This is an interview of Daniel Merriweather Explaining the concept of the song water and a flame ft. Adele. He talks about his inspiration to making the song and the video and how he went about it.
Sunday, 21 November 2010
Initial ideas
When deciding what we were doing for our music video we had loads of ideas that we wanted to put in but unfortunately wasn't possible these included:
- South end on sea
As half term was approaching we wanted to push out our boundaries and film a beach scene, inspiration of do this scene came from Broken hearted girl by beyonce. Due to Lack of timing and insufficient funds we were unable to go to the beach which was very disappointing as it would of looked great in the video.
- Singing in the rain
We were also planning to do a romantic singing in the rain shot which we took inspiration from the movie 'Hitch' and the Usher 'you got it bad'. We did look at weather forecasts and it did say that i would rain on a particular day, but seeing as England weather is so unpredictable it actually didn't rain so we had to go for plan be and film the mirror scene instead.
- Deja Vu scene/ Confrontation
Finally we were going to have a Deja vu scene where i was going to be on a road with a new Lover but have day dreams of Duane walking past me, due to this the 'new lover' would get irritated and we would have an argument, I imagined it to be in black an white and in slow motion but due to lack of time and disagreement concerning the exact location we also scrapped this idea. and chose the party scene instead which also didn't end up in the video.
Editing
Now that we had all of our shots we began to edit but just before this we had to do some research some tips on how to use Final cut pro, we turned to YouTube and looked at some tutorials and we found one that was very helpful.
Now that we had some idea on how to use it we began editing, it was a very long process as we had to explore the programme and try experiment with different effects, so of the effect that we used were colour correction, bad TV which gave us that old style look on the mirror scenes. we also mix and matched the scenes with on beat cutting all in all it was a long process but we had Finally created our master piece.
FINAL DAY OF FILMING!!
Finally we were at the end of filming and we decided to go for an autumn look. We hopped in a car as i remembered a beautiful location off Elmer's end, whilst we were driving we thought that we should record the side mirrors whilst we were driving to the location.
On the way to our location we decided to park up and shoot a scene where Duane sat in the drivers seat to make it look like he was driving then I cam up with the idea that he had parked up to have an 'emotional breakdown' where he would act as if we was down which we could edit into the video.
After that we finally Reached our destination, first we filmed me driving towards the camera then quickly swapped so we shot Duane coming out of the car and singing the bridge of the song, but as we though everything went well DISASTER struck and we accidentally deleted the song form his Phone which left us with no music to lip sing to!! SO we rushed back home to download the song again and returned back to Elmer's end to continue filming.
After we had shot Duane parts we started of my half of the bridge as we though bad luck had followed us all throughout our filming luck struck and hay presto it rained which gave us the desired effect that we orginally wanted. All in all other than a few mis-haps the day went very well and we managed to complete our filming and was ready to edit it all together.
Day 3 of filming!!
This was another day that didn't exactly go to plan as we expected rain we wanted to shoot a singing in the rain scene but we couldn't do that as there was NO RAIN!!! but never fear we did have a back up plan and ending up going to my house were we shot my mirror scene.
Firstly we set up my computer desk to look like a dressing table and put props like; a make up kit , lit candles, a read rose jewellery and an "Oscar" the aim was to have a 1930/40's look which we were going to edit in order to have that effect.
Using What we learnt from our lighting training session we had set up the three point lighting technique using lamps that we had found around the house and it really did have a great effect as everything was well lit and it came out very clear on the camera.
Lighting training
We attended a lighting training session in college in case we had any studio scenes and wanted to have the perfect lighting. We were taught various techniques and key lighting elements that would effect our footage.
Firstly we were taught about key lighting. The key light is the first and usually most important light that is used in a lighting set up. The purpose of this is to highlight the form and dimension of the subject (in this case Me, shown above). No matter what, key light is needed in any studio shot unless you are looking for a sillhouette which is caused if key light is not used.
The key light can be focused (hard) or diffused (soft) depending on the desired effect and can be placed at any angle relative to the subject. The most common set up in lighting is the three point lighting.
The three point lighting includes the key light, fill light and back light. The fill light is used to balance out the contrast of a scene and provide some illumination for the areas of the image that are in shadow. The fill light is often softer and, by definition, less intense than the key light. a fill light that is a small fraction of the power of the key light will produce very high-contrast or low-key lighting, while filling with half or more of the key light power will produce a high key, low-contrast tone.
Finally we learnt about back light the final part of the three point light. Back lighting refers to the process of illuminating the subject from the back. In other words, the lighting instrument and the viewer are facing towards each other, with the subject in between. This causes the edges of the subject to glow, while the other areas remain darker.
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Rough cut feed back
After completeing the rough cut of our music video we wanted to get feedback from both the class and family and friends so we had posted up the rough cut on facebook and waited for friends to reply we recived a very pleasent response with everyone liking our story line and performance of the video. We did get some construced critisim from friend and the class about the lip sycning and we plan to sort it out for our final version. We were very greatful for the support given to Duane and Myself.
Friday, 19 November 2010
Day2 of filming!!!
The aim of today was to fit in a social scene with Duane in the middle of a crowd looking depressed and down whilst the crowd was lively and upbeat also we wanted me in the scene as a ghost figure to show that he was thinking of me. 
Numerous Problems occurred first the lighting didn’t exactly go to plan as we did have a lamp but the lighting somehow didn’t exactly register to the camera and it came out a bit too dark. Also with the amount of extras we had it was hard to fit everyone in the shot to have the effect that was desired. After the problems with lighting things got worse as we spent so much time getting the right shot of Duane, that we didn’t end up shooting my scene and it was decided to stop it there. 
If I Could of changed anything I probably would have cut down on extras looked for a better location and planned the lighting in the room properly.
If I Could of changed anything I probably would have cut down on extras looked for a better location and planned the lighting in the room properly.
Day 1 of filming!!
Finally it was time to start filming we had our hearts set out to film at Crystal Palace Park as it had that rustic feel that we needed for our music video. It had been predicted that it would be a good and warm day which was perfect for filming.I and Duane had ideas that we could incorporate in this scene. The aim of the scene was to have both protagonists in the park which shows a connection between both of them, in separate areas f the park they would bout have different positions but both reflect the same body language of heartbreak and regret.
First shot was of Duane sitting on the old step in the park singing the first verse if the song whilst filming we had noticed that it was a bit bland and decided to start of with an out of focus shot in the introduction of the song just to give that realistic effect. We had done this shot as a close up just so we could have a clear identification of his facial expressions. This shot was done numerous times as we wanted to have a choice of which one we were going to edit.
We had also done some shots where Duane was walking around the park we decided to shoot this in different angles to get different perspectives of his character as if we were on a journey with him. These shots included;
- Close ups
- Medium shots
- Long shots
- Point of view shots
- Over the shoulder shots
- Panning shots
- And of course following the 180 degrees rule
Our aim of his scene was to also get different shots from other locations in order for us to mix and match shots to create a collage of shots all to represent the same theme.
The next scene that we had done was my scene we weren’t going to shoot much of it as we wanted to change locations and time was against us. So we both decided to do a short walking sequence to start of my verse, things didn’t exactly go to plan as England’s weather proved unpredictable and it started to rain on us, as we were cold and wet we thought we should quickly shoot this scene and get it as precise as possible in order to finish quicker. We stuck with a medium shot and me walking towards the camera with a pan as I past it.
All in all I would say that this was a good start of our filming despite the weather and there was nothing that we would want to change as we had captured the effect that we had originally planned.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Storyboard
These are the storyboards. Not only have we (Duane and Myself) drawn out the plan but i have also created an animatic version of the story board in order for us to experiance what the video would look like.
Target Audience
As our genre is quite mature we have decided to have our target market aged between 17+ (17-25) to be more specific, we think this was a good idea, as we know they would understand the music more than teenagers , as the lyric and the tempo are much more sombre .
We made a video as we invited two potencial target audience to be interviewed and also we conducted a survey on 27 people to figure what exactly they want in a music video and also asking them what kind of lifestyle they have in order to link the two.
Results of survey
We fund outthat a majority of our target audience were 18 and 21 and most of them listened to hip-hop music and also spent there time listening or participating in music or shopping.
Results of Survey
We made a video as we invited two potencial target audience to be interviewed and also we conducted a survey on 27 people to figure what exactly they want in a music video and also asking them what kind of lifestyle they have in order to link the two.
Results of survey
We fund outthat a majority of our target audience were 18 and 21 and most of them listened to hip-hop music and also spent there time listening or participating in music or shopping.
Results of Survey
Lyric and lip sycing practice
When deciding how to make our lip-syncing accurate we wanted to try out two ways that would do this. Firstly we thought miming the lyrics was the easier option but it was obvious that we needed to know the lyrics inside out first.
We try out miming but it wasn’t as effect as the notes tended to stretch out we miming wouldn’t make t accurate so then we had chosen to sing along so we get the noted and it made it look much more natural. After trying out both strategies we came to the conclusion that we should just sign along with the song.
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