A2 Film Production Practice

In preperation for our A2 music video production, we carried out a 'mini-task' that involves the use of skills that are required from us in the up-and-coming task. In small groups of 3-4, we had to film footage of us lip synching to a summer song (as well as any additional footage) and edit it together to resemble the style of a popular music video. Perry, Sophie and myself worked together on this task; we used the song 'Summer Nights' from Greece to lip synch to, this way we could all be involved in the filming as there are both male and female voices in the song. As we believed this task to be primarily focused on lip-synching, we did not spend time thinking of and/or filming interesting shots to accompany the song; therefore, in terms of our camera work in this task only our basic skills are evident. Saying this, the focus on lip synching somewhat paid off as our end result was extremely good. We had managed to successfully lip-synch to the song and edit it to fit like a realistic music video. We achieved this by having the music playing through an MP4 when filming, with someone out of shot holding up the lyrics to the song. This is obviously a successful method, but it comes with its flaws; for example, in all of our shots you can see that we are using the MP4s as the ear pieces are visable in camera shots. In terms of Mise-en-scene, this was just as basic and un-thought-about as the camerawork. We did not really think about where we were (apart from the first shot, where Perry is leaning on a car bonnet) and therefore ended up with several shots that did not fit in with the tone of the song. This was fine for this task, but will not be in our final A2 production. All in all, I am very happy with the outcome of our practice task. There is obviously room for improvement, especially in the sense of mise-en-scene and camerawork, but the main focus was achieved and I believe achieved well.