Busted Music Video - Research and Planning

After completing our Bon Jovi lip syncing exercise the whole class was then asked to work together to create our own version of the opening scenes of either Britney Spears - Oops I Did It Again or Busted - That's What I Go To School For. Our class choose to Busted - That's What I Go To School For with Millie offering to be the Director, Leah as her assistant and Sophie as the camera woman, filming the scenes.

For the first part of this task we spilt up into small groups of two or three and completed a storyboard (using screen grabs when necessary) of the opening scenes of the real Busted video.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2q0rt_busted-what-i-go-to-school-for_music

This was important part of the process as it enabled us to see what sort of scenes the original makers used and, as we were trying to produce our video as near to the original as possible, made our video more authentic.To further authenticate our video we made sure that we knew the exact timings the original video used; we noted this, the props, locations, costumes and characters used in each shot as well as screen grabbing some examples.

An example of four of our storyboards is below;

Next the same pairs or small groups made shot lists detailing which shots (type, location, props, characters, costumes etc.) that we will be filming each day. This allowed us to divide the shots that we needed to film to certain days, keeping us on time with shooting as we could always refer back to the shot list. This was a critical part of the process as it allowed us to keep a simple yet effective schedule to our filming as we only had limited time (each lesson either being an hour or an hour and 20 minutes long) and the number of people involved would have made it difficult to organise without the shot lists.

An example of our one of our shot lists is shown below;

The planning task that I found most useful was the shooting script. It helped us to keep track of what we needed to do at anyone time with just enough detail so that we could quickly scan read it and gather the information that we need e.g. if a cast member asked what props that they needed to bring on Wednesday we could quickly look on the shooting script to tell them the answer.

I would have liked to do more work on the storyboard as towards the end it seemed slightly rushed and some of our scenes for our Busted video suffered as a result e.g. at the very last scene Iuaen didn't walk forward and swing his arms towards the camera like in the real video. This therefore slightly devalued the authenticity of our video.

For A2 Media I would expect to complete a more detailed storyboard and shooting script as well as maybe further research into the band or artists themselves to see what style of music video would suit their music the best and in connection with that a more in-depth look into the location, props, actors and costumes etc. so that the style of our video matched the style of the song, its genre and its target audience.