When we first assembled our group it didn’t take much discussion to decide on the style of our video. We needed a video that would fit our chosen song, ‘Goodnight’ by Professor Green and it was unanimous that our production would be a performance based. I think we took a lot of inspiration from past groups productions when we were given viewings of their works earlier in the year. We saw how they managed to create a video with an actor lip syncing the lyrics in various locations and thought, yeah that’s what we want to do, but lets see how we can do it better. As we’ve not yet begun to edit our footage whether we can better the efforts of previous groups remains to be seen, but we’re confident the editing process will leave us with a good solid video production.
However, past groups were maybe not where we took most inspiration from as their performance-based videos were to songs not from our elected genre. This is when we knew research into videos produced by artists from the urban/hip-hop genre had to be undertaken in order to gain some ideas. One of the videos we looked at to gain more an insight was ’99 Problems’ by the huge hip-hop artist, Jay Z. Despite this being a combination of performance and narrative, not the style we want to achieve, the performance elements show Jay Z lip-syncing his lyrics in various urban locations, such as a New York housing project. Having then discussed the issues with flying out to New York to shoot our video, we decided on a more realistic plan which was to find areas of Manchester and Salford that would suit the urban feel our video required.
ial backing and how to use your surroundings effectively. Music videos don’t always require foreign locations for them to be of good caliber and to obtain the right response. However, it was clear that these artists were trying to produce a much more comedic effect in their video where as we plan for ours to be much more serious as the themes dealt with in our song are very close to Professor Green's heart such as the death of his father and grandmother.
In terms of how much each member of the group has contributed to the creative process we feel that most decisions and ideas have been arrived at predominately as a group. No one individual has done more than the others, we’ve all worked as hard as each other thus far. However, certain decisions have been more personalized such as the song choice which was chosen by Kwame. He then offered to star in the video, portraying Professor Green. As the rest of the group wanted to be more involved with the production side of the project, we were all happy for Kwame to display his extrovert qualities in front of the camera.
During the planning stages we knew we wanted to utilize certain areas around the city centre and in Salford Quays. I think the most exciting locations we’ve found have been through exploring new parts of the city rather than anywhere we we’re already familiar with. These include quirky spots of graffiti sprawled across the outside of buildings in the northern quarter, as well as beautiful areas along the canal unknown to many of public’s eyes.
As for the shots we’ve filmed so far, we constructed quite a developed shot list before filming began. This gave us a good basis and structure to work with. As with most media production groups the shot list was altered and eventually we’ve come to a point where we feel comfortable to go out filming without a shot list knowing that we will still manage to execute some brilliant shots.
We still have a long way to go in completing filming, editing and aspects of the blog. However we feel confident and will be working very hard over the next few weeks to ensure that we achieve a high grade.
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