Skills Development: How I approached planning this production work differently to my AS production work.


The way I approached the planning for this work on creating a music video was that I wanted my group to pick the song called ‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’ by Coldplay. In prior in telling them to choose this song, I decided to create a vivid storyboard depicting from each scene what I want to show and how it should be filmed. I gave a short presentation to my group of why they should agree with me and choose my song. Back in AS, the way we came up with idea was that we all just simply agreed on a rationale idea that we were able to create, so we wanted a house where we can film, there was a car scene which a car was needed, all these resources was granted because one of our members in our group had access to these.


In A2, I took a different approach in planning and deciding how we should create our music video by watching a variety of music videos from different genres that have different unique selling points in their music videos. For example, ‘Hey there Delilah’ by Plain White T’s have a split screen effect and ‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’ by Coldplay has an illustrative motif throughout. These ideas form these videos help spark off ideas that would inspire me in deciding how we should create our video.


I also watched on Youtube behind the scenes of various music videos to see how they film and the process it takes to make a music video. This was similar to what I did in AS because I watched a lot of Thriller movies to see the convention that they follow – normality, then building up tension, then the false plateau then the climax. Watching music videos and Thriller opening scenes helps me to understand what it takes to makes these and allows me to comprehend how the professionals do it, which motivates me in achieving a similar outcome. Research helps a great deal in both AS and A2 because it allows inspiration to take form allowing me to take something that I watched and articulate it into my own form.  


What I did differently in A2 from AS work through planning, is that in A2, the planning was more detailed in the sense of what we wanted to achieve because it was a little bit complex. We spent many lessons and workshops just planning on what we wanted to achieve out of our music video. We spent a lot of time researching our locations so that it reflects or contrasts our song. However, mistakes did happen in my A2 planning from AS planning because when we filmed and put it up onto Final Cut Pro, it felt disconnected with the other shots and it looked unfinished, which meant we had to film even more base tracks for our music video, which we never anticipated for. But in the end, we planned on what we wanted to film and achieved this through intensive planning and coordination.