Matty Muncey/ Media Blog

Phil has worked in the industry for over 20 years and has worked with Jamariquai, Spice Girls and many more.   These were his main points that he made: The music industry in the uk is worth 4 Billion pounds   Music videos came along in the early 80s and unblocked a constipated film industry   Music videos were a creative playground for directors and producers   Music videos played around with the extensions of film itself   Music videos were made to promote the artists and their most recent music He then showed us a bunch of music videos he had made before and what surprised me a lot and the most valuable thing I learned was that sometimes when things don’t go to plan and you deal with whatever you have, you can often have better outcomes. It showed me that I still have time and if the new idea doesn't stick it doesn't mean that our video won’t be as good because we haven't had so much time.  

After deciding to change our idea, I came up with a few visual representations that would imply questioning religion.   My first idea is to have a close up of a bible and have someone open it, but as it opens there is black paint all across the pages. This could symbolise that the bible isn’t truthful which would apply to our theme. As well as this I would have our rapper wearing a neckless with a cross at the start but then towards the end have extreme close ups of him holding the neckless with black paint dripping down. Something Mima came up with was to have a line of girls praying and as they look up they have tears coming down their eyes.   Whilst these initial ideas are good they only take up about 10 seconds each max. So we came up with performance strands for our rapper to fill in as well as coming up with more visual ideas.   Strand 1: Rapper in a church performing to the camera   Strand 2: Rapper in the studio with dark lighting rapping to ...

After changing our song, we decided that the concept of our idea really needs to evolve to suit the song better. With this in mind we all sat down and discussed where we go with it and to help c us come up with ideas, we wrote down the main themes that the song is based around for something to go off. What we mainly got from the themes were family problems and religion. We felt that going down the route of family problems could very easily become generic and fake. However there is a lot to talk about for religion. So with that in mind, we listened to the song again and figured out what it was the artist was saying about religion. To sum it up, the artist is questioning religion and explaining how all these bad things have happened to him and he is still expected to believe that there is a god. We then went off and researched and came up with ideas around religion that we could use in the video. I wanted to be able to visually represent these themes and ideas. After thinking about this ...

After we all had a discussion about what songs we could do we all put forward our best song that we found and listened through all of them and then came to a decision that Loyle Carner was the most suitable artist and was the best fit voice for Guy. There were many factors that we had thought about such as what he was rapping about, what accent he had, the amount of views his music video had got, if he was swearing a lot and generally how his voice sounded. This is the official music video to 'The Isle of Arran' Now that we have our new song we can further develop and mould our idea around the song. Next week we are going to have another test shoot with our new song in the studio so we can truly have an idea of what the music video is going to look like.

We spent a lesson on finding new songs and all came up with our top 5 songs that we found. I started off by listening to related tracks to Egyptian Joint but didn't find anything that was accurate so I started searching and going from name to name until I found only a few that were good enough to use however I found one artist that stood out from the rest and that I thought guy could really pull off the voice. This was Loyle Carner - I found him through a track by Tom Misch - Crazy Dream which Loyle Carner was featured on. After finding this I searched Loyle Carner on Spotify and has a listen to his top 5 songs. One that really stuck out for me was the song; The Isle of Arran. The sample used in this song was really nice and was quite similar to Egyptian Joint. The song wasn't a really fast rap and the subject wasn't about Guns, violence, etc. Which meant it would be realistic for Guy to rap as Guy clearly isn't a 'Gangster'. 

Instead of buying a brand new multi lens Camera that uses film to produce the wobble effect on photos, I decided to experiment a method using my own digital camera. However using a digital camera requires a different method and is hard to make seem-less. You have to keep the model or subject your shooting still for it to look realistic. You only need to take 4 photos and each just needs to be moved to the side very sightly. After trying it, I found that the ones I took weren't effective so I'm going back to do another shoot after learning what works and what doesn't.

Phil felt that whilst the performance is very good, the actual voice isn't suitable as he didn't find it believable after showing our class the test shoot for some further criticism. Some felt that it could work whilst others didn't. After a long discussion with our group about the direction of the video we decided to change our song and possibly the concept with it. We now need to find a song that fits with guys look that's by a rapper that we could believe is guy wen he performs it.

(Unfortunately I couldn't make it) But Aidan, Mima and Maya went to the local village and shot a test shoot with our main rapper; Guy Newland and some of our extras, they only filmed a verse just so we could all get a general feel for what it would look like but more importantly how guy is performing in front of a camera. Whilst our lip sync is good the general B roll footage is slightly off as we won't be shooting skateboarding and the editing wont be so full on as it has been a bit overdone. This has been helpful because we can now keep this in mind for next time.

Something we didn't want to happen was to shoot the video, edit it and upload it only to find out that the video has been taken off for copyright. So I sent the artist an email requesting for his approval for us to use his song in our video.