GREEN MEANS COMPLETED
LAST MINUTE BLOG PLAN
Category Planning
Inspiration for my FMP
For mostly everything in the modern media, you don’t have to delve to deep to find where a creative has taken inspiration from older pieces of work. Whether it be through plot line (e.g. The Lion King and Black Panther) or genre tropes (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), similarities can be found everywhere in the media. Some might argue that it is in fact idea-stealing, but unless it’s an exact replica, or practically the same, everything has it’s own differences.
That’s being said, it is clear where I have taken inspiration for my final project. Considering I chose to create a music video, there is endless possibilities of what I could have done. I could’ve stuck with a purely narrative video, or an entirely performance based video, or even a mixture of the two.
As previously stated in my proposal, I intended on keeping a relatively creepy feel to my video and what better place to look for creepy inspiration than from the artist of the song I’ve chosen: Billie Eilish. Her videos are laden with creepy aesthetic, a lot of her videos carry a darker colour palette (with the exception of her “bad guy” video which subverts the tone of the song), as well as having some quite gruesome themes throughout all her videos, including one shot where she is seen to be crying out a black liquid, and another where a tarantula crawls out of her mouth.
The main sort of aesthetic I’m looking for it dark and ominous, and the best example of this in Eilish’s videos is “bury a friend”, arguably her scariest video to date.
Throughout the entire video, it is pretty dark; there aren’t many moments of lightness, if any at all. This helps to keep the vibe pretty macabre, not to mention all the use of horror film tropes such as black eyes, creepy walks and flickering lights. The director, Michael Chaves, also uses a lot of strobe lighting within the video, as well as keeping the editing pretty choppy, which is what I intend to do with my own video.
It’s basically a horror story set to music, it’s designed and produced to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and scared. Considering my song choice, I want to do a similar sort of thing for my FMP. I don’t want to copy this style exactly, plus I always had it in mind that I wanted to keep the colour themed around reds and blacks, but this is certainly one of my main influences for my FMP. I’ve always admired the style of Billie’s music and her videos, and I want to make sure that I do her song justice when I create my version of the “bad guy” video.
“Stressed out” by Twenty One Pilots is probably one of the best example of what format I want my video to follow. It includes a nice balance of dialogue and performance video. Not to mention, it also uses subtitles (if only once in the video) which is an idea I’ve had to develop during the process of editing my final production. It also has one of the creepiest face shots in any video I’ve seen. From this, I’ve drawn the idea to do a similar thing in my video. I will have my actress in front of a dark backdrop, mouthing the lyrics to “bad guy” in a intimidating sort of way.
If I want to find an example of the exact formatting I want to follow for my FMP, I have to look no further than Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “The Kill”; not only does it have an opening dialogue, but it also follows a similar layout to my idea and the Twenty One Pilot’s video, seeing as though it uses both narrative and performance clips. It also has a sort of creepy “The Shining” story running through the whole thing, so again, my main inspiration that I take from this video is the horror genre and the way it is presented.
The video is a homage to the Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining based on the Stephen King novel. Several scenes are based on the film, such as when Shannon Leto enters Room 6277 and encounters the woman in the bathroom and another when Matt Wachter is served drinks at the bar by a doppelgänger apparition. The video culminates in an elegant ballroom in the same manner as the photo at the end of the film.
En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). The Kill. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kill [Accessed 3 Jun. 2019].
This video has taken direct inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, so clearly this was a good example of a horror music video to take my own inspiration from. It, like bury a friend, also uses choppier cutting techniques and strobe lighting in places in order to create an air of mystery and the lack of comfort.
LAST MINUTE INSPIRATION
Due to not having a mic whilst filming, I wasn’t able to record an actual dialogue for my video (to be fair, I don’t think I would have been able to anyway, but that was purely due to the competency of the actors involved). I needed to find a way of conveying the story of the video, so it made sense to the rest of the plot line. Then, it occurred to me that I in fact knew of a video that manages to do this perfectly: Radiohead Turn.
In this video, they use subtitles to show what the characters are actually saying to one and other. It’s clearly used just so you are able to hear the music over the top, but from this I wanted to create my own stylised version in order to convey the thoughts and speech of my characters. It creates a sense of ambiguity to the character’s voices, as well as emphasising the emotion of the music behind it rather than the actual speech.
Action Plan
Script vs Shot List
One of the biggest problems I faced during this project is how hard I found it to document my ideas. I knew I couldn’t just DO my work, I had to find a way of showing how I did something (which is also why I’m having such a hard time writing my research blogs). That being said, one of the most difficult tasks I faced was trying to decide on whether to use a script format or shot list format to document what I needed to film for my video.
In most cases, a script would make more sense to use; it looks more professional to start with, as well as being the more popular to way to explain what is needed of the actors in certain scenes. Not to mention, in more first draft of my proposal, I stated how I wanted to write a script for my opening dialogue.
However, I didn’t take into consideration how useful a shot list would be to my final production. Firstly, it didn’t take anywhere near as much as effort to format correctly: no need for fancy fonts or specific formatting, nor much need for it to be in chronological order. A shot list would mean I can keep the dialogue ambiguous, and it also means I can just jot down any ideas that come to my mind.
Practically, in this case, it made more sense for me to do a shot list as there wasn’t going to be much speaking, due to it being a music video (UPDATE: there ended up being no dialogue whatsoever anyway due to my terrible memory and bad time keeping)
THE FIRST SATURDAY OF FILMING – 11/05/19
I have only one word to describe my day on Saturday: stressful. I only have myself to blame, however, as I wasted the time I had to do some last minute planning the night before by watching Ru Paul’s drag Race instead. It’s becoming more and more prevalent throughout this FMP that I will need to start planning and working well in advance for my second year FMP to avoid this stress next time.
That being said, I have also found myself with a lot of problems which were out of my hands during this filming day and, I feel, I have handled them as professionally as possible. Needless to say, I was drained by the end of Saturday, and I hadn’t even got all of the footage I needed. I can’t exactly blame myself for calling it a day on filming as by 10:00pm we were nowhere near finished, I wanted to sleep, as did my actress.
I booked out a Canon 800D, as well as a camera tripod and a Rode mounted mic for the session. I wanted the best quality camera I could book out and this was my best option.
Although, pat on the back, I did get all of the opening “dialogue” done and the final part of the video completely recorded, even if some adjustments to the final production had to be made.
Because my dumb body likes to mess with me, I, of course, woke up with a migraine come Saturday morning, and thus my planned morning of setting up the back drops and lights was tossed away like yesterday’s jam (if you get where that’s from, we’d probably get on). I slept the rest of the morning off, I wasn’t due to start filming until mid afternoon after all. I woke up an hour before my bus was due so I opted to wait until I got back to set up. I needed to go into the city centre to meet my friend Kirsty, who offered to be my PA for the day in exchange for mozzarella sticks and hash browns. I also needed to pick up some fake blood from the fancy dress shop for my video, as well as meet Esme, my actress, from work.
Whilst at the fancy dress shop, I got the idea to pick up a masquerade style mask for £2.99
Although I didn’t really have a specific dress code/costume in place for this video, I knew that I wanted to keep a creepy and sexy feel to the whole thing. And with my colour scheme being a cool palette of reds and blacks, this mask was the perfect choice to try and incorporate into my video. Even if I didn’t use it, it was only £2.99 and would make a huge dent in my personal funds (I did end up using the mask and it was very effective).
Now onto the second problem of the day: buses. I was due to meet Esme at 2:45pm, catch the next bus home and complete all the main music video shots before 6pm when I was to meet my other actors Izzy and Luke. However, as you can imagine, this did not happen. Esme’s bus did not arrive in town until 3:15pm and then two of my buses didn’t even show up. By the time I got home, it was 5pm and I had an hour to set up my set and film all of my video before we went out to film the rest of the video. I did manage to set up the backdrop and camera/tripod and film some scenes, so go me.
Since the beginning of this project, I’ve been wanting to experiment with all sorts of techniques I haven’t been able to with past projects, and with most of these new things being post-production, one thing I was certain on trying was experimental lighting. I really wanted to use a red light for the final part of the video; it’s the most sinister part of the whole film and I want it to look the part. I looked into getting some red cellophane to put over my house lamps however I found a way more reliable option in my basement
Considering the location of this scene was in the bathroom, this meant I wouldn’t take up the little space I had by trying to fit a whole lamp into the room as well as a tripod and camera. By having these bulbs, it meant I was able to utilise the lighting that was already in the bathroom. I did find that during the daylight hours that the red light wasn’t anywhere near as visible and so I made the executive decision to wait until night time to film the scene in the bathroom.
And, if until now you thought I was having a bad day, just wait for the main event. It was finally time to meet up with Izzy and Luke when several problems came to light. The first of which being that I had left my mic at home on the table. Not that this was a huge problem considering I never finished the script but this now meant I wasn’t able to record any speaking whatsoever. However, all hope wasn’t lost at this point as I reminded myself of the Foley project my class did last term.
This task went really well for me, I was very, very successful and, considering the dilemma I’ve left myself in, I could have been left worse off. This gave me a chance to show off my skills in create foley tracks, and my confidence in using Adobe Audition.
Amongst these problems, I also had to sort out a new main male actor due to Luke being too nervous, changing set location because of general public being in the way and in general having work with novice actors. This was my main problem for this day of shooting as only Esme took the role seriously. This has given me a few warnings for when I come around to doing my second year FMP; next time I will definitely look into casting actual theatre students and, if I have time, I will conduct a casting day before filming.
All in all, I wouldn’t say filming was a complete disaster, however there were some clear problems I had to work through. I was so stressed out from working on this film, I couldn’t film everything I wanted to and thus I will have to run another filming day, and this time I will only work with Esme and not have so many people show up.
India's FMP Blog 2019 