Band research - The Verve

The verve are an english rock band formed in wigan. Their music is similar to some of oasis and the stone roses tracks and i very much like their bitter sweet symphony video. I may decide that some of the ideas and camera shots used in their video would be useful in my video and so i will probably be taking a closer look at this.

Band research - Stone Roses

I enjoy Stone Roses' music and so i will be looking into what songs and videos would be appropriate to me and this project. They are an english rock band who inspired many including bands such as oasis. I will be watching their videos and listening to how their songs are constructed etc. for when i make my music for my video.

Band research - oasis

To begin my research i have looked at bands that play music similar to what my music video will be using. The first band that came to mind is an obvious choice for me as they are my favourite band, Oasis. Oasis originally formed in 1991 but to begin with were called "The Rain". They grew up in manchester and the band was originally formed by Liam Gallagher (vocals and tambourine), Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs (guitar), Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan (bass guitar) and Tony McCarroll (drums, percussion), who were soon joined by Liam's older brother Noel Gallagher (lead guitar and vocals). They have had eight UK number-one singles, seven UK number-one albums, fifteen NME Awards, nine Q Awards, four MTV Europe Music Awards and six BRIT Awards, including one in 2007 for outstanding contribution to music and one for the best album of the last 30 years as voted by the BBC Radio 2 listeners; they have been nominated for three Grammy Awards. As of 2009, the band have sold an estimated 70 million records worldwide. Also the band was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2010 for “Longest Top 10 UK Chart Run By A Group” after an unprecedented run of 22 successive Top 10 hits in the UK. The band also holds the Guinness World Record for being the "Most Successful Act of the Last Decade" in the UK between the years 1995 and 2005, spending 765 weeks in the Top 75 singles and albums charts. As you can see from the many awards won, they are very succesful and create excellent rock and roll music.

I will be looking at videos and pictures of these to get a rough idea of what clothes the band members will be wearing and playing etc. I will also be taking a look at songs similar to the song we are going to use such as "whats the story", "go let it in go let it out" or "Do you know what i mean?" and see what kind of camera shots and mise en scene has been used. This way i will be able to develop an understanding of what goes on in a modern day rock video. I will try and capture elements of this and use it in my music video. However, after watching videos such as, "Do you know what i mean?", i have realised that some of the technical devices and props they have used would be far too expensive to use in my video.

Review of skills

In the last year i have been creating a short film with lads in the class. I learnt a lot about camera shots and what they represent and show the audience. I have also learnt about the equipment and how certain groups of people are represented in the media.

We also went on to watch a film called Shifty which was writen and directed by Eran Creevy. We learnt about the way digital technologies are used. We analysed and did research into british realism as a genre and used web 2.0 to do our research. Generaly web sites such as wikapeadia and google were used to research this. This was one of my strengths as i use web 2.0 everyday. One of my main weaknesses was definatly time management. we struggled to get much done to begin with and ended up doing most of our filming and editing in the last two weeks.

Once we had looked at Shifty and discussed how different the camera work and budgets etc. were to hollywood films we started to look at the film, London to Brighton which was another low budget british film directed and writen by Paul Andrew Williams. We did research on these films and learnt a great deal about each mostly looking at the way they were filmed and the quality of the filming etc.

Once we had done that we went on to do our bloggs which took some time as i was'nt completely sure on what to do. This was definatly a weakness of mine and i struggled to write enough posts and talk about globalisation and institutions etc. I did plenty of research on films that were similar to the film we were going to make and so this was a strength of mine. Another weakness of mine was getting a story board together. I should have done this in the earlier stages and so this was another reason time management needed to be improved.

Whilst filming i learnt about what types of shots worked with others and not to break the 180 degree rule. I did however find the editing the harder part and was marked quite low as another member of the group did most of this. After last year i know what to improve on and will be making much more effort, alot earlier. I enjoyed filming and learnt alot about how digital filming is done. This went from a weakness to a strength. It also helped that i had many ideas and so this meant that not having a story board was'nt as bad as it could have been.

The editing i feel is my main weakness as i left it all to Ben in my group. This year i would like to change that and focus alot more on the editing so that it becomes a strength. I did however do voice recordings on the mac to be played whilst the film was being played. I found the mac much easier to use and when filming earlier on in the course, i used the mac and could edit alot easier.

I also learnt this year what things to avoid when filming so that it made things easier when editing. Taking such things as filming horizontaly instead of verticaly into consideration will help me when filming and editing in the future.