Music Video Remake: Production

Soon after completing my animatic, I set to work persuading peers to take part in my surreal audio-visual venture. Luckily, a college 'day-off' was fast approaching, so I took the opportunity and organised filming to take place on that day. Ideally, I would have filmed the remake on the school stage, or in a drama studio, to ensure that the mise-en-scene was as similar as possible to that of the actual video. However, because availability of volunteers was limited to a day without college, and because I wanted a space that was mine to control (without definite time-windows and lingering responsibilities), I decided to film in my back garden. 

After reviewing the placement of the band and the shots required, I chose an appropriate position for filming which had the least restrictions for both camera placement and on-screen action. It was also quite necessary that I filmed on one side of the garden to avoid capturing enormous changes in lighting throughout the day. Although this couldn't be avoided entirely because of sporadic cloud-cover, the position I chose did minimise the problem considerably.

I was aiming to film what I needed as quickly as possible so as not to waste the volunteers' time, so I used the planning skills I had developed during my AS Media production project. Essentially, I wanted to make sure that I filmed only what I needed, and filmed it well, so I transferred all of the illustrated frames from my animatic onto sheets of A3 paper in order of first appearance. I then wrote the time windows in which the shots are used beneath each frame. With a variety of static shots to recreate, this preparation enabled me to set up a shot, and then film all of the moments that it is used one after the other. This method not only saved time and effort in setting up shots, but ensured that each respective shot remained the same throughout the video. 

Probably the biggest limitation I faced in remaking the video was in terms of accuracy was that of the props. The closest I could get to a real instrument was a small electric keyboard, so improvisation was required. Drumsticks became screwdrivers, guitars morphed into spades and tennis rackets, a metal safe became a cardboard box, chains turned to rope, and the miniature motorbike was swapped for a child's pedal bike. Still, this didn't matter too much, because the substitute props were chosen for their similarity in shape, proportion and utility to the real thing. As a result, the shots and performance were hardly affected. 

To ensure that everyone was performing in time, I hooked up a laptop to some speakers nearby, and played the original music video whilst filming. This allowed the volunteers to pretend to play their 'instruments' at the correct pace, so that I could time it to the audio track during editing. Seeing as only I was familiar with the video and the song, it was necessary that I mimed the lyrics. In order to allow myself to set-up the shot and also be in it, I asked a volunteer of the same approximate height to pose as me in the shot as I aligned the camera. After pressing record and swapping places in the shot, the same volunteer then played the video on the laptop at a suitable point for the rest of us to mime along to. This was the process used throughout the day, but not for certain shots involving the sabotage of the safe/box, where the timing of the performance wasn't particularly important.

The solutions for the ascent and descent of the safe/box were very much ad hoc. Essentially, we used an extending pole provided by a volunteer to hold a rope which was tied to the box. This way, a volunteer could hold the box in position whilst the performance was being filmed, and when it came to dropping the box, the rope could be fed through the loop at the end of the pole, allowing the box to fall vertically. I placed some items in the box before sealing it up to ensure that the box actually would fall instead of blowing to the side in the wind (which is rather uncharacteristic of a safe).

Admittedly, there are some glaring errors in continuity both between the original video and the remake, and just within the remake. Some examples of the former are

• The guitarist is holding his guitar the wrong way. This was a simple mistake that went unnoticed for a while, and when it was noticed, I judged it not to be worth filming the affected sections again.

• The vocalist is often stood to the wrong side of the frame. This mistake was entirely of my own making, caused by a misinterpretation of what the camera was filming; in the shots where I was miming directly to the camera, I fully rotated the preview screen so that I could set-up the shot, and forgot to compensate for the fact that the preview adjusts to mirror the image it receives.

Some examples of the latter are:

• The pole holding the safe/box suspended changes sides. It was unavoidable that the pole would be captured within the frame, but I also failed to foresee a problem in where the volunteer holding the pole was standing, so the pole does change from being on the right to being on the left, and then back again.

• The blue coil of rope being tugged by the pedal bike fully unwinds, only for the following shot to show it unwinding once more. This problem was unavoidable, simply because I didn't have enough rope for the coil to continue unwinding as the bike moved further and further away.

 All in all, I found the production of the piece to be a very enjoyable and worthwhile experience, and I would like to thank Alex Branson, Daniel Knights, Toby Barrett, Tom Palmer and Martin Campbell for their extremely skillful 'pretend-play' performances and their invaluable assistance in the arts of button-pushing, knot-tying and rope-pulling.