Introduction filming

One of the conventions of dance music is a introduction section before the main music begins to play. Last week my group went out and filmed our introduction, as a rough cut, to see how effective it would and to show us what we need to do to improve it.

Things that went well:
After 15 minutes of planning we managed to get our final shot, where you see the main character walk into the assumed club, and as the door closes the lights switch off to signal that the music is about to start, in one take.

Things that could be improved:
We did not have any means to hold the handi cam steady at low angles, and as the first few shots of our introduction are low angle we had to drag the handi cam along the floor. This lead to some really shaky shots that we will re film using a simple but effective cradle, made of a steady base supported by string, to reduce camera shake. Also we noticed a continuity error so we shall have to re film this too.

Filming

Today we started to film the entrance sequence, as we discovered that conventionally this genre of music has a big introduction. This went well and we feel we have enough shots to get a convincing sequence, there were, to begin with, some difficulties however. we do not had a dolly to place a camera on so the shots tended to be quite shakey, we fixed this by placing the tripod on something that slid across the floor. Once we'd fixed this problem the filming was easy, and the sequence came together nicely.



(This is not part of our final piece, but is relevant proof of construction)

Digipack research

Digipacks are a type of CD packaging made out of card stock or another form of hard card or paper. They can flip open like a book or have three section, with the CD always being in the middle section. Their purpose is to offer more information on the band or artist and/or the album, they tend to include a message from the band, perhaps a lyric book, as well as original band art, and a song list on the back.This type of packaging is atheistically pleasing but can get damaged more easily

Costume for artist

As the artist of the song does not wish to be in the film, we have had to create a persona to compensate. I shall be doing this. We plan to use a costume consisting of a baseball cap, a relaxed t shirt, sunglasses, jeans and some trainers. This should give the image that the artist enjoys going to the club himself, while still looking smart enough to show that he will be doing the music.

Choreographed dance

Last Wednesday (13/10/10) i saw the progress on the choreographed dance sequence. It fits very well, and although progress is slow due to the speed of the song, the quality is good.

Target audience research

By doing target audience research we hope to validate our initial beliefs of dance music, we have designed a questionaire to give to people with in the age range we wish to appeal to (16-25), and hope to get useful feedback from this. We have designed our project to be appeaeling to young adults, who enjoy social events with freinds. To do this we got an upbeat, fast tempo song, and are now working on a choreographed dance, with the help of a dance student at our school. We will put the questionaire onto facebook, and use the feedback to further our project.

Green screen practice

Today we practiced using adobe pro to edit footage filmed on a green screen. We did this as we plan to use this method in our final piece to place our choreographed dance behind previously filmed footage using green screening. Here is a sample of the images we got from this process.