In this section I personally critically evaluate my project and the process I took to get to it and say what I believe I have done well and what I could improve on and how I would go about doing this in the future.

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Initial Idea Generation:

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In the initial idea stage of the project I think I worked very well because I was able to come up with three different and in depth ideas, all of which I really liked. I drew up all three ideas on three different mind maps, which explored the ideas I had come up with and made it able for me and others to visually see what I had come up with. I ended up going with my most adventurous and interesting idea in my eyes, a music video about a man with a Horse Head. If I was to do anything differently within this stage of my project, I would have probably made even more mind maps exploring different ideas which involve different styles, types and genres of each of my 3 ideas as I didn’t have a lot of reasoning to pick the idea that I picked other than the fact that it sounded good at the time. I would have also had a look at other media 180 FMPs and taken inspiration from them because my own ideas could sound a bit ambitious or on the flip side a bit bland.

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Research:

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I think the way I approached the research stage of my project was nicely structured, organised and specific to what I was planning on doing in my music video. I started my research by researching different types of music videos so that I could choose which type would be m9ost appropriate for the story I wanted to tell. I chose to make a narrative style of music video as I not only felt that it would be the most cohesive way to tell my story but also because I felt that my past experience of making short films meant that I could take implement a lot of my prior knowledge to this such as use of cinematography to tell a story. I wanted my music video to be timeless and also acknowledge the music videos that came before so I decided to research into the history of music videos, the way in which I went about the research was firstly to research into the actually production of music videos and then I looked into a specific music video from each decade and I then analyse them and write what elements of this era and the specific video I thought could be applicable to my own music video. This really helped me think in more depth about the type of techniques that I wanted to employ in my music video and I loved how structurally I was analysing the music videos, it did feel very efficient and even gave me some inspiration on what else to research to better inform my project. The analysing of these music videos lead me to thinking more in depth about colour theory, one of my favourite uses of colour theory in film is in the 2003 film Thirteen as the colour grading is used artfully to show the exact atmosphere that the protagonist is feeling and it works perfectly to show the deterioration of her mental health and descent into drug addiction. To study this I first researched more in depth into colour theory and how it is used in film. I then used the knowledge that I had learnt from this research to rewatch Thirteen whilst playing much closer attention to the use of colour grading and analysing it.  I found this really helpful as it made me think about the structure of my video and I also felt that this would give my video it’s own edge. 

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As well as just analysing music videos that are already out there, I did some research into other things that I thought I could learn a lot from as I lacked skill in these regions in previous projects. The main two were how to write a script well and the other was camera movements. For writing a script well I focused on how to build  a storyline that will make an audience cry, I looked at a lot of articles but I really liked the article by the independent film school which discussed the “mom is finally here” moment, this got me thinking about the emotional peak of my story, i decided a fitting emotional peak for a story about lonliness would be the protagonist finding out he was never really alone, I used the horse mask as a symbol to demonstrate this as the horse headed protaginist meets another man who also has a horse head. It also said in this article to not make your storyline too sad as it needs to build slowly, I decided to therefore use the idea of a week progressing and getting slowly worse and I decided to use a calendar to show this progression. Although I was originally looking more into how to right a script I found the storyline information more useful than actual script writing advice as it helped me build a coherent story with purpose. For the camera movements research I watched 2 youtube videos recommended to me by my teacher and then thought about which would be best for my own music video and I practised these techniques with my sister in a horse mask. I did not end up using every technique that I practised in my finished music videos however the ones that I did I was very happy to have in my itinerary and the ones that I didn’t use I only didn't use because it didn’t seem appropriate for the scenes I was filming.

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Whilst I was researching I was also actively trying to link my research as closely to my own project as I could, a good example of this is when I did a fair amount of research into audience theory as making sure my music video would make an impression on my audience was very important as my music video aimed to make an active change on society so I did a lot of additional research into audience theories, looking at gratification theory, the hypodermic model and negotiated audiences. I applied this research to my own music video’s desired audience and looked at the five different audience needs and five different core elements of the gratification theory. I then applied these elements and needs to my own music video to see the ideal way to peak audience interest. I felt this was very helpful as it gave me great confidence in my ability to appeal to my audience.

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For my active research the main skill I focused on was learning how to animate. The song begins with an introductory build up before the singing starts so I wanted something that would separate this from the rest of the video. I've also always been interested in animating but never really taken the time to explore this fully so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I began the animation process by testing out my skills as I didn’t want to set myself an impossible task that would waste my time. I used youtube tutorials to animated a short gif on krita of a simply drawn cartoon man. I really enjoyed this process and although this took me a few attempts at first to make the animation coherent and learn how to use the program after I completed this I felt confident I could animate a full length introduction. I began the process of animating the introduction by mind mapping some ideas around the topic of loneliness to make sure my animation was related to the topic. I used a lot of symbolism in the animation as the use of symbolism and visual metaphors was something I really liked in my research of music videos over time. After I had my basic ideas down I then made a rough storyboard and began animating.

 

After I finished the intro I decided that I also wanted to use the same skills to animate an outro which could link real life statistics to the film. I began this process by finding 3 statistics I felt were relevant to my film and that would shock the audience. It was important for me when finding the statistics to make sure they were from trustworthy sources so I used an article on trustworthy sources and ranked various websites with statistics and I only used the most trustworthy for my final 3 statistics. After I found the statistics I then made a storyboard that linked the statistics and I followed this to make the outro animation. If I was to repeat this process again I think that I would have made a shorter or more simplistic animation as the sequence with lots of different heads that I used to animate the final sequence ended up taking multiple weeks to finish and took up a lot of the time where I could have been doing production and pre production and I think that was part of the reason I was hindered in these areas, however I was very happy with the end result despite this. 

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I also looked at the Kuleshov effect in an attempt to really have the most emotional impact in my audience researching this I think I did learn enough to give me a good idea on what is best to do for me and my music video but I do reckon I could of put more effort in this section of research and researched more relevant techniques, and if I did I think it could of really made my music video stand out that little more than the rest. 

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One of my biggest inspirations going into this project was Jonas Akerland, I have always really enjoyed his style of music videos and I feel like there’s something about them that stops you from taking your eyes away from the screen so as part of the research process I did some deeper research into Akerland, his style and studied in depth my favourite video of his, Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s Telephone. I looked at the techniques he uses in his videos and looked at how I could apply them to my own video whilst keeping with the more melancholic atmosphere of my video. Adapting his expressive visual language and use of visual metaphors to make my music video stand out.

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All I have talked about so far is all the secondary research I did but I have also done some of my own primary research, which was a questionnaire done on google forms. I conducted the questionnaire to make sure I was targeting my music video at the right audience and also to see what symbolises loneliness to the general public so that my music video would be relatable because relatability was really important to me for this. I really was happy with my questionnaire because all the questions seemed relevant and as well as assuring me about the best audience to target for this film it really did help me decide on what I plan on doing in regards to my film, for example I asked ‘what activity makes you feel the loneliest?’ and I tried to weave in as many of the activities that were listed into my film, prioritising the activities that multiple people said such as eating alone. Whilst I managed to get a good variety of respondents by making 3 different surveys, one for under 20s, one for people age 20-39 and then one for people aged 40-59, I wanted to do one for people aged 60-79 but I don’t know many people over 60 and the ones I do know have no interest in music videos so I felt it was a bit pointless. I was happy that I managed to get such a good variety as it meant I could compare the different answers between the different age groups. However, although I was happy with the variety in age, their still wasn’t a big variety between respondents as the majority of the respondents live in cambridge so it would be harder to apply these results to a larger area and the biggest let down about my questionnaire has to have been the amount of different respondents I got. I was aiming to get around 70 respondents but in the end the final total number of people sat at around thirty despite sharing the survey on social media. However I think I was still happy with my survey as due to Cambridge's multicultural culture many of the respondents had not grown up in Cambridge and so the difference in socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds made up for the lack of people I think. 

 

Overall, I think I did great in researching for my project in many ways but there were still those few things I do feel like I lacked in. I do feel like I should have done more research using different sources like books and magazines as a lot of it did feel like I was doing the same thing and using the same resources. I also think I may have taken up a little too much time doing this stage because for the rest of the project it did feel like I ended up being a little behind.

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Pre-Production:

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I started the pre-production stage by writing the script, I think I did commit just about the right amount of time to this part of the production because I believe it to be one of the most important parts of the project as it is what your project is going to end up being. The script took me a little while as I really struggled with the last script work unit and I wanted to make sure that this script was up to scratch. I also that my English was good enough throughout the script and as this is the first time for myself writing a full script for a music video and I wanted to make sure it was all ordered correctly and made sense. I may have taken too long on the script but I think I was just making sure the quality of the script was there.

 

Another part of pre-production I did to a high standard in my eyes was the location documents, I think this because I dedicated a day to going around to all the potential locations I would use in my project, taking photos of them and seeing the pros and cons from that location. This didn't take up too much of my time and I am happy with how efficiently this was done however I think there could have been some improvement on how detailed my location recce was as I struggled to enunciate what made the location stand out in my eyes and I think an outsider reading the documents could be confused about why I chose these locations specifically but hopefully my vision in demonstrated in the end music video. I was really happy with the storyboard however a lot of the scenes which I put on my storyboard didn’t get used in the final music video as I had to prioritise the shots fitting with the tempo of the song, this was not a major issue at all but I think that I could have prevented this by spending more time listening to the music whilst making my storyboard and seeing how the shots would actual play out to the song instead of basing my choices of just what I thought would look good as this evidently wasn’t the most efficient method, I would say the same about the shot list as I was making these at the same time and basing them off eachother so both had to have shots removed. The other parts of pre-production, like the prop list and key character list were easily completed with hardly any to no struggle at all, which I am really glad about as it gave me more time to work with for other parts of the project.

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Production:

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The production stage was spread over a long time with me filming different parts of my music video in a time span spanning from easter break to the third week back after as I had to keep reshooting lots of shots and also because I began the recording prematurely without a clear idea of what I wanted as I was still completing a lot of the pre production planning and I think I was overconfident about how much of an idea I had about what I wanted to film. I didn’t like this fact because it made it harder for me to complete my music video as I was worrying about filming and also editing my project together. In addition to this because I spent a really long time on pre production work I didn’t have a clear image of what I would think the music video would look like. It also left me with less time to the end so I had to really rush together the editing.

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Filming started with me and the main actor filming some simple scenes in his house which he offered up at the beginning of the process, these scenes went really well however the overall process was also hindered massively by the issue of using a drone. At the begging of my process I made it one of my goals to use a drone to film however this was unable to be completed unfortunately as there was a manufacturing issue with the drone I bought and although I did lots of research and purchased multiple SD cards by the time I accepted defeat I did not have the time or money to purchase a new drone to film more with. I solved this issues by filming the shots I wanted to use a drone for either with different compositions or by using an extendable tripod, the choice between the two depended on the practicality as for scenes where I wanted the camera to follow the protagonist I did not want to attempt to move a camera attached to an extendable tripod above my actor.

 

The scene that I would say I struggled the most with was the final scene where my protagonist contemplates suicide until he sees another character who also has a horse head. The moment was very important to my film as it was the ‘mom is here moment’ that I had spent so much time researching. The main issues that I had with this scene lied in costuming and location. For costuming I needed 2 horse masks, the issue here was that the original horse mask I have had for years and so an exact replica was not easy to find, I ended up purchasing a different horse mask off the internet, I was aware before filming that these two masks did not look exactly the same however I did not think this would be something massively noticeable in the film however when I looked at the footage after shooting I realised that this mask was intended for comedy and had turned my emotional scene into something laughable. This has taught me to thoroughly check the footage and put more time into perfecting the clips and not settle for a subpar version. To solve this problem I looked into cloning on premiere pro so that I could use the same actor and the same horse mask to play both characters, with the coat changing to differentiate between the two. We also decided to change the location for this reshoot because of the issue with foot traffic on the bridge as it is a small pavement with a large road next to it so when we were filming there we were massively in the way of the public and some of my shots were obstructed by people and vehicles. The car park was entirely empty when we filmed there so I think this was overall a positive change.

 

There was also a problem with lighting in the eating alone whilst watching tv shoot which resulted in a reshoot as I had relied on natural sunlight indoors and the brightness threw off the exposure off the footage completely however in the second reshoot I had a whole rethink of the set and even experimented with ring lights and different coloured LED lighting so I was once again very happy that I was forced to reshoot even if it did take up a lot of production time. This process definitely taught me to factor in time for errors in production and to shoot as much footage as possible as so much ended up unused so I wish that I’d left myself more time so I could spend a lot more time filming and experimenting with different camera techniques and lighting. I also learned to make sure what I am filming is to a standard I am satisfied with thoroughly before I leave the set instead of checking at home because this could have saved me a lot more time.

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Post-Production:

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I’m happy with how I did the editing of some of the footage, but I do think it could have been done better with more time. I did not have many setbacks in the post-production stage, except the time constraints as I barely left myself any time to get the final product together. I had already been putting the footage I had gathered into premiere pro and removing the clips I did not need during the filming process which I was very grateful for when I was doing the last of the editing. I also had already been doing some of the more complex editing for specific scenes, for example after I finished my animation I used a youtube tutorial to work out how to take the name of my music video from my animation and overlay it over the opening shot so I already had a rough beginning and also after I filmed the last scene I used a youtube tutorial to work out how to clone my main character so I already had a rough ending. However a lot of the stuff in the middle was still very unedited. I began the editing process properly by screen recording the music that I wanted to use for my music  video on my phone and I uploaded it onto my google drive and then I downloaded this and separated the audio and placed it above the clips I already had and I then edited all the clips down to about the correct size they’d need to be, moving on chronologically. This then made it possible for me to see what other clips I may need to fill the gaps left in the editing and it also enabled me to see what were the next steps for editing it all together.  Again, I am happy with how structurally I had been working as it made it a lot easier for me to know what to do next. I then moved onto adding, I did things like adding a warp stabiliser to some of the clips to make the video seem less shaky and I worked out how to use the colour grading so I could grade the film how I had planned in the research section.

 

One of the scenes I really liked my use of colour grading in was the scene where my protagonist is receiving messages from his friends saying that they don't want to come out and for each message i slightly increased the blue hue to show how he is getting sadder with each message. I also liked my use of the pink hues to show how he views others with 'rose coloured glasses', as as well as delivering my message I think it looked really nice visually in contrast with the blue atmosphere. Something I wish that I had had time to do was spend longer on the last scene to make it more seamless as when it fades into the animation you can see where the mask is but due to time constraints I couldn't work out how to change this in time to hand it in as I was running behind schedule and worried about not finishing the project on time for the deadline. I really think the main thing I should focus on is the speed at which I work to ensure everything is completed on time. I liked how I went about post-production but I think there was just so much to edit that I got a little overwhelmed that I couldn’t see the entire bigger picture from the beginning, which I think would have helped a lot. I feel like there was less of an issue with not having enough time but not utilising the time correctly and planning ahead properly but I feel like this is something that I can learn from this experience so next year I will be more aware of the level of planning that needs to go into every filming day for example. 

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External Evaluation – google form:

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I showed my music video to a few people and asked them to evaluate it and explain what positive and critical feedback they may have in a google form which I sent them. This is so I can improve on my music video making skills and get a wider view of what people think.

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Positive Feedback:

• Love the colour grading especially in McDonalds it looked really good the people eating together were aglow and the horse was sad and blue

• The transition where he looks one way then looks the other way and the background scenery changes was so good and it made you feel for the horse.

• I  liked the variety in sets used and the lighting in the microwave dinner scene

• It made me tear up a bit

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Critical Feedback:

• The scene at the end on top of the building the two horses clothes are too similar it looks like a mirror image

• The scene at the end could have been more seamless

• More crazy cuts like to the calendar but I think not too many more maybe just in the beginning to get the ball rolling then later it’s like a call back

• More animations