Preliminary Task- Britney Spears

Research and planning

Task outline and real video

For our prelim task we had to perform a short 1 minute 19 seconds sequence of the Britney Spears music video “hit me baby one more time” each pupil in the class had to impersonate Britney and carry out some miming, dancing, directing and editing. The task involved us to work as group to create a final product that looked professional and resembled the real “hit me baby one more time” video. The real video consisted of Britney dancing within a school environment (classrooms and hallways), there were a number of extras within the part of the sequence we were filming this worked well for us as we have a large class. The first 1minute and 19seconds held around 62 different shots all from close ups, mid shots, long shots, high angle and low angle.

Planning

To plan for our prelim task we started of by looking at the video and thinking about and mind mapping locations we could us within the school grounds, specific areas that we definitely wanted to us was a classroom with windows as this was one of the first shots in the video. Another location we definitely needed was a long and spacious corridor to allow us to dance and move around. We also thought it was a good requirement to find a corridor with lockers. Once we looked at this we discussed and wrote down what costume we needed to create the right effect, for girls black skirt, shirt, and black knee high socks and for boy’s only trousers and a shirt was required. After this the class split up in two, one group went and looked at the video and copied all of the shots down to allow us to distribute certain shots to people and to know the amount of shot we need and what types. The other half of the group watched the video on a big screen and learnt the dance moves within certain shots to be able to teach it back to the rest of the class.

Filming

Filming our prelim task consisted over several days mounting up to 4 ½ hours we started of slow with creating the correcting lighting and ambience, however once we started filming a couple of shots we soon got into it. We decide to go through the shots logically as well as we could due to the fact there were a lot of cuts. On the first day we filmed the classroom shots and a couple of the corridor shots, this was easy and looked really professional. On the second day we moved to a new location for the start of the dancing shots, on the third day however we continued to shoot some of dancing pieces but not everyone was prepared for this as some people didn’t have costume which cause some parts of the piece look unprofessional. For half of the fourth day we filmed small shots such as the clock and the bell, some close up against the lockers and shot of the boys “dancing” and “spinning” out of the doors. After this we had finished all the filming we need to, we were now able to proceed onto editing.

Editing

For the editing process we split the sequence into four sections we all paired up and took charge of a 20 second section and edited that to match the real Britney spears video. I was paired with zoran and we were given the 21-40 piece section, this consisted of mainly dancing and a couple of locker shots. The editing process was hard at first because we didn’t delete shots that weren’t good on the camera before we uploaded them; this meant we had to go through all the shots we had collected to find the correct pieces for our segment.

Final product

This is our final product.

 

My contribution

Hours of contribution

I contributed during the whole process of planning and filming giving opinions on what would be the best options to choose and looking at the angles from which the real video takes and applying them to our project.

Which sections you filmed (upload)

I filmed parts of the close up towards the end of the sequence in which Sophie appears in.

Which sections you lip-synched (upload)

I contributed with lip-synching towards the end of the sequence which started from 1:13 and ended at 1:17 not only did I contribute with singing I also did a section of dancing.

Which sections you edited (upload)

I edited from 21 up 30 to this took a while due to the amount of shots we had on different dates; I had to go through all of them to find the correct shots for my section. When I had finished my part of the editing zoran took over the last 10 seconds to finish our whole 20seconds piece. 

Evaluation
            

Our prelim wasn’t very professional looking due to the dancers and llip-synching, we didn’t have enough time to get dance moves completely perfect and the group members were very self-conscious of singing in front of others. Another factor of why our prelim task wasn’t as professional as it could have been was due to some members not wearing the correct costume this made particular past of the video look very unprofessional and “tacky”. As a group we didn’t have very good time management skills, this was a problem as we were working to a tight time schedule as we only had the camera and lighting for a certain amount of time. We shot the main shots with the lighting man  and started editing them together but we some members had to shoot some small singular shots which put the prelim task down further. I have learnt that there is a lot more planning to a music video then I originally expected, you have to know each shot keep organized when creating a video otherwise it becomes very stressful, when it comes to creating my own music video I will make sure I am organized and know types of shots I aim to film this will make it easier for me and less stressful. I did find the task very useful to do before starting straight away with our own music video, as know I am aware of certain aspects that make a music video unprofessional and the requirements that are needed to create a professional looking music video.