Meeting 12

This meeting was taken place one day prior to filming. We discussed all of the aspects of the filming to ensure everything ran effortlessly and according to plan. All group members brought in all their costumes and props, which we needed, and we made a checklist. We ticked of all the things we had, to enable us to have an understanding of what we still didn’t have. Thankfully due to our organisational skills, and with a combined effort from each person in the group, we had all the costumes we had planned for our filming. The next task we approached was to make sure we had three tripods and fully charged camcorders for the next day. We asked our media teacher for these items and we provided the equipment. We also decided to reconfirm our booking of the hall to ensure that were no misunderstandings of our group filming our music video the following day. The person in charge of the hall said that we had permission to film the next day. As a group, we contacted all the actors that were in our auditions so they understood that their time was needed for filming on Friday afterschool. Due to a notice that was given 2 weeks prior to filming, they all agreed to come and take part in our music video.

Meeting 11

Using the correct tools can help to bring our concept to life, which is why we have now edited our digital/animatic storyboard using Final Cut Express. We then uploaded it onto Youtube in order to be able to upload it on our blog.
We wanted to maximise our visuals as much as we could. Therefore, we mapped out our idea's by creating the storyboard into moving images through technological innovation. This allowed us to envisage our final production through drawing our imagination onto pieces of paper. This will help us to be very time efficient and will increase our organisation - all leading to creating a top standard music video in the end. We will be able to get on with our shooting straight away when we can see our storyboard as pictures on posit notes and then as moving images on the computer. We can put our imagination into action much easily by previsualising it all. This has all helped to ensure as a group we know what and when certain characters will be involved, the camera angles we will use for each scene, what props we will need and basically what will be in the frame.
In other words, our music video has been created now through this digital storyboard. Now we must put it all in action.

Meeting 10

This lesson, our main focus was on organising both the costume and prop list. We also allocated each individual, from the group, to find items of clothing and props that could be used within our music video. We ensured to split the tasks evenly and the items that one could not find were allocated to someone who had these resources available to them. 
We made an individual list for everybody as each person had different items to organise. We then took pictures of the items we had available and showed one another on 'Facebook' (as we could not bring them into school). 

Meeting 9

During our media lesson, as a group we began to construct our storyboard. We wrote out a clear storyline first on a piece of paper so we all knew exactly what order the music video is going in. We each got a copy and then spilt the work equally. Each of us got a specific verse to use to make some of the storyboard. These were produced on post-it notes. Once this was finished, we discussed how we will add the animated edits to it on the computer, with the soundtrack, to make it look like a storyboard version of our music video. This will help us to visualise what we wish to generate. 

Meeting 8

During this group meeting, we decided to apply the feedback from the questionnaires onto our music video. This meant that we changed our initial ideas to suit the response from the audience. This therefore meant that segments were adapted for appropriateness and out of circumstance. We managed to resolve any issues we had with the acknowledgement of what was going on in our video as everyone received certain handouts which allowed for a good and detailed understanding. 

Meeting 7

As a group we analysed and discussed the results of the questionnaire that we handed out to the audience during our pitch.

We found that overall many people believed that we have many good ideas and we have embedded the genre conventions of comedy and pop effectively. However some individuals suggested that 'less is more' and our video can be just as effective without too complicated and intricate ideas.

The most favourable extract of our music video was the 'Dream Sequence' and  the idea that we were including Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis and James Dean look alikes. Our logo of pants made of Smarties sweets was greatly approved as well as the technique of stop motion which will be used towards the end of our music video.

Everyone in our audience believed our music video of 'Famous' by Scouting for Girls fall under the genre of Pop. This is a good sign as it suggests that our ideas and techniques incorporate the conventions of the pop genre and it is apparent to the audience what the genre of the extract is.

The audience also managed to estimate our demographic of being teenagers which is what we set out to achieve. Ages ranged from 13 years old to 17 years old. 

Mostly all our audience were willing to watch all our video as they believe they would find it funny and comic. This is a good sign as it shows that the comic aspect of our music video is achieved.

However one individual commented that they would not watch the extract, as it is not a song our genre of We calculated the mean score of the ratings of our overall ideas. The score we gained was 7.5. We believe this is a good score however we shall try and improve our ideas to achieve an even higher score by taking into consideration the suggestions made by our fellow classmates.

Meeting 6

We designed a questionnaire, which we would give to our classmates a chance to give an insight and evaluate our Pitch and that therefore helps us when looking back at our ideas for our music video. On which was stated things along the line of: what do you think of our ideas, what would you change, rate our ideas out of ten and other such questions which would allow us to gain an insight into the true nature of our video, whether it would have a good and successful comic effect and if the context of the video is appealing to our target audience.

We also applied our ideas to a timeline, producing a step by step guide for when it comes to filming our music video. This timeline was put in sections that broke down the verses and chorus' allowing us to view our ideas together as a whole. Therefore letting us see whether their was anything out of place or anything we had missed out. 

Meeting 5

In this meeting we tackled two main tasks: Applying our ideas to the lyrics and starting our pitch. In terms of the application to the lyrics, we found it to be a worthy idea as we needed to ensure that EVERYONE gained a detailed insight into what would occur at each stage within our video. We stated what we thought would be the best to put where and developed our ideas into a detailed account as to what would occur in our video. We did this to obtain a greater understanding of the video and the creation process, as we had to ensure that all aspects within the video, despite the random and obscure nature of it, flow, in the hope that it is not jumpy. We also did this to ensure that we got as many ideas as possible into it, without it becoming over crowded. This therefore means, that the ideas should fit together well, and make sure we are not putting footage in places for the sake of it.

The pitch we began to create, is one which would be presented to our classmates, on the basic elements that would be occurring in our video. This would allow us to see whether the ideas for our music video would be successful and appeal to our target audience.

Meeting 4

Once again, we sat down to discuss our ideas for our music video in length and so brainstormed our ideas, some of which were accompanied by illustrations. In this meeting we covered many possibilities and as a result everyone has had a great impact in the planning of this video. We each shared our ideas and expressed our opinions on them as well as developing good ideas into even better ones. Some of our ideas that were developed were: The old fashioned movie star idea who is dressed exceedingly glamourously and being 'snapped' by paparazzi. We developed this idea into a dream sequence which we have managed to tie into our auditions, which is our main idea for this video.

Meeting 3

This weeks meeting involved finalising our song choice. After coming together once again, we all went through each others ideas for both 'Famous' and "Mr Blue Sky' and we discovered that everyone had a higher quality of ideas for Famous, which is our reason for selecting this song as our chosen music video. We then discussed our ideas in more depth, which helped to create an image in the groups mind of our final product.

After deciding our song choice, we thought of advertisement ideas. We decided that we are going to create an album cover for Famous, in which we would picture a pair of funky sunglasses of a bright and vibrant nature accompanied by the black and white background of the singer. The singer will be wearing the glasses, which will have "FAM" on one lens and "OUS" on the other. These glasses will be the only thing in colour, whereas the rest of the image will be in black and white. The shot will be a close up of the singers face. 

Meeting 2

We came together as a group once more. We went through the lists which we had composed throughout the week (some were quite lengthy) and we colour coded them to say which we thought we could do successfully and would enjoy to make, what we could possibly do and what we thought just wouldn't really work. We narrowed our list down to the two songs we thought would be the most successful, these included: “Scouting for Girls – Famous” and “Electric Light Orchestra – Mr Blue Sky” both these songs are good as everyone in the group knew the lyrics and have seen the original music video, which helps as we can all have an appropriate input to the discussions and developing of the ideas for the music video. 

Along with that we also decided to research pop genre conventions as in our previous meeting we decided that we wanted a comical effect to our music video. we came up with pictures, information and examples for this. By having that information, it would help us all to think of ideas to do within our music video.We then decided to come up with ideas for each video throughout the week and then come back together in next week’s meeting to share our ideas for each one, then it was our intent to select the one which we had greater levels of developed ideas for.

Meeting 1

In our groups first meeting we first discussed our production name and logo. We went through many names, such as cracking cookie productions, mint choc chip, lightbulb films and candy cane productions (we were hungry at the time), before we settled on "Smartie Pants productions". After deciding this we found it easy to come up with a logo of smarties on jean shorts spelling our our production name. 

We also discussed the possibilities for our music video, meaning we talked about what songs we thought would be good to compose a music video for.  We, therefore, went away with the aim of each composing a list of songs that we would personally like to do and as we felt our video should include a large amount of comic effect we thought about what comic visuals would accompany the songs. 

We also set about making the blog and giving it a unique design. Due to our production name and logo we thought it to be appropriate to have a the traditional brightly coloured smarties as the background. After creating our blog and designing to our tastes, we then thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about ourselves to provide an introductory segment to our blog. We accompanied these with images of ourselves as well as a group photo which we felt we needed to show our bond as a team.