Casting the male lead.

Today we decided on who we wanted to be the main character in our music video. He will be posing as the singer of the band and also acting out the storyline.

We need to make sure that he has good acting ability and is competent at lip syncing and has good stage presence.

Here are the potential candidates:

Alex Talwar:

Alex Talwar is a drama student from North London. He has very advanced drama skills and has recently performed in our schools musical production of 'Anything Goes' as the male lead.

He is a grade 7 at singing which would probably mean that he would be very good at lip syncing.

We like Alex but we are not 100% sure that he will fit with the vibe of our music video.



Jem Nash:

Jem Nash is a student and part time musician from South London. He has previous acting experience and knows how to play the guitar and the drums at an advanced level.

Jem is our main candidate as it was our original plan to use his song and we already decided that he would be very good in a music video. We think he really fits with the indie genre and we like his personal style.

He regularly busks on the Southbank which is something that we wanted to incorporate into our video.

Overall we think that he is a very strong candidate.

Images from http://instagram.com/jamnashmusic

We decided to go with Jem for our video. We checked the filming dates with him and he confirmed that he was available. The next thing that we need to do is a screen test to see how he looks on screen and to test his lip syncing ability.

What we did today: 11/10/16.

Pre-Production planning

Today we did some pre-production planning in our groups. In order to make sure everything goes smoothly with our filming and production, we need to make sure our group is well organised.

Today in class we allocated different roles to work on the mood boards. I was in charge of the styling and mise-en-scene mood boards, Wini did location and props and Sophia got started on analysing the lyrics.

Once we had finished with the mood boards, we helped Sophia and added our own insights into the lyrics.

I will be adding the mood boards and lyric analysis mood boards on to my blog soon.

Adjusting our concept to fit the new song.

As we have our new song 'Oceans' we decided we needed to adjust our concept to fit the new song and lyrics.

We definitely can keep most of our previous ideas as the song still fits into the indie genre.

We still want to film on the roof for our cutaways from the main storyline.

The one thing that we are going to change is the main filming location, today we brainstormed as a group and decided that we wanted to film in Brighton. The first line of the song is 'We fell in love / right by the ocean' so we thought it would be fitting to film it by the ocean.

We know its not going to be the best weather as we are filming in October, but we want to work with that and have our character dressed in nice winter clothes and working with the grey weather. We can even use it as pathetic fallacy, to use the weather to convey a sense of mood.

We are all really happy with the new concept and we don't think this set back will hurt our video - we all said that we prefer the concept now which is really good!

Permission from the band.

Due to our problems with using Jem's song, we had to find a song as quickly as we could. We found a few songs that we liked on soundcloud - including the song 'oceans' by Coasts.

We messaged a few bands and a few of them replied, but Oceans was by far our favorite. We were lucky that they were so quick to reply.

We had to regroup to change our concept slightly, as the song is about the ocean - we decided that one of our main locations should be Brighton. This was quite a big change to our previous idea to film in London, but we wanted to make sure that the video was relevant to the song.

We are all solid on our concept now so now we can really put all the planning into motion.

Our Song: Coasts - Oceans

Problems with using Jem's song.

Our original idea was to use our friend Jem's song. He is a new artist who is signed to a label and has some original songs which we really liked.

We brainstormed some ideas and we think we should definitely incorporate busking in our video as Jem regularly busks on the southbank. We also definitely want to film on the Jealous rooftop as we think that this location is perfect.

We also wanted to incorporate a story-line in our video, we want there to be a love story running alongside the visuals of Jem playing on the roof and lip syncing.

We were all really happy with the concept...
However we discovered a problem.. The song that we really liked was not properly recorded; originally Jem said that he can finish the recording and production in the studio, however today he told us that he cannot book any studio time with his label and his contract states that he cannot record anywhere else.

This means we are going to have to find a new song - and as fast as possible so we can get our plan back on the road.

Location Scouting - Jealous Gallery Rooftop.

Jealous Gallery Shoreditch

This is the rooftop of the gallery that my dad works at. We think its the perfect location for a music video - both at daytime and night time.

We have permission to use it on the weekend when no one is working there - we are also allowed to paint the wall however we want (potentially green to use as a green screen)