Practice Filming Task

During one of our media lessons we were given a practice filming task. This was given to us to help us prepare for when we start filming our coursework. We were all put into groups and then given a song to which we would make a music video for. The song myself and my group were given was Dolly Parton 9-5. This was a song that me and my group were fairly familiar with which we felt would be of an advantage to us. The main point of this task was to help us practice with filming shots and editing them into a full video. This task would also help influence our decisions on which brief we would choose; either a music video or a film trailer. 

Firstly before we started filming it was important for us to plan exactly what we were going to film, where and when. As a group we listened to the song a few times over to get even more familiar with it and to help us learn the lyrics better so that if we were required to use lip syncing in our video we would find it easier to do so. We decided to search youtube to see if the artist already had a video for this song to see if we could take a few ideas from this to help us with ours. However the only videos we found were live ones in which she was performing on a stage for a large crowd. Although we noticed that she used props such as desks which fit in well with the theme of the song. This idea helped us to come up with the location for our video. We decided the best place to record was in the school itself as this was convenient for us and as it is in a work environment this would also help set the scene and link to the lyrics in the song. By using the school as a setting this would also help us keep this video fairly simple as this was something we wanted to do as we had not filmed this kind of footage before. 

We brainstormed and made small storyboards to help us lay out how we were going to record the video. The brainstorm included the types of shots we wanted to use, who was going to be in each shot and what role they would be playing in the video. By assigning roles in the video this helped us to stay organised. 

As a group we decided that as mentioned in Goodwin's theory we wanted to make our video narrative so that the video had a clear relationship with the lyrics. We decided we would do this by including shots of people hard at work. On our storyboard we included the lyrics to various parts of the song and drew a small sketch of what would be happening during this time. To make our video as narrative as possible, during the time where Dolly sings "I swear this man is out to get me", we decided to include a shot of a woman at work getting told off by her boss. 

We also decided that we would use the lip syncing idea. We had one of our group members mouth the words while two of us sat beside her and danced to keep up with the fast tempo of this song. 

As this was only a practice task I feel our group worked well together to produce our final video. Each one of us contributed ideas and everyone was happy to take part in the making and editing of the videos . We made sure as a group that everyone participated equally which helped us not waste any time and we managed to produce our video in around a week. It took us a while to get the hang of editing the shots and putting them all in the right order but after a while of experimenting with it we managed to pull it all together nicely. Now I have done this practice task I feel I have more experience in filming and would have less difficulty producing my coursework. 

Below is the final video created by our group for Dolly Parton's 9-5. The video has also been uploaded to youtube.