Why do I have so much work to do!

Although I was a little apprehensive at first with the decision to change our video, editing and cutting large amounts out and reshooting, since seeing what Josh and Adam had done in their free periods without me, cheers guys ;), I can say now with a little certainty that I’m looking forward to seeing what we come up with. However I do believe we need to plan our new ideas in terms of what costumes we shall wear, where we will shoot around Bury and WHEN!

Time, we no longer have as much now. Although we were ahead of the game planning excellently for our trip to London we seriously need to think when we shall shoot as Christmas holidays are not far away.

I’m pleased we are reshooting as I feel, and so too do Adam and Josh, that our most recent footage is both stronger in performance and editing, consequently making it look and feel more like a Hip Hop video. I do however feel a little disappointed that we did not manage to get sufficient shots when in London as we did shot at some great locations. Nevertheless we may be able to find ways in which to keep old and new footage together, and I suppose it’s all part of our practical journey hey?

Dwell on the could haves, we must not. Focus on the solution, we must....

Thanks Yoda, and thanks josh for such an enlightening post. 

Here in fact is the exact responses we got when we showed our first rough cut of our london footage.

Pro's

Street performers x 5

Location x 3

Changing Of Scene x 3

Energetic Performance

Costumes x 4

Well shot and framed x2

Choice of Track

Fit the part of Beastie Boys (in character)

Con's

Continuity at start

Bury train pulling off 

Not looking at camera x 2

Lip sync x 7

Train at the end

Punk outfits- James’ Hair

Camden tracking shot

Lyric learning x 5

Shot is too long at the end x 2

Needs More Edits

update / A new direction?

wow this thing hasn't been used in a while so ill give you a quick update.

After uploading the footage and editing it we have our selves a pretty sweet video. From the feed back it all seemed dandy but when we asked for opinions certain answers kept cropping up:

Train looked stupid, takes where too long, lip sync in south bank scenes was crap.

Well we re-shot the southbank / G boy shots in the urban capital of the UK, Bury st Edmunds And took the train out. However we stuck by the long shots for a long time as we liked the idea of the movement towards the camera and the skill required to do one constant take without any muck ups. We also saw that in beastie boy videos alot of the time its quite long shots of the three of them rapping to the camera.

THIS CHANGED TODAY!!!!
After agreeing that most music videos cut alot to keep the audience intrests we made a new video with the old footage only cross cutting more between differnt lines to difernt angles or locations. We also put in shots of just us without any lip sync. The result was Great it was alot more visually engaging and the few people who have seen it liked it.

So where do we go from here? the current plan is to get alot more footage from differnt locations to cross cut inbetween but save it as a differnt project so we can always go back to our old one. This is a massive advantage to us being well planned at the start as we have time to effectively shoot two videos (even if they share alot of footage).

Hope this goes well and ill update this when we know more :-)

Filming in London Town!

So this tuesday myself, Adam, Josh and camera man Ben B set of to London to put our final idea for a Beastie Boys music video together. Our idea involved us dressing in three different costumes that represent and portray three different elements of the band and music industry(which you may have gathered from previous blog entries). Although it was an imaginative idea and an idea i feel worked well worked we soon found the problem of where to leave the bags of clothing when filming, luckily adam knew the manager of a small cafe' located in bond street, Don Vitos,

We decided to shoot us dressed in smart suits first so we headed down to bond street. Filming went well since the location we were in looked good and the camera work went well with tight positioning of me adam and josh, which effectively made it feel more like a video of the Beastie Boys. This was the case when shooting for the punks in Camden town and the G's/beastie boys in southbank, however when shooting in south bank lip syncing was a bit out due to some people not knowing their lyrics! Concentration there was also hard to keep especially when you have to watch out from being 'shanked' because you find yourself caught up in the middle of graffiti artist warfare!

Overall I feel that they day was a big success, we planned ahead so we knew exactly where to film our footage and had our costumes ready. We also had some fantastic luck coming across street performers which has added further enjoyment into our music video but still following the conventions of a hip hop music video and of the music artists beastie boys.

Outfits

Well if you've understood the previous posts, the main part of our video focuses on three different versions of us (The Beastie Boys) in three different outfits. This is obviously because the song is called triple trouble and we wanted to include as many "threes" as possible. When deciding what the different outfits would be, we thought it would be a good idea to split the beastie boys into there three different personalities/influences.

We decided they would be:

Punk outfit.
In 1979 the beastie boys where a punk band called The Young Aboriginies. And punk music remained a big influence on the band throughout all their later work









Hip hop / Gangster
well them being a hip hop group, its pretty obvious that we should portray this side of their personalities.











Business / Money makers

This one was to show the money making side of what they do, after all music is a multi-million pound industry and artists make a lot of money.

The Opening Shot

This is how we picture our first opening shot to look. It would involve;

The 3 characters on the sofa wearing similar clothes to the Beastie Boys 

The 3 characters on the right wearing suits and looking smart 

The 3 characters on the left dressed as punks. 

This is a rough shot and composition of how we would have it, we would concentrate on having more props and hopefully shoot it when there is some natural light to eliminate harsh shadows and silhouettes 

Rolling In The Benjamins

Budget

So far we have 2 items in our budget;

1. Beastie Boys VW Necklace (£8.70)

2. Beastie Boys Triple Trouble Single (£1.25)

The Budget comes to £9.95

Three Is The Magic Number

We are pretty set on using the 'Beastie Boys - Triple Trouble' Idea now so we have been brainstorming some ideas for opening. 

Using the cloning idea, the opening shot would include 3 sets of 3 characters (9 on screen), these would all be played by us. However, to distinguish between the different characters we will be in 3 opposing outfits; Smart suits, Gangster wear and punk clothing. These 3 represent the different aspects of their music; The money making side by the men in smart suits, The gangsters representing their modern day image and the punks representing the bands roots.

All of them would gradually fill a lounge, living room, style area. It would be a mid-long shot incorporating all 9 characters in the frame. The soundtrack, for the opening, will be of other beastie boys songs from the album 'To the 5 Boroughs'. The effect will be like the character is flicking through the album. The two songs we will use here are 'Ch-Check It Out' and 'Open Letter To NYC'. Once the song 'Triple Trouble' Starts then the character of 'Adrock' (Adam Horovitz) will lip sync the lyrics and then we will cut away from the cloning shot. This cloning concept will be used every time the song revisits the chorus;

 

If You 

(If You) 

Wanna Know 

(Wanna Know) 

The real deal about the three 

Well let me tell you 

We're triple trouble ya'll 

We're gonna bring you up to speed

From thereafter, each verse of the song individually follows one character (In the three different outfits) until they meet up in one desired place. This desired place will then take on the cloning concept once again and the triplet of different outfitted characters will sing the chorus. 

UPDATE

Our new idea for the opening soundtrack is to make it seem like the characters are watching television. The show would be 'david letterman's late night show', and in the extract he introduces them as a band. The character would then turn off the TV and then it would switch to the main song.

**** The Rest Is Still In Our Minds, Come Back Soon For In Depth More Info ****

Ay up

Songs/ideas we are thinking about :

Daddy cool - placebo (Father is a cross dresser, family aren't to happy about it, mixed narrative and performance, the performance would be by the family)

Paul revere - Beastie boys ( follow the narrative of the song but update it to modern times, horse to BMX, piano player to DJ etc. would be us rapping all the way through then lip synced later)

Triple trouble - Beastie boys (starts off with two or three groups of ourselves squaring off in a bit of a rap battle style, we will do this by layering two shots over the top of each other on final cut express, each group will be in different outfits, we will then cut away to tracking shots of each individual group rapping and dancing using the layerd shot as our master shot)