Our music video has finally come to fruition and we ended up persevering through our second long-term project of the year. I have to say, working in a group is fun but has definitely been more stressful than I anticipated. Experiencing stress is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion because it means you're getting things done in the end. I had fun trying to make a different type of music video than I'm used to and my group and I all knew each other personally so it made life easier for us.
In retrospect, the hardest obstacle to overcome with this project was our pre-production stage. When we began brainstorming ideas for our music video, we really went back and forth for a couple of days before agreeing on one solid idea. We wanted to do a storytelling music video out of our old habits of needing to tell a story with our video, but we all agreed that doing a storytelling one would be 10x harder to agree on and it probably wouldn't work well for our schedules collectively. We did not choose a promotional video because it felt a little too much on the simple side for all of us and we didn't want to go through the hassle of synching our audio. Then, we considered an artistic music video and this is where we started to flush out our ideas -- making our video artistic would enable us to have complete creative freedom with what to put in the video as long as it has a cohesive theme to it, so this was our first milestone with brainstorming. We all really loved the idea of doing an artistic music video but then a new challenge arose -- deciding on what our concept/theme would be. This took us a while because we all had to listen to "Tonight" by Phoneix several times to understand what kind of "vibe" we got from it. I was getting funky, the 80s, and playful feelings from the song. The one thing we all were able to agree on was going for an 80s vibe to our music video because it lets us have fun with the mise-en-scène. We immediately thought of vibrant, colorful, and fun outfits for Miguel to wear and knew we could have fun with our set design as well. However, we weren't able to solidify our concept until we were forced to think about it. We had thought through what kind of things we wanted in our music video but never came to a conclusion on a purpose, so we had to take another listen. After paying attention to the lyrics and correlating it with the music, we wanted to convey that same sense of loneliness hidden beneath playful colors in our music video.
So then came the fun part -- production! I don't think I've ever been more excited to film a project before because I enjoyed the production design ideas we came up with. We knew we wanted to include a birthday party scene, a cooking scene, and a banana as a graphic match from the first shot. It just felt so weird and out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. The biggest relief for all of us is that we were able to really focus on the artistic direction of this music video more than focusing on telling a logical story, which can sometimes be challenging. Here are a few moments I managed to capture while we filmed:
All of these photos were taken during our first day of filming. This first day was much more difficult than our second day because we filmed during the night, which made getting the lighting on point even harder. We had to be inventive with the ways we added light in our shots, but it ended up working out because we added that 80s grain to our footage in post-production, so raising the ISO didn't really affect the quality. Another obstacle we encountered while filming was using a gimbal. They're really sensitive to motion, so Matthew, as our main camera operator, had a hard time navigating its technology and getting it to cooperate. The only shot we ended up using it for was our opening shot by the sidewalk and we all spent about 2 hours figuring out how to use it. We called our other TV friends to see if they could help us but they were all occupied, so we had to take matters into our own hands. After reading a bunch of online manuals and watching videos, we only managed to use it for our opening shot and tried using it for our birthday cake scene. It was taking way too long to film that singular shot with the gimbal, so we opted for filming the entire thing handheld. Matthew and I are used to filming things handheld, so we thought it'd be a better option for our group since we could do things more efficiently by playing to our strengths. After making the decision of going handheld, things ran much smoother the rest of the day. We went to 7/11 to film one of our last shots and I tried their slushie for the first time (it was decent). After filming that scene, it was getting pretty late, so we called it a day and decided to continue the following morning.
DAY 2 OF FILMING:
On our second day, filming went much smoother for all of us. We had about 3 scenes left to film and we knew exactly how we wanted to film it thanks to our storyboard. Storyboards are sort of underrated because I honestly rarely use them, but they make the production process 10x easier when you know exactly what shots you're getting, where, and how. We filmed our party scene, the blank room, and the cooking shot all that same day. We started filming this time in the morning and it's truly so much better to film during the day because you feel less groggy and more encouraged to be productive when you have an early start to your day. It wasn't only because our scenes were during the day, but we wanted a fresh start from the night before and this felt much more refreshing and light. My favorite scene from our video is probably the party scene because all we used was a projector and a small pocket light while filming and it turned out to look great. We had some trouble trying to make the party look realistic because some of our extra actors canceled on us, but using the projector was a pretty good choice on our part. All we really wanted to focus on was Miguel so as long as we saw shadows and party lights of some kind, it would work. We filmed the cooking scene last, but it was probably one of the easiest shots to film. It transitioned from the piano and we had to practice the exact movement a little bit, but it turned out really smooth in the end. After filming our last scenes, we were able to wrap it up at around 2 PM and it felt nice to still have some of the days to enjoy as opposed to coming home late.
Our final stage was post-production and this was again, an easier stage for us because of our storyboard. All we had to do was find the shots we wanted and align them with the sequence in the storyboard, so we finished doing our line edit in two days. Samantha was in charge of editing the final music video because she originally came up with the idea, so knew how to put it together. She would send us some clips and sequences throughout the week to get our feedback on things we should change/add and if things were running smoothly. After adding our final touches and effects on the last day, we were finally done with our music video. We added some cool grainy effects and spent the most time on color grading our footage to make it look close to the 80s funky aesthetic.
All in all, this project was such a great learning experience for me and my group. I feel like at the beginning of this project, I was worried that we'd all face a lot of conflicts when deciding upon an idea for our music video because agreeing in group settings is extremely difficult. In the end, though, we all were able to go with the flow and just try something new for once and I really liked our end product. One takeaway I can say I gained was upholding the value of pre-production over anything else. Like I said earlier, I'm not a fan of storyboards because they're sort of time-consuming and unnecessary for me when I have my own vision of things, but spending that extra time in pre-production makes every other step 10x easier. The fact that we were forced (it's a good thing) to make that storyboard enabled me to visually understand how much smoother things go with putting a little more effort into planning. Similarly, I was able to grasp how much quality matters over quantity -- one of the debates we went through in pre-production was how we'd incorporate a variety of angles and shots if we were gonna do graphic matches with continuous shots. We were able to incorporate the specific angles and shots we wanted within our continuous shots within only a few scenes but were still able to convey a concept and that's what I really liked about making an artistic music video. Although we had to be extra resourceful and inventive with our shots and production design, it definitely came out the way we wanted in the end and produced a good product. These are both things I hope to apply to my Cambridge portfolio project when we get to start on it this year and hopefully, I'll be able to come up with an even better story to tell for my portfolio project through the use of mindful planning and inventiveness with production.
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