First Part Of Filming - Performance part.

Performance part of filiming
We have done a basic story board to choose what shots we want to include in this part of the filming. We’ve also got the lighting sorted and the equipment that we needed to borrow from the school and the other equipment that we needed to bring in. We will also bring in the lyrics to the song with detailed timings written on them aswell as a laptop which we can play the song off to just help the actors with remembering how the song goes.

Props List
• Amps
• Guitar
• Bass
• Microphone
• Drums
• Lighting
• Smoke machine


Equipment List
• Camera
• Trolley for Camera
• Tripod for Camera
• Lighting
• Smoke machine
• Another camera (for behind the scenes filming)
• Monkey Outfit

The Schedule for filming goes like this:
We Have the Location booked for 3:40 to 5:00
3:40- 4:00 – Setting up set and getting cameras into positions
4:00 – 4:30 – filming various shots 2 or 3 times without any smoke being included in the shots
4:30 – 5:00 – filming various shots 2 or 3 times with smoke from the smoke machine included in the shots.

Shots that need to be included:
Close up shot of instruments to show skill
Close up shot of singers face to show lip syncing
Long shot to show entire band

We feel that the amount of performance we include in the video is extremely important. We have decided to have about 20% of the music video with performance, this may change due to any problems we may occur during editing.
We are worried about how the footage is going to look because of the fact that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are extremely famous and have a certain look about them and we won’t be able to replicate this exactly. So we might have to do some more filming based around a different idea for the performance part.

( Note: We have tried uploading our storyboards, moodboards etc but we have had problems uploading photos to the blog, so this will have to be uploaded once this issue is sorted out)

Monkey

We have bought a monkey suit for our music video. The reason for having a monkey in our music video is because the monkey is called "Charlie" and the monkey has escaped from the local zoo which will be shown at the start of the music video via a newspaper article being in the shot that will say something along the lines of "Monkey Charlie escapes from local Zoo."

We will update our blog soon with the moodboard, story board and with the treatment so that we can start collecting some footage for or music video.

All the filming must be completed by the 5th of November and the construction of the music video must be completed by the 26th of November.

Actor Selection

We had two different actors for the role of the lead singer and we couldn't decide which one we wanted to choose. So we decided to show two 10 second clips of the stop motion of both to a group of year 12 media students and asked them to vote on which one they thought fitted the part better. Below you can see the pictures of the two actors aswell as how the votes were cast:

Alex Elsworth: 80%
Alistair Shearing: 20%

The vote was out of a group of 20 people and 18 people chose Alex Elsworth while 2 people chose Alistair Shearing, this gave us a clear majority.

This is one of the shots of Alex Elsworth from some practice shots:

Stop Motion Idea

Stop motion is now seen as an obsolete technique because of CGI. However, as shown by the video below, it can still be used to create a stunning piece of media:



This is Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance and was posted on YouTube on January 19, 2009. The video is directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan and uses stop motion. It has achieved great success with over 15 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for "Best Short Form Music Video".

As shown the stop motion idea is still extremely popular and this video shows that it makes a music video stand out as people refer to it as being “that stop motion video” as it is different and isn’t like any other video. And when thinking about it in that type of format, we thought of the previous Red Hot Chili Peppers music videos and how different they are to the rest of the genre as they are trying to make it stand out in some way of form. So we came to the conclusion that having a stop motion element in our music video would fit the song well.

Location Photos

These are photos of the different locations that we considered using for our music video:






We are currently having trouble uploading the rest of the photos, so these will be uploaded and detail will be added later.

One Music Video Idea We decided Not To Do

We came up with an idea for our music video and wrote out a quick treatment. However we had changed our ideas as we also changed the location for where we were going to base our filming. This is what was wrote in the treatment we rejected:

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Charlie Music Video Treatment
We are creating a music video for the song Charlie by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We started off by doing some research into the band and found a history of drug abuse, we also did some research into the song Charlie and found on numerous occasions that the song is about drugs Because of this we have came to the conclusion the song Charlie is about the drug ecstasy. So we have based our music video plan and ideas around hallucinations.
The music video starts off with a young male in his late teens sat in a room taking some drugs. He then starts to hallucinate; this causes him to start seeing people standing on the stage nearby playing instruments and playing to the song Red Hot Chili Peppers. Then the main focus will be on the people who are on stage, the camera will show close ups of the instruments to show their skill. After a short space of time, the focus will be back onto how badly the person is hallucinating by making the band who are playing on stage change into different people, and maybe some people in costumes of random animals.
The camera then zooms out and shows the person who was hallucinating is sat at a table and has an “Alice In wonderland” moment and is sat around the table with some characters from the film, and then a extreme close up of his face looking confused. Then it zooms out from his face and shows the room is empty and it was all a hallucinations.

There are a few reasons why we rejected the idea. The first reason is because of the drug element, Red Hot Chili Peppers are known for taking drugs but when they created their new albm they wanted to be less associated with drug culture. Personally we also don't want to be promoting drug culture. In light with this we decided to change from this idea surrounded by drugs to a more socially accepted image.

Storyboard ideas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOvzQv0Imw

This is a video done by a University student for his Final Year. The concept of being chased is something we were already considering - The idea of hallucinating is something that could work really well with Charlie. 'Charlie' is another term for a drug, and therefore connotations of the drug culture are formed almost instantly. In addition, the idea of powerful figureheads attempting to control and manipulate the band is another clever attempt at manipulating the audience. Whereby imagery and ideas of a corrupt society (perhaps showings signs of a favoritism towards socialism or communism) are created.