Setting Ideas

Alex and I have decided to do some of our filming in Brighton as we feel it will fit into the idea of our story. We decided that Brighton Pier would be ideal with all the lights on.

I wasn't sure whether Brighton Pier would be open, seeing as it will be December time, so I looked up some information on the Brighton tourist website and this is what I found.

Letter of Permission

Yesterday, Alex wrote to Island Def Jam for permission to use the song 'Walking Disaster' by Sum 41.
This is the letter he used:

Dear Copyright Holder,

We are A level students and we are writing to request your permission to use one track from the latest album by Sum 41 entitled Underclass Hero.

The track we wish to use is 'Walking Disaster', track 2 on the album.

With your permission, this track would be used in our current A-level Media Studies
project which involves creating a music video for a popular music track, as well as
producing an album and a magazine advert for the artist.

If we received your permission, this track would ONLY be used in an educational
context and be viewed by our media class, our teacher and the OCR exam board
moderator. It would NOT be released to a large audience or uploaded to any public
video websites.

The artist and your company would of course be fully recognised throughout pre-
production and the final video itself. A copyright notice, with wording supplied by you can be included in the records of the project. If this is required, please send full
details.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Alex Newcombe and Sophie Brown

Main Character

Seeing as our character has been away from home, it is logic that his clothes will be shabby and dirty.

Here are a few pictures of what I thought it should look like.

Our character's going to have to be wearing ripped, dirty clothes if it is going to look realistic so here is an image of some jeans I found:

Whilst looking for clothes for our character to wear, I came across this image:

This is the exact image we want for our character.

We are also going to need a few more people in our video, and two of these characters are going to be adults, who pose as the mother and father, currently we are having a bit of trouble finding adults that will be willing to help. Both our mothers said they wouldn't mind helping out, but we need to find a man to act as the father.

Here is how we want our adults to look.

Character Ideas

Like I said before, Alex and I have very different views and ideas and our first (for this project anyway) problem came when we had to decide what the main character would look like.

I thought he should have short hair.

Alex thought he should have long hair. (At least we both agreed that he should be a boy as the male vocals would sound out of place if it were a girl character)

In the end we decided that he should have long hair, as we plan to have him be a little bit younger than our age (so we think he should be 14/15/16) and long messy hair seems to be the 'style'. Here is a picture of boy band 'One Direction'. This is the age that our main character will be and they all have long hair styles.

Ideas TAKE 2

After listening to 'Walking Disaster' again, and again, and again etc. and looking at the lyrics, we decided that we would base the video on a boy who has left home due to disagreements at home. We came to this decision as the opening lyrics to the song are 'I haven’t been home for a while/
I’m sure everything’s the same/ Mom and Dad both in denial/ An only child to take the blame.'

We've both got our own ideas of what the video is going to look like and so we are going to have to agree to disagree on a few things.

We are currently drawing out a brief story board, just to get a few ideas down so we'll have somewhere to start when it comes to filming.

Yet Again

Once more, we've decided to change our idea. We did a bit of filming last Sunday (24th), but it really wasn't good enough. We thought it might be quite simple to do, but it really wasn't. The filming wasn't too bad, however certain members of the ban were putting in more effort than others and so the less enthusiastic members didn't look the part and you could tell they weren't interested. It wasn't just the lack of enthusiasm that was holding us back, the setting we chose was slightly too small, although it did look better than we expected, it was a lot smaller than we initially thought and there wasn't enough room for the whole band. We also found that we weren't as good at filming as we thought we were. All the shots we did were static and we found that we needed a lot more movement.

After discussing this back at school, Alex and I decided to use 'Walking Disaster' by Sum 41. After first hearing it, I instantly thought of a few ideas. I compared these with Alex and this definitely seems a better choice. We are going to do a narrative based video as we found that the performance thing isn't for us.

Here is what we filmed and what it looks like once we edited it all together. We like to think of it as a learning curve!