Here are some storyboards that Sean and Melody (and with the help of her boyfriend) for our music video. This will help clarify shots, speed the shooting process and help us use our time more efficiently. Well done guys!

In lieu of me not being in on Monday and a feedback from our presentation, I went location scouting for existing and alternative locations.

Hosier Lane – perhaps too busy for our shoot.

AC/DC Lane. Might be a possibility as it has a cul de sac.

Fitzroy: Up from Moor Street are some quiet laneways.

Off Moor Street heading towards Johnston Street.

The Standard Hotel

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Brunswick Street:

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WILLY AND HIS EVIL TWIN
Willy, sunglasses on, is cycling down an industrial area. Everything is grey and cold. He’s dressed in a pale tracksuit.  His bicycle is battered and has a flat. It’s way too small for him.
He arrives a karate dojo. As he steps up a student rolls out of the doorway. He’s injured. Willy goes to help him up, but the man freaks out at the sight of him and runs off.
Curious Willy walks in and sees another man but wearing a black karate outfit punching a speedball/punching bag. Willy shouts out and the man turns around. Willy freaks. The man looks exactly like him. He’s even got the same sunglasses.
The man, Evil Willy, looks him up and down and challenges him to a fight. Willy is a little bit reluctant but agrees. They begin to fight.
In no time at all, Willy is being knocked on his back. He gets up but Willy knocks him down again and again and again.
Evil Willy stands over him, victorious and preens himself like a proud rooster.
Willy, humiliated, gets up and limps to the doorway but as he does he declares revenge. Evil Willy laughs.
He tries to ride his bike but he falls off and throws it away.
Later, in the bamboo forest, he sees a Buddhist man meditating. The Buddha smiles and offers him to sit with him.
They meditate together and Willy has an epiphany that shoots from his third eye. He’s singing and dancing with his crew who pat him on the back and tell him how much they love him. In this fantasy, the Buddha teaches him about self-belief and self-love (lots of pointing to the heart).
Emboldened, Willy heads back to the dojo to confronts Evil Willy. As Evil Willy goes to hit him, Willy takes a long meditative breath, thinks about the Buddha, and ducks the punch and kicks Evil Willy across the room, streams of ‘visual power’ shooting from his foot..
Evil Willy gets ups and tries to kick Willy but he merely sidesteps and Evil Willy crashes into a rubbish bin. Angry now, Evil Willy runs at him and again but Willy defeats his every move. Willy takes a long breath and twists his arm till Evil Willy falls to the ground. Evil Willy taps out and Willy bows and leaves.
As Willy steps out he’s suddenly funked up and his crew are waiting out the front with a new low rider bicycle. He thanks them and they go for a long ride on St.Kilda beach, smiling.

Out of our presentation, some things emerged. Namely, the location of Hosier Lane being a suitable one. As we need a close off space for the shoot, Hosier Lane was a lot busier than what I had thought. Even the side street of the main laneway was prone to disruption.
Other points that were raised were the ‘pulse’ effect from the fluorescent lights in Flinders Subway which may affect the video recording (thanks Tessa!). San had a good suggestion in getting us to wear yellow vests to signal to passers-by that we were doing something ‘official’.

Today, in our group was our first point of conflict. A crew member turned up late for our group presentation and chose to read work that myself and Sean had written and without our consent or even reference to us. I had told this person to write the story, to put it into a paragraph in their own words but they did not. I was not happy about this and I took them to task for plagiarism.

They didn’t understand that this was the case, that they had no choice but to read it because they hadn’t been present during the drafts of the story.  Eventually, Rohan had to intervene and agreed that what they had done was indeed plagiarism. Rohan cautioned them for their lateness and lack of contribution.
Thankfully, everything was smoothed over but I do find it frustrating when someone in a group does not pull their weight. I concede that I should’ve given them written instructions as to what they should’ve done for our presentation.

 

Today we talked about our music video. Willy Dynamo still hasn’t provided us with the lyrics which impedes but doesn’t stop the process of writing the concept. It would’ve just helped!
We established roles today. Sean will direct, Luka will do the shot list and film, Melody will assist with camera and I’ll continue to work he concept and write the treatment as well as production managing. I pushed for defining of roles as last time I made a video at RMIT no roles were defined and it was quite confusing and time wasting.
The concept appears to be shifting now for practical reasons. No longer will we be using a dojo as the story no longer required there to be one. Willy Dynamo just needs to be downtrodden by Evil Willy and we only need to see him triumph. Also, I’d written it with too much in mind. Will have to rework.

 

Today we learnt about 3-point lighting. What was interesting was how different positions of the three lights created different moods or signposted various genres. For example, to create a spooky feel use one light pointing from below the subjects face as we see here:

Or, to create a mysterious or even ‘poltergeist’ look, shine a single light from behind the subject. Also known as ‘backlighting’:

The amount or type of hair affected the amount of static glow:

Another technique was to have a single light shining downwards on the subject. This is often used in police interrogations, prison cells, to hide the identity of someone or if someone is about to be abducted:

Using two lights the subject’s side can be illuminated or not. This suggests something sinister of the character, their ‘two sides.’

This is following lighting device is called ‘Tutor Talk Lighting’. This is often used to make students wake up and get off their phones and pay attention to said tutor!

Today we looked at students music video presentations. Some stand out were San’s which was professional and confident and really took us through a breakdown of the video form, the history of the band and their influence on the video: notably they produce, direct and edit them.

Second favourite was Sean’s video Gosh (Jamie XX) which featured an albino African-American and other albinos of different ethnicities as the main characters. What was interesting about this, apart from the fact it was filmed in the Fake Paris of China replete with Eiffel Tower, was Sean explaining that the director chooses to focus on issues that the mainstream ignores – in this case the treatment of albino people – rather than promoting a band.

‘Wolf’ by Siames was also interesting. It was a hand drawn animation in a Japanese style with a strong narrative story.

 

There was also a Taiwanese music video ‘Tough’ by Mayday presented by Grace about a middled aged man who builds a rocket ship after being ridiculed and humiliated at his low status jobs. Our video will be similar to this narrative structure because we have a similar story of the underdog overcoming obstacles to achieve his dream.

My own presentation was a bit all over the shop mainly because I decided not to read from my paper because it seemed that a number of other students were reading from their work and it seemed to bore the audience. I should’ve just read! I even missed a slide I was going to talk about, dang it.

It was great to see a wide range of music videos and provided ‘grist for the mill’ for our project.

Today we learnt about video settings using a DSLR. Rohan explained the difference in using shutter speed for slow motion and ISO levels. He recommended no more than 800 ISO as after this setting the image begins to go very grainy and distort.  In terms of frames per second, he recommended 1920 at 25 fps and for slow motion to double fps rate to 50fps. He also said to ignore icon exposure levels as these are just speculative and not very good at all and instead use the white balance feature – take a photo with the camera and adjust the white balance from there.

With that in mind, I tried to use my camera, a Canon 600D, for the slow motion test task. The biggest problem I found was that I couldn’t find the aperture setting despite setting it to manual. Thus I changed the ISO up to 3200 – way too much but it was the only way to get any light.  Thus, we can see above, the grainy, purply look of the shot.

What I learnt from this is that I can only view the slow motion in post when I effect slow motion gain.

 

READING: Dawn Shadforth on Hurts’ Lights: “Haven’t we all been there?”

It was revelatory to see Dawn Shadforth’s music videography. I never knew she had done so many music videos including Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t get you out of my head.’ Her videos were so vastly different that I felt that we had moved on to another video director.

What struck me about in this week’s reading was that the Rosie Kellet who plays the antagonist is not only an actor and playwright but she also wrote the dialogue. I think her writing helps ground the video, gives it weight, a purpose, and a direction. The preamble in the foyer with the protagonist, Lucy Martin,  who bites back at them in Spanish helps link Martin’s attraction to the matador character.
The singer, Theo Callum, also plays the matador and Shadforth speaks of him being a natural actor. This is true. I thought he was a real actor he was so good. Not only does Callum’s contribution add another sense of authorship and fuse with Kellet’s written characterisations, he ‘thinks like a filmmaker’ says Shadforth which must’ve made it much easier to film. It’s something they fleshed out after she’d written the treatment.
Shadforth brought in an experienced costume designer, Alex Noble,  who does custome made pieces. You can see this in the clip  with the variety of animals and exotically dressed characters that look like they could’ve been in the Star Wars bar scene (there flashy niqab-wearing dancer and a bejewelled lady in the bathroom that Kellet tries to touch). It’s not only visually dazzling but also adds another layer of character
Lastly, she loves working with Robbie Ryan, director of photography, because he not only loves flashy dancing (a necessity for this kind of shoot) but he is also, as Shadforth describes, like a dancer himself.
Thus with all these collaborative elements of actors, costume designers, writers, choreographers and photographers ‘mucking in’ gives the shoot a fluidity and grittiness that might not have been achieved in a more detached crew and cast. So in short, good collaboration is bound by the passion for the project.

‘Twas a fitting start to the course by seeing the film ‘Control’ by the director, Anton Corbijn, whose eponymous music video ‘Egg Hunter’ is also the name of this course. 

Like his Egg Hunter video, Corbijn keeps the frames of his shots for ‘Control’ stark and in black and white. There’s a bleakness to them all while at the same time communicating relationships between the characters. For example, there’s a scene where Ian Curtis is sitting on a couch while his love interest Anika is standing on the other side of the frame in a doorway. The band is in the middle communicating subtextually that they or Ian’s ambition, is in the way of their relationship, that right now they are emotionally far apart. A lot of the shots are quite static. There are no handheld or many of tracking shots. There are no camera flares, no great camera tear aways, just simply gritty scenes that the band is in sweaty, stinking pubs. We get the sense of Curtis’s state of mind, the maladies that plague him, his isolation, his state of perpetual conflict.
For our project, it occurred to me that we could use a studio scene with Willy Dynamo, headphones on while he narrates the song. This could be our return point, our core narrative. Also, I liked the door opening and closing in Joy Division’s ‘Love will tear us apart.’ Simplyeelements that repeat could be useful.