Task Four: Directors Commentary

Director
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In our opening shot we used a blue screen and after effects to create the location of the New York sky scape. Here we instantly recognise the significance new media technologies played in creating the narrative of our production.

To create the location, We super imposed an image of a NEW YORK CITY skyscraper on the blue screen. We then imported the image onto after effects and duplicated it to our sequence on to final cut pro. This new technology allowed us to give our music video a new location, which gives our video more variety in its mise-en-scene and helps convey the narrative of our production.

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We used the Internet to research a variety of prison locations to give our music video a sense of realism. We ‘googled’ Alcatraz prison in San Francisco, USA. From this cell, we looked at how the light green colours and rusty, dirty surroundings could be used in our own cell to give our star image a dirty and grounded attitude.

In the zoom out to reveal the band we had to rescale the image in after effects to make sure it made it look authentic we used it by setting a key frame of her close up and then revealing a another key frame with the full wide image of the band.

Continuing with our prison set idea we took inspiration from other music videos around which we researched on YouTube. The vast amount of user generated content on YouTube meant that there was a lot of visual stimuli to draw from. We looked at conventional music videos that have been or are in the popular charts today. We looked at The Lady GaGa video ‘Telephone’ for example, the narrative of this video gave us inspiration for our lead female singer to be enclosed in a prison cell, we thought this video conveyed Lady GaGa's star image to be a powerful woman who wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in. The way Gaga has been constructed follows the conventions of Richard Dyer's theory of a star image.
We also explored anti-institutional material on YouTube including independent music videos. This extensive and varied research gave us the knowledge to create an original and interesting set that would appeal to the target demographic and highlight our star images female empowerment.

Tunnel:
1.34 We also wanted our music video to be as visually interesting as possible through varied locations. For the Tunnel we took influence for the Pussy Cat Dolls music video Buttons. We wanted the tunnel not only to create an interesting location but also highlight our star’s strength and power to escape.

To create the tunnel, on after effects we duplicated our original footage to fill the tunnel as if it was spiralling down so that she was in the bottom of it. From this, we used a layering technique to size up and down the tunnels degrees to make the depth cues larger than the actual tunnel itself.

In the production process, we used the Internet to creates blogs, using them as creative filters. They allowed our group to share ideas and creative stimuli that would appeal to the demographic we researched. We uploaded our storyboard to receive early feedback from our fellow group members, so we could make collective decisions. This meant while editing our footage, we were easily able to refer back to the storyboards and the comments we have made on it.

Using the new techniques on Final cut pro in the editing process we were able to use a series of jump cuts between tunnel and rooftop to give a sense of urgency to the narrative as she is about to escape. This also resulted in a more visually exciting video from an audiences perspective.

New media technology gave us the freedom to try out new techniques and ideas to create a conventional video to support our target audience of 15 – 19 thank you for watching