFX required in the movie, which also lends itself to a small British independent production company, as they wouldn't be able to raise large "hollywood-esque" production budgets. Therefore, it is in Quak Films's interests to produce our movie about teenage members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Film 4:
Film 4 are our primary distributor, as they already are an established distributor of British indie films and worked in the distribution and funding of other British indie films, such as Frank (2014), '71 (2014) and Submarine (2010). Film 4 have their own TV Channels that they must provide content for and thus being involved in the production of films helps provide Film 4's TV Channels with content. Film 4 also have the potential to make money from the distribution of the film by selling off rights to the film to other channels and distribution firms, such as Focus Features who distributed the large British independent film Suffragette (2015) in the US, whilst Suffragette was distributed in the UK by Pathé.

Comparing aglet and Submarine (2010) release plans:
-Premiere:
 Submarine premiered at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, September 2010.
 aglet would also premiere at an international film festival, such as the BFI London  Film Festival in October 2016.

-Release Date:
 Submarine was released on October 10th 2010, which falls outside of the major  hollywood film release times of Christmas and the Summer holidays.
 aglet would be released at a similar time of October 2016, as therefore it would not  be forced to compete with big hollywood films for attention.

-DVD and Blu-Ray Release:
 Submarine received it's initial Blu-Ray and DVD release on October 4th 2011.
 aglet would likely receive a Blu-Ray and DVD release around a year after cinema  release.


Exhibition and Exchange of aglet:


Cinema Release - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;