Preliminary Task

As an introduction to working with a band to create a music video, my group was tasked with choosing an existing music video to recreate as a cover version. The resulting music video recreation of Wonderwall by Oasis can be seen below with the original video.

FIRST MEETING

The group proved difficult to work with from the first meeting as there was a clash of friendship groups as well as preferences in terms of the music video to recreate. One team member decided to leave the group and another person joined due to this. Choosing a song was a long process, with one half set on doing a conceptual video and the other an electronica song. To resolve this we agreed to choose a 'classic' that everyone would like. While we considered Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen for a while we eventually chose Wonderwall due to its simplistic style and blank-canvas like opportunity to add some creative ideas based on other videos we liked.

STORYBOARD

The Wonderwall video switches between various concepts including the band performing in a warehouse with the singer lip-syncing, clowns, a record player, close ups of the instruments and circular imagery.

We quickly decided to keep the black and white filter and squared-off aspect ratio, which would make ours look more modern. Also, inspired by a video that had cardboard boxes on people's heads with faces on them, we decided to replace the clowns and circus performers with the box-head characters.

As we had to film some footage on a Creative Arts Evening in school we decided to incorporate a lip-sync booth that members of the public could interact with. The rest of the video remained pretty much intact. I drew up a storyboard that depicted all 9 of our key concepts.

1. A bench set up featuring members of the public sat in candid poses and situations
2. The lead singer lip syncing to camera
3. Members of the public to lip-sync to camera and a montage be made of this.
4. Stop motion with the box heads
5. A wide shot of a chair and a character with a box head interacting with the chair in this space
6. Close ups of the instruments in performance
7. Various shots of the box head characters in scenarios
8. Circle imagery eg. a record player and dartboard
9. Shots of the drum kit and drummer

PRODUCTION DAY

At the Creative Arts evening we began by trying to arrange our two setups: the lip-sync booth and bench. We wanted to hang a white backdrop against the wall in reference to the original video but this proved slightly disastrous as we couldn't get the backdrop to stay up despite using the entire roll of masking tape. Also people were reluctant to take part in the lip-sync, being more interested in the bench setup. As the backdrop behind the bench was holding for the time being we as a group decided to concentrate on this and abandon the lip-sync booth idea.

I joined in taking part in the bench footage on camera and as a co-director, giving people props and ideas to work with. As the band were at the evening performing the song again I captured some footage of the performance and added it to the video, this time capturing close ups of specific instruments and band members.

REFLECTION

In hindsight, the video shoot wasn't as disciplined as it could have been and some of the resulting footage is problematic: for example some shots are out of focus or have poor camera quality due to lighting. The box heads looked very good but there weren't enough different setups of the band so footage has had to be repeated to keep the variety up. The band also made a mistake in the beginning of the second verse in their master shot but I managed to cover this well by cutting to a later line of song. I also believe we could have chosen a more interesting or ambition video to recreate but due to the group issues this wasn't an option at the time.