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Last week, Anna and I began putting raw footage to the music to see roughly what it will look like. When the weather cooperates, we will continue to shoot happy scenes of “The Good Life” because a rain storm doesn’t showcase a “Good Life.”  Anna also put together a scene with the mantel/moving picture and it looks really cool!

Whoever thought of this music video was rather smart and knew their art history. I found this video very very amusing, and also genius. The paintings might not be all familiar to you, but you might crack a smile while watching it.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

This videomaker article is about Music Videos. More specifically, how to make an engaging, interesting, and somewhat good music video. There are, essentially, four kinds of videos. One is narrative, which tells (narrates) a story that is either suggested or outright stated by the music. Another is a Musicians Only video, which is obviously just a bunch of musicians playing the music, usually on-location. The third is a mixture of the two, involving the artists playing music and engaged in the story. The fourth is just an abstract montage, which is becoming more and more common these days, I think.

The rest of the article discusses the moviemaking techniques of Ali Santana and Jesse James Jackson, two music video makers. (I don’t know the guys personally). They discuss what influenced them, what they do for music videos, and a very good tip for anyone who wants to do a music video- KEEP IT SIMPLE.

Technically, this is my first Videomaker article. Shame on me. At least I helped myself out by helping film Cabaret and Letters!

This article, like a lot of articles featured in the magazine, focused on making music videos. It emphasized the importance of being original when coming up with an idea. It also pointed out that you don’t have to be limited in your ideas just because of your budget. I think the advice is really helpful to our class in creating concepts for our music videos.

Music videos are typically referred to as MVs. MVs have two major elements to them: 1) the logistics and 2) the aesthetic style. Logistics are the realities that need to be considered when planning the video. Aesthetics are the artistic elements of the video and how it is presented. There are three general styles of MVs. The first features strictly musicians onstage or on-location, and they are the only elements. The next is a Narrative Story, which tells a short interpreting the meaning of a song, and they usually involve actors as elements of the story. Musicians may also be involved as the storytellers. The third style is an Abstract Montage, a compilation of images and sequences that, while they may not relate to the song, can still be very stimulating.

Jessie Jackson, Jr. and Ali Santana, two rising names in the industry, were interviewed in the article.

Jackson is an independent film maker and directed a music video called Oh Jesus. He went to school to learn cinematography, but much rather preferred to direct. He usually starts making music videos by listening to the song, sometimes closing his eyes and visualizing his own concepts. He creates an aesthetic style based on his budget, which he feels “decides how to shape the look of the video.” While he appreciates abstract imagery, he feels that featuring the musician in the video best expresses the theme of the song. Simplicity, he says, is something that is greatly underappreciated. Basic shots sometimes make the video. While he uses a Mac Workstation and FCP Studio for his production work, he emphasizes that you don’t have to constantly chasing after the latest technology because 1) that doesn’t necessarily mean you know what you’re doing and 2) you waste a lot of money doing it.

Like Jessie, Santana also starts by listening to the song and visualizing what’s happening on-screen. Her father is a film director and her mother is a photojournalist, so she is greatly influenced by their work. Working with MTV, she likes to tell stories that reflect her experiences as a teenager. She feels that an artist’s lyrics serve the same function as a script does for a movie, and they are very important to consider.

Okay, that’s all for me! I’m working on my Behind-The-Scenes mini-documentary for the Cabaret DVD, and coming soon: Survivor by Destiny’s Child. Muahahaha!!!!

Samstar

Wow, my second post in two days! Crazy. Just wanted to recap what I’ve done so far this semester and my future plans. 

Our scheduled footage for the music video contest was not shot during the week because people have crazy lives, and we couldn’t get it done.. so our plan has changed to get our shots done by the end of this week instead. We also have to re-shoot the mantel scene, because it would take too long for Pat to put the moving pictures in the shot. We are planning to take screen shots of the other soon-to-be shot scenes, print them off, and place them in the picture frames.

Evan and I started filming our music video! Good news: the lighting was beautiful and we got some good shots. Bad news: we’re going to have to re-film the mantle scene with actual pictures in the frames. We figured we could just put the pictures in afterwards with all our nifty special effects. However we forgot to take into account that our video involves panning and zooming- not just still frames. Rather than painstakingly tracking 7 different pictures, we will film everything else first, grab some nice still frames, and print them out to actually put in the frames. This will be much easier in the long run, and will probably look better. Yup, we’re smart. 

Hey guys, Fishfactor Flex here with another movie breakdown. So I recently went to the theaters and saw a movie called Shutter Island. Now this is not a kiddie movie, it’s rated “R” for a reason. It’s spooky, clever, and all around just fantastic. It’s about a detective named Teddy played by Leonardo Dicaprio. Teddy and his partner go to Shutter Island, an island home to an insane asylum. They are supposed to find out what happened to a patient, where she went and how she did it. Problem is, as Teddy finds out more and more about the island, his own dark past begins to creep up on him. Things start to go crazy, he imagines people who aren’t there and has trouble trusting his own partner. But the best thing about this movie is without a doubt the ending. It will keep you guessing and guessing until your so sick of it that you’ll just have to accept what you saw. Believe me when I saw this guys, but it was that good. If you are going to the movie in the next few weeks and a re over 17 I would definitely go check it out. I’d give it  solid 4.5 out of 5. Another great one from the director of The Departed. 

In this Videomaker article, the topic is wireless devices (most notably wireless microphones). They are extremely useful in the sense of reducing workspace clutter while filming, enabling one to do more things with less space. However, each wireless device uses a specific frequency to send its data back to the receiving unit, and if more than one wireless device is using this frequency in the same area, they get “tangled up”, so to speak, and neither one works. This becomes a problem with older wireless devices, as certain wireless frequencies are deemed “useless” or “outdated”, and they are used for Internet, cell phones, and other uses, so anything that uses this frequency gets tons of feedback and interference. The only way to fix this is to either buy a new wireless device or get a refund from the company that made the device, if they offer one. It’s inconvenient, but it’s the only way to free up the air for people who need or want to pay for it.

-Chris Balcer

This article explains how new users like our selves in the future can use cell phones and other mobile devices to get our videos seen national and worldwide. The use of cell phone videos is predicted to increase, at a rate of 28% every year for the next five years. So by 2014 there should be 500 million users watching videos on mobile devices. Cell phones (smart phones) are now becoming known as a 4th watching screen. The other three being Computer, TV, and the Movies. Because of all this information, people should learn how to use cell phones for video advertisement or video streaming. Maybe our video class will be recorded on these mobile devices because of the rate of technology increasing in our information age. All in all cells phones are increasing in an extreme rate, and can eventually be our main source of entertainment.