Practical Skills Evaluation

 The Final

Practical and Professional skills I've covered but it's time to see how well I covered them.

Looking at camera and lighting I feel that I have covered everything necessary here, I have gone into good detail about the various areas such as what lighting is best for the right situations when filming providing decent advice into what lighting products work best for the right circumstances. When discussing DSLR basics and ISO usage I feel that I covered the right details and gave good advice based off of it, while providing examples of what I talk about to demonstrate points and show what happens when talking about the various settings and other accessories when doing so.

However I do feel that I had some weakness to in the work that I did for this area, for example when discussing standard lighting for photography studios, I only covered the basics of what the area had and only really covered the basic idea behind each lighting type rather than discussing not only that but real world application of these techniques.

In future I need to remember that while analysing and providing examples of what each technique can do is good showing and giving real life applications and effectiveness is also necessary as that's where they'll be used more than how they have been used in the past.

The next area to cover is legal and health. I covered this exceptionally well as I gave some strong real world examples and scenarios as well as relating them to the current project.

In relation to health I covered all applicable situations that could arise from doing certain pieces of work or projects, it covers damages to camera operators, actors and others around the area while the project is underway and how best to cover them from these incidents should they occur. However it's not just damages to people directly but indirectly like having something wet around electrical sockets etc.

When covering the idea of legal I feel like this was my biggest strength. I covered all possible legal conflicts or ideas when making a production from copyright to fair usage and actor regulation. I made sure that every aspect showed what each part does and more importantly how these aspects would impact the production and how I would help move it along from there.

The next time I do a project like this the improvements would be based on the lesser amount of detail that I gave to the health aspect of productions as while the multiple posts gave them good coverage I feel that there was still aspects I could have given more details to or maybe instead of giving a great focus to the real world part of the development I could instead have provided more considerations that might not be known to most but still give importance to the production as a whole.

Lastly would be planning and how effective I was at doing so. In the first project I covered planning to a heavy degree, talking about shot lists and equipment as well as budgeting and other such necessities for a large scale production.

For the promotional video I feel that this was my strongest area as I gave great detail to every important area within it and showed how each of these details impacted my decision. I feel that my strongest piece in this was discussing the budgeting as I provided greater detail from this and demonstrated how these details would impact the choices I make for my project.

The music video was weaker I didn't give as much detailed analysis of the same areas as before and what I did cover was flimsy and didn't capture what I discussed to the same effect as in previous projects. I only gave small pieces of what each was alongside what I was using them for.

For future projects and other such ideas I need to dedicate the same amount of time to the each area in order to make sure that they're all as effective as each other to give me the best result for my project which helps me to ensure that I'm getting a quality product by the end. 

The Legal

 Why No Health?

So now get onto the big and the juicy bit again the Legal problems faced with making a video like this but first lets address something.

There's a limit to the amount of health concerns in this type of production. This is down to two primary reasons the first of which being restrictions, due to the COVID restrictions that have been presented and passed I'm not able to utilize as many resources as I would do normally which brings down the health and safety risks a bit. The second thing is limiting the use of original footage which come with it and doing that means that I limit the amount of people involved in this project which helps in terms of keeping things narrow.

I have spoken about legal and health in a previous post (See Promotional Video Tag) however this is an entirely different circumstance with new rules and methods of achieving the end goal for the entire project as a whole.

Now the big and the bad, the legal that hangs over every project and with something like this there's a few big doozies that need to be covered. In a video project like this there's an obvious thing to cover and that's the legality and licensing behind the music/audio used in this video. Since any and all music is licensed and protected in its own way is fully protected by copyright it means that how I proceed will need to be careful as there is no protections that I have which will make this claimable for profit.

Two stages would need to be completed before I could do this the first giving a portion to the official owners of the song and its rights in this case would be the band 'Tenacious D' and the production company there of as they own all the rights to anything made off of it as royalties.

A Royalty is a small portion of profit to be paid out to any owning company for the song or material used when in being used for monetized purposes, it works in a similar way to when you buy a song off of a platform like Spotify. You can pay a predetermined amount of cash for the track, some of that will end up with the platform company while some will go to whoever gets paid the royalty amount which is ordinarily the band or the record company depending on the owner for the rights.

The second is actually talking about the rights themselves, see when you hear in a private establishment a piece of established music like say 'OOPS! I DID IT AGAIN' by Britney Spears there's a license that the company or organization has submitted in order to be able to play and use that set of music within a commercial setting as its copyrighted and protected against usage through an unlawful or 'unlicensed' manner. This helps to protect the owner of the rights and ensures that they get a return and that their intellectual property is protected proceeding but it also helps to protect the companies using it from any unnecessary legal preceding's.

Obviously there's a work around from this and that's use royalty free music. This is free to use and doesn't require all of this technical jargon, but for argument sake its necessary to mention and learn as it's important especially to this project.

Now as I do not have any of this in anyway as the standard cost for a license like this can be anywhere between £300-£400 and this wouldn't help with a second condition of this project and that's the fact that I plan to post this on big social platform so unless I indicate in someway that I am legally covered I do not get the chance to use this in a financial way and posting it onto sites like YouTube mean that the end product will be placed on an unlisted method until this is sorted and it will also block me from being able to possibly monetize it.

Neither of this is a problem as I have no intention of gaining profit and I will share the link elsewhere meaning that the final product will still have reach and impact it will just be in a more indirect manner than before. 

The Plan

 What do I wanna do?

This is a reiteration of what I wanted to do for my last project (the promotional video) as such I won't go into too much depth with these as I covered them to a greater extent in a set of previous posts but I will still cover all of the necessary bases that are required so you get a good idea of what I'm thinking.

Mood Board

So we'll start with the basics of any good production plan and that's the mood board. Now all of you know what a mood board is from a previous post that I made from the last project that involved it, so I won't cover it to much but in essence it's a stage of the plan where you take inspiration from evidence around you and make sure that everything you have is relevant to the project that you wanna make and develop it to make some sense and have it as almost like a proof of concept.

Having the board is essentially like saying "Hey this technique or idea is interesting, I think it could be applied to X through my video and it'll add the layer I'm looking for." so you draw from it in order to get yours to be as unique as possible from outside sources.

So this would be my board, four videos to demonstrate where I took my ideas from. 3 out of 4 of them feature the main artist stationary in some way and one follows a narrative in some way.

This I thought would be a good way to start having some thoughts about what I wanted to get out of it. Given my small amount of resources I decided that making a video using this trend would be a good idea, with the thought of making sure it had a comedic edge to it as this would suit the type of song well.

Taking the idea of a narrative worked well too, this would enable some good planning and projections to make sure that I more control over what I could produce and more importantly will help me to make sure that and it would be great in helping to create a structure making sure I match videos to the beat of the audio.

 Examining the existing video

As this is essentially a remake of an existing video I need to look at what ideas are present inside it as well as what techniques are used to ensure that I make sure to not step on anyone's toes and avoid some serious bite back. This examination has already been written about in a post previously, titled Music Video analysis 2 where I break the video down and talk about some of the ideas techniques and images that they use.

What's the idea?

So now I have looked at the video and thought about some ideas from other ones too and have decided that making my video will be making it in a more comedic sense of things as this will be a good idea to make sure it gets a more wider appeal. It also follows in with the theme idea of the original video itself as much as it is a serious rock type it lets itself be silly with some cheesy effects and ideas itself so I was going to play off the basic of the comedic element from the footage I have in order to make sure that I get it to look bad but work it so that it becomes almost the point.

So after talking to a few people in the form of surveys and a focus group I got a clearer idea of what direction would be best in order to make this project a success. A suggestion that came out of the focus group was to have the footage to look like an old VHS style using an overlay which was a great idea to play the minimalist and to get the full effect of the minimal that I was looking for.

So using the feedback from those areas I can now develop it a bit more, so using the idea of minimal but adding to it by making it seem like a home movie using static for transition from time to time to make sure to keep up this aesthetic. The main purpose behind me doing this is to have the video match the lyrics in a narration form whilst keeping in with the idea of star iconography and other such things.

The Times

So as I have discussed previously discussed setting up a schedule in order to keep up with times and keeping an orderly production is key. Now in the last project I already discussed what a Gantt Chart is and why they're important so I'll keep the summary quick and light, so this helps to give a quick showing of how long the project will take in a more visual style and helps to show a client or team how long you want to spend on each section of the project.

Here is my schedule blocked out into different sections based on the different stages of the production. I kept it to the same style of my previous project as when I was structuring out the various sections for this one the structure of where time was dedicated felt good and that each section had enough of its own dedicated time which lets me ensure this project gets the full quality that the final product deserves.

Now on the face you might think that the various considerations that I made from the last project (see Promotional Video Tag) would just factor in, while this is true not every part is the same for example the filming section links within the planning more, I have spoken in previous posts about how different a music video is to the standard type of video that everyone is used to as it follows different patterns like iconography or choreography which means that you need to plan around it to have an idea on the basic structure to make sure that all of that is incorporated to the best level possible and to a capacity that means the goals are fulfilled (which more often than not is selling the artist and their brand.)

Remaining Logistics

So with all of these ideas and other plans coming together there's still a lot to talk about so I'm going to quickly go over what's left of the planning stage here before moving. 

In essence there is little to no storyboarding related to this type of project as much as it is a recreation of an original music video it almost becomes a fan-made tribute so there wasn't as much planning behind many of the shots in the production but it also helped to keep in with the idea of this to make it as corny and home-made looking as possible so using  minimalist planning and structure helps to achieve that goal.

Equipment list is small too, I've summarized everything I'll need in the production below:

• Camera-Standard DSLR with a basic rig- Free
• Tripod-Normal and used for stability when filming- Free
• Inflatable Guitar-Prop for great usage in filming to help provide the sense of a guitar as back-up incase main prop gets lost or damaged- Free
• Microphone-To help in an emphasis of singing and mark a shift within the edit- Free
• Book-This will help me to mark beginning and end points on the video but also provide a good point of reference for the calmer bits of the song- Free

Everything here has a reason for its involvement as I have stated above and everything that has been used in this production is free as I have it on hand in one capacity or another.

The Idea Generator

 Coming Up With an Idea

So in a previous post I was talking about planning stages and one of them was the biggun, coming up with an idea. Since I didn't cover this in enough or decent detail in that post here's full stage planning of the video that got turned out at the end of this process.

Looking back at that post in particular there was a few ideas that were brought up. Mainly the initial one which was producing a video to the song 'Shoot To Thrill' by ACDC and this was a good idea as there wasn't technically a current or existing official video for the song to work alongside it meaning that whatever ideas I came up with for this would be their own.

Obviously the first thought is to do something big dumb and crazy as that's what would be good and generally considered the norm for a video like this as it plays well into the idea of the song itself, but that wasn't the angle that I wanted, I wanted something unique and different to work alongside the lyrics and maybe not create a master piece but somethig
n that was fun for the viewer. To that end I ended up participating in a focus group in order to get a wider range of opinions from a bigger body rather thna my own brain.

I collaborated with other craetors who were working in a similar field to me and were bouncing ideas off of one another to get the crowd reactions and get the best possible outcome for our projects, when I presented my mood-board to the group at large and what my thoughts were based off other sources from around the same area as examples and with what I had planned originally for a back-up should the main faulter.

A lot of really great ideas came from this session, my new idea came from a spur of the moment decision made at 3AM where the back-up and primary ideas got scrapped due to a number of reasons. The main main one being a complete lacking of application or resources in order to achieve the best effect possible for the chosen song, the continegncy/back-up plan for the video wasn't particularly great either as it wasn't fully fleshed out and was a mess of ideas that weren't fully coherent.

Upon realising this and other short-comings of the idea due to limited resources and timings I couldn't make it so I made the choice to change track and video idea, but I took some feedback that was brought up from that focus group and from it I got the main idea that I have been working with.

The contingency plan was to make a live action version of the video, so it would still be a remake of sorts but the drive behind was to incorporate some of the original music video as well as remake some more of the other elements in order to achieve a great effect. Using this would also help to achieve my goal of making it appear to be a homemade video in the style of a VHS tape as live-action is typical of this method of video production and as such there comes certain conventions, like there has to be noise on the screen and slightly diluted colours.

I was listening to 'Tribute' by Tenacious D and a load of ideas came through my head and I began to wirte out and think about what I could do with this and I settled on the idea to remake the original video of the song but with a home film appela to it while keeping the idea of the original cheesy humourus visuals to go with the song.

So that's the full length story of how I went from an original plan of using ACDC to off piece cheesy home movie humour within Tenacious D.  

The Plan

 The Video Plan

So I started planning my idea for the video and I wanted to keep it brief for here, so I started with generating a shot list.

My idea is to recreate the original video to Tenacious D Tribute but with a more creative twist. Instead of using live action as the subject for the video I have chosen to use stop-motion figures and models and more visualization of what's going on with the song. The type of live action I would go for is to use stop motion similar to that of Wallace and Gromit (Seen Below) but the change would be if the creator was on acid so as much as the graphics would be crude and rough around the edges there would also be some more manic images or ideas present an idea of how this would look is below the source image. This would help to achieve a point of visualization of the lyrics to an emphatic degree but also would help me to achieve one of my goals of providing a bit of humor with stop-motion animation and these little icon transitions.

Shot 1-Angle up looking at a stage with two models on it one of whom has a small guitar shape the other has a microphone in front of him. First two lines of the song.

Shot 2-Bird’s eye view of the two models moving down the desk pan down to them moving away from the camera. Match to the second and third.

Shot 3-Low-angle shot of a shelf with a new model on it, one with hons and a backlight to it. Illustration of lyrics, match the 4 lines. Transition jump cut pop (so nothing initially then jump to it being there)

Shot 4-Medium shot of model, floating symbols to demonstrate the next set of lyrics following an illustration theme of the lyrics. Ninth line set for this shot.

Shot 5-Close-up shot of two models on the desk. Have actions match the next set of lyrics. Up to line thirteen. Jump cut transition.

Shot 6-Repeat style of angle for Shot 1 for two lines, have camera move back showing more of the stage and an audience. Have a globe spinning behind in accordance of the next two lines.

Shot 7-Extreme close up on the eyes for the next line closely followed by;

Shot 8-Have a mid-shot of two models both with a 1 above, have them meet and become a single one with 2 above before separating out into a bigger and smaller model with 2 and 1 above them before remerging into a singular with 3 above it.

Shot 9-Pan up to the sky shooting star across it for the line after.

Shot 10-Back to the stage with images of a sun and moon both shining behind

Shot 11-Return to the low-angle shot of the shelf of the demon model with the back light with exclamation mark above his head before a tail move out to the right vicious swipe. Halo and a question mark above head

Shot 12-High-angle shot of two models shaking there heads one of them slamming something down. Following the next line have one of the models point to the other.

Shot 13-Close-up low angle of the two models with bright backlight on for the line “Ah, ah, ah, oh, wo, a-yo” with a quick cut to the demon model with a bright light on it making it turn away before going back to the two models on the desk.

Shot 14-For the next few lines of the song have some small strobe like lights going off. Mimicking shot 1.

 

This is what I drafted, here we can see the brief of the idea itself using ambiguous language as I hadn't decided the final method of visualization. However there's a structure outside of the numbering for the shots I have listed on screen now, which is to follow the flow of the lyrics to the song itself and using those to help me come up with ideas for what to have on screen.

The reason behind me using the lyrics to generate ideas is a two fold way to structure the video, it follows the flow of the video which means that synchronizing the visuals to the song is easier in the end and not only that but each shot works in tandem with what's being said to help boost the amplification of the lyrics to audio being played. The second is that the ideas came from the song itself which means that I can follow the rule of illustration that most music videos follow these days, but not just that however but a narrative for the song even though the song itself follows a narrative so it has to follow it in some way.

The next step is to work out the schedule. Now I followed a similar schedule structure to that of the previous project as it was an effective method with the right amount of dedication that can be set to each section and it also allows for suitable time during the production to make contingency plan or a bit of filming for the contingency in order to make sure that wouldn't start on the back-pedal for making the contingency.

The last planning section that I had to make was for the storyboard. Below you can see a sample of what I decided to go with for this production, it doesn't follow the usual format but as this production isn't typical I felt that I should try and capture the idea of what I was going for. Ordinarily on a storyboard you would have the motion that the characters and actors would follow while filming but as my characters are going to be done in stop-motion I felt that instead of showing the path and the motion of the characters I decided to make sure that you can see and tell the general positioning of the models/characters as I feel this provides a more accurate idea for the production more than others.

Research Techniques- The Review

 Evaluation

Let's start with the what I use and how effectively I did it.

When discussing questionnaires I think that the information I provided about what a questionnaire is was good, I covered both sources of information that you can get from using this method. Discussing primary and secondary sources of this was one of my stronger points of this section as it was easy to discuss and explain with justification on the good and bad points about it. 

However I do feel that there are areas where I could improve, such as providing better examples of where each method would be more useful for what type of thing being done but over all I think that Questionnaires were my strongest point.

Onto Focus groups, this one is a bit weaker as I couldn't really find a lot to discuss in essence because they're self explanatory really. We go through life doing focus groups when we work in a team so this becomes something that you know and just gets narrowed to specifics of what the discussion is.

There is room for improvement for example I could have discussed differentiation more when it came to how focus groups impact different decisions of a production, maybe gave some real world examples to back up my points too but overall I think that while a bit more wobbly this section was still okay.

The final section, live research where I carried out my own stuff. 

Starting with questionnaires, now I definitely had a lot to improve here for example instead of asking broad open-ended questions I should have had a more narrowed approach to get better results that could have helped me more in my production. The way a pulled together the data could have been smoother too and instead of loosing results by including a middle option I should have stuck to simple Yes/No formula to achieve the best possible result.

The focus group, this was definitely a luck one. I had no back-up group ready in case this was cancelled or people couldn't make it and with a group as small as it was that would've ended up hurting my production badly, not to mention the fact that I had no back-up questions or development points which would have been extremely beneficial to me and my research.

In summary I felt that I did better with the background of the techniques rather than putting them into practice themselves. 

Focus Groups: What are they?

The Breakdown

So Focus groups, I'm sure that we've all heard of them or maybe have been in one at some point but how effective can they be? All they seem to be is annoying and boring as a way of gathering information but as a way of getting opinions and the chance to talk about the product itself as well as being able to discuss further details about the product itself . It provides the opportunity for companies to get a better idea of how well the public will react to a new product or advert they're going to put out there, and you're able to get some better opinions from the idea than possibly from a questionnaire as you can actually see peoples expressions and body language.

The Good

So we know about what a focus group is so why is this a better preference than a questionnaire and as a good source of information for a project, well for a start as I mentioned earlier they are great for finding out more information as there's only so much a questionnaire can tell you. This comes from the fact that if you work with a focus group you can show a draft or demo of the production and gauge reactions from that but, it also gives the unique opportunity to speak with people to figure out their reasoning for the points given as generally with a questionnaire explanations are generally optional so the chance to get a more detailed response to what has been said is invaluable.

However it's not just the detail above questionnaires that makes this the superior but it also gives you a good point of reference when it comes to the development of the project, by this point it's good to have a demo or draft of what product your producing. Typically this would be when the product was till in its early development phase as it might not be as good within a week of the products end or launch but it's still useful to have as a marker for the making of the product.

  

The Bad

Now onto the bad, the first of whom is inherent bias. Now bias isn't a typical word used for things like research methods or within what's technically the preproduction planning stage but everything has it in one form or another so what about focus groups, how can they be bias? Well there's a few ways that I didn't even know, the first one is obvious when you think about and that's down to the fact of interest in the product itself.

When it comes to the interest of what's being made there's obviously a bit that can play a factor in this that would impact the results from the group as the people speaking have a pre-existing interest in what's being discussed whether it be good or negative there's always the chance that an opinion on the products being looked at making any results gained from it questionable.

Now a last thing to consider is the idea of getting opinions, it's the thought that a small number of opinions from this focus group represent the majority of people when that's not strictly true. In fact having a small sample size could potentially do more damage to the product than good hence why this technique is a follow-up on what has been changed based on what was given from a questionnaire and then convene a smaller group in order to get a final input. So this is an important point to consider that while similar to the topic I mentioned earlier in general but at this level it has a different outcome.

The Secondary

This is where it differs to the questionnaires and other types of research methods too, sure you can find evidence in the form of videos online for a focus group but they won't have the specifics that you're looking for so while you can get some secondary data, it won't give you any particulars that you need.

Instead the best form is to make up your own version of a focus group to get the best data possible, and it's not just at the start of a production either when putting an edit together there's a 'draft' video that can be put together based off of the material gathered earlier and then use that as a baseline for the group.

Reference List

OCR Business Studies for GCSE, 2nd edition (Paraphrase of Information)

Revise Btec National Creative Media Production-Revision Guide

The Pros and Cons of Focus Groups | Bloom Ads

The use of focus group discussion methodology: Insights from two decades of application in conservation - O.Nyumba - 2018 - Methods in Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library paragraph of (179)

Questionnaires-The Breakdown

 The What and how

What is a questionnaire?

Answering this will give a better understanding of what they are and how important they can be when making any type of product. So what are they? Questionnaires work like this, you have a set amount of questions relating to the topic being covered (for example employee health) in order to get an idea of a wider margin of effects that something has had or to gauge opinion on a product or production depending on the situation.

What information can be gained?

There are two different types of data that you can get from this type of survey/questionnaire and when you begin to make or design one you need to think of when thinking up of one. The first one is Quantitative, this type mainly deals with measurements and numbers such as lengths or angles but it can be applied to media as well, we need to know the shot angles and locations not to mention timings too but how does that help us now? Well not only does it help when working out the camera work and setting but it can do a lot of work when it comes to pricing and sourcing, one of the best ways to get the data such as pricing or other data relating to this is through Secondary Research or Second-hand from existing sources such as the internet or newspaper.

Next is Qualitative which is less of a measure on more about what the characteristics then stats like its counter part, what can we get from this? Well if continue with our media example we can find out what people are looking for in a product promotion such as within an advert with it's visuals or persuasiveness, or maybe to get information on the product itself (if that's what your promoting) but they can also help to figure out what you want to make and how effective it will be once production is done.

Different Types

Now as with many other things within the world there are different types of questionnaire however there isn't as many different types as you think there are. The different types include:

Computer: This is where the questionnaire is sent out in an email and the receiver has to respond either through a link or document that attached to said email. As a method of distribution and response this is a good type to use as it gives people more freedom and time to respond. However there could be issues relating to inboxes such as spam folders etc. or the more likely outcome which is that people who get sent them will ignore what's sent through.

Phone: This type of questionnaire is more problematic than others mainly due to the fact that it has fewer methods of response. For example trying to gauge a full group response will be more difficult than a face-to-face or on the web type but the main thing is expense as more often than not companies calling out could be charged large sums if calls are made to multiple people over large extended periods. This is not including reception, possible language barriers and other such things that could have an effect. 

Face-to-face: This is almost self descriptive as it's done during the initial interview stage at the end of the talk, but this has many different forms such as being in someone's home or place of work which can make them feel uncomfortable given the circumstances but it's yet again more expensive for the company as they would have to pay for the copies of the questionnaire and the time spent outside of the office (and possible travel too).

Post: Now we've all had mail ballots and this works on a similar principle and can actually give some good results as people sent can reply to them in their spare time which means that data gathered could be more accurate. However again costs are a considerable thing to consider as it's a lot of pre-paid resources that could end up being put into the bin by the responder.

Strengths and effectiveness:

 So as a technique for collecting data how good is a questionnaire? Well if we look at it from a statistical stand point then we can see that it's certainly very helpful in getting a baseline for what's being tested, if different groups are being evaluated then it can triangulate the areas in which the groups come from or help find the groups that found it more useful than others. They can help with getting a general percentage for certain products/services or to help provide an idea of how it works for them (the consumer) and maybe an idea from a larger audience on what the company/organization can do to help improve it for next time.

These types of research methods used are easy to make and send then simple to fill out for the responder making it a much smoother process than some other methods out there. It helps to give companies a guidance for focus groups to talk about or to get information from even if it's verbal.

Weaknesses and limitations:

As with most things there isn't perfection coming out of this by any means there are a few pitfalls that come with using them. I mentioned previously throughout this response about company costings and this is a big limitation that changes depending on which type is used, if it's a physical copy that can go in the post then you have to think about printing costs and envelopes to send to them that also include a return on them. Linking there's also the possibility of phone costs as most phone numbers will charge whoever rings first which is more often than not the company who made it.

Yet it's not just costs that have an effect on it but the information gained, for example in a survey of 100 people there could be 12% positive response, a 20% negative response and then there could be an undetermined result of 68% which isn't exactly helpful data to use when collaborating all the data together which makes this a big weakness when it comes to getting the data together.

Conclusion:

When using a questionnaire be careful, making sure that all the information that you get is justified in how effective it will be to you and the business/product being made. There are some fairly big negatives against this, such as funding and the amount of data that's collected at the end of this compared to how useful it is compared to other methods. However for a founding baseline in the development stage of the production to help guide your ideas and the flow of how it then develops it becomes a better value of research than others.

Reference Link:

Questionnaires (research-methodology.net)

Understanding Qualitative, Quantitative, Attribute, Discrete, and Continuous Data Types (minitab.com)

OCR Business Studies for GCSE, 2nd edition (paraphrase knowledge given) 

  

Location Recce-Scout before you shoot

 What and where?

When we look at a location there's a lot that goes into the where of a production like legal problems (which we covered in the Legal post) not to mention thinking about the actual possibility of the production being actually viable in that area and whether it's necessary to use somewhere else.

Now depending on what production your doing you'll need to think about the location itself. If you're making a drama then maybe have a setting that can help establish the feel of the scene and better cement what you want the audience to take from the surroundings not just the characters.

For now though lets stick in the context of our production and the promo video. Now for the tone and general feel we aimed to get a strong up beat tone focused around discovery and learning so a hot contender for our location was a public park in a local town.

However this didn't pan out too well as there were a number of concerns and issues that were raised with the area itself such as its location means that its used an awful lot by people as a path in-between places like jobs or the high street etc. which meant that we unfortunately had to scrap that idea upon further inspection.

Luckily however we had a back-up location we could use for the video that we had waiting on incase something like this was going to happen. This is where our contingency plan comes into place, thinking about where things can go wrong allows for better coverage in the case that things do go wrong or what we plan for originally becomes unavailable. In this case we made sure to cover our location to ensure that we can still film but we don't have to lose anything.

The area that we have chosen for filming is known as Burbage Common, it's mainly used by people who go on longer walks and dog-owners but it's a large public space with a lot of areas that we were looking for when planning out our storyboard and reaches most of the marks that we needed. There's an additional benefit to this to in that the type of location it is allows for us to control more, I know that sounds strange but don't forget that earlier I said environment can help to set the theme or feeling of the video/scene therefore making sure that we can get the most control over the scene we can get and having this type of an area used for filming lets us control the message we want the audience to get.

The main reason behind picking this area is to make sure that we have that extra element of control behind what we want our audience to get from the production to make sure that our message is clear from the video about what the app is and what we want the audience to get from it.

Well hopefully this has given you a clearer idea of how location recces are used within a production and how a setting for a video will impact its setting.

Have a great day!

Equipment list- Or a shopping list for digital production

 How is it useful

So when we talk about lists I guess an immediate list that you would think of is a Christmas or shopping one as the defaults and to some extent you'd be thinking along those lines with this one too. Only when it comes to production its less about what you wish you had and more of a list of items that you will use for making the thing.

It's genuinely that simple. Now the use of an equipment list is important as you can keep track of items in a production which is especially important when renting equipment or scheduling for timetabled use of equipment like an boom mike from the office as it allows the production to keep track of what they start with and then what they end with or to ensure that any equipment that's used (like a camera) which takes from the actual production itself can be marked for easy identification of what needs to be taken for the file transfer.

There's also additional legal protection that can be gotten from having this list and from it a fair bit of detail within it, so say for example you rent a camera for your production and when you collect you notice there's some pre-existing damage with it having pictures and the evidence against the equipment itself protects you from having to pay any extra unnecessary cash.

Now below is a screenshot of the equipment list I generated for this production in order to show how this relates to the main topic of discussion:

So here you can see my example of what an equipment list looks like and more importantly what sort of detail is needed for them to be used effectively. Now I have covered the camera portion side of things extensively in the Budgeting post of the costing and why but the others need a bit of explaining so lets go through them in order.

The first is the microphone now as we have these in house we don't really need to cover pricing or things like this but it is liked to the second thing that I have included here and that is Photographs of before and after production. This is more the help of us than say our client. If objects and the like get damaged during the production then we may need to claim back for the damages recieved now of course the client could come back with risk assessment details and other such details which would make our claims all but void. So how can we avoid it? Well we have to head back into the legal barrel once again and cover ourselves.

The best way to make sure that we keep covered not only for ourselves but our actors too we can invest in what's called Public Liability Insurance our research of this came from a website called filmmaking.net where they talk about what types of insurance are the bets for filmmakers and the like and we come under this bracket. In essence what's being said is that Public Liability is the highest recommended and gives the best coverage incase things go wrong during production like damage of property or injury on set during the filming of the production. This is great as we are filming in a public location that could have a lot of hazards (as previously discussed in the Legal post) so making sure that we are covered is great.

Now unfortunately I couldn't find out if this covered rental property or not and this is a big thing as the cameras (and the lights however these are in contingency and backup plan they aren't covered as in-depth) are rental property that we then have to return to the company and we are liable for the welfare and use of equipment given to us therefore we need to consider coverage in the case of damages done to the equipment while filming.

Well hopefully this has given you a good idea and look at how useful an equipment list can be and what it can do to help you and your production not to mention how much easier it will be to keep track of all the items.

Have a great day! 

Client communication

 What you chatting?

So obviously there's a necessity in talking with your client otherwise you won't know anything about what your making or you might not even get anything made! There's a semblance of requirement about it though because it makes sure that you can keep up with what the client wants to get out of your production and how important it is that some elements are used when doing so.

So throughout the posts I have done so far (and possibly some future ones too.) I have brought up the idea of client communication and how I have used it to make sure that they get the most out of their budgets and commission possible so below are a few screenshots of the communication where I talk about a few details on the app itself as well as a screenshot of the moodboard that I used in order to intro the initial concept idea and what was contained within the meeting itself.

   

Initial Pitch meeting (Screenshot and bullet-points)

• Meeting starts
• Discussion about the moodboard and the meanings behind each shot and how they relate to the commission and brief
• Begin explanation of Idea 1
• End explanation of Idea 1
• Begin explanation of Idea 2
• End explanation of Idea 2
• Feedback based on explanations- Too general and up in the air, nothing concrete or solid for proof of concept (for example terminology 'I'm going to do X that leads into Y"), Bit of a mess and haphazard with a lot of noise going on around them. Need to bring it down and get something solid in place for a single concept that reaches mark.
• Discussion afterwards in budgeting (roughly) for both concepts at roughly the same price and how achievable and looking is it for the client
• Quick summary of everything discussed and what they want to see.
• Meeting end.

Hopefully this gives you some context behind the references to the client info that I have mentioned in posts and maybe given a bit of an image as to how important this idea of communication is with the client.

Have a great day!

Legal and health- What're the rules?

 What are we talking about?

So when we say legal maybe your brain automatically goes to lawyers right? Courts about goodness knows what and laws seemingly dropping from the sky but actually when it comes to the laws and conventions of film and video production it's actually pretty simple when you know what you're looking at ad how they're broken down.

So lets start with the most well known. Copyright. Now the way it works within the UK is that there is no official register for the protection of your own copyright and the essential is that if you come-up with an original piece of work like literature or creative works. So in terms of protection for the client we know that we can say he's safely protected against anything that might be ripped off as long as he can provide the evidence the idea is his. This actually comes from the government themselves in their most recent reports on the copyright protection of ideas and distribution within the UK themselves.

Now onto the bigger one, how could we step on it and there's a fair few ways that this can be done but for the sake of argumentum and the fact that a few won't be related to this production we'll stick with the relevant ones. The first is music, now music or backing tracks are what can make a an ad into a great one and can help to set the tone for what you want, when picking a track unless you make sure that you have permission to use protected music in a licensed production as this you need to make sure legal protection on both sides is available. How can you tell whether the track you have chosen is licensed? Well there's a few ways but a general one is to simply search it on the internet if you've found it on the internet or its come from a link so chances are if you want to be safe then the best way to find music without the legal hassle is to place 'Fair use' at the end of your searches as this will help to filter what results you get for the music that you look for.

Now for my production in an effort to keep costs down and work in time constraints with the processing for the licensing the most effective way to make sure that we can get the tracks that we want to ensure that we can get the production off to a good start and since these tracks are edited but in the base form we have a bit more leeway in making the track fit our production better.

So now we've talked audio lets talk visuals, now for my production this isn't a majorly impacting factor to the production we won't cover it as deeply but it essentially follows the same pattern as audio where licensing or permission is needed for the use of restricted and protected images and therefore would take more time for the production but as any images used within this are made by us or given by the client we didn't need to consider the ideas of using protected images in order to add emphasis to our productions outcome.

The final thing to worry about is the idea of talent release. This is a form that is signed by actors or anyone on camera to make sure that they're okay not only with being on camera but also that we as a producer and the client are protected against getting sued for deliberately using someone likeness or voice without permission in a monetized and corporate way helping to protect all parties involved with the production. For context of what this is and how one can look in its basic form I have a premade one attached below.

  So now we have the technical and legal stuff out of the way we can get into the health of it all. Now when I say health I mean the health and safety of the production during the filming within the filming area and other similar areas.

So we are filming within a small park during an off-peak time (during the week roughly at a high point of business/school time) legal issues are at a lesser risk, however as we are filming in a public park there are numerous health and safety areas to cover within this. I'll talk through a few here.

So the first is waste, now you may think that in a public park the rubbish collection services and bins around the area would help but it's still a major concern as there could be broken bottles with glass surrounding the area making potentially dangerous hazards not just to the actors but the film crew as well, there's a lot of travelling with cameras in this production making them more susceptible to injury by the feet. Now for actors the injury to the feet is a similar concern but for those who have extra interaction with the ground could risk more serious injury.

The second is the equipment itself, not only are we renting which makes us responsible for damages to the equipment themselves but also there's the risk of accidental injury to one of the crew or a pedestrian with the motions of the camera itself. From the storyboard and our script we have a lot of dramatic and fast motions which need to be highlighted, without proper indication of the movement and the timing of said moves one of the actors could potentially get injured from a transitioning shot; and its not just them but pedestrians too, as we are using a public space we can't keep pedestrians out of the area permanently for the entire length that we're filming for so there could be some who come past the production area and get caught by an actor mid shot or by a cameraman performing a tracking shot.

Hopefully this has given you a clear idea of what legal and health concerns are present in a production and how they are considered before being tackled through my own productions examples.

Have a great day!  

Storyboarding. The What and Why?

 What is a story board?

A story board is basically a drawing of whatever idea that you have. It's where you can apply your script (which we will discuss in a separate post.) alongside the chance to draw out different camera angles to see how it work in production and then have the option to make changes in order for the scene/shot to look better than how it appears in the first instance.

As you can see from the reference image that I have the storyboard provides a good visualization of the shots that you have in mind and more importantly how these would look which helps to give the client a more rounded view of the production that you'll be completing for them.

However while these are good for visualizing the shots that you want to complete and demonstrating your ideas to the client than just words it's not all they can do. Depending on how detailed you want them to be content can include things like shot length the type that you're looking to do to the mis-en-scene and even what audio that you want in it too. However it's not just about time saving and a visual demonstration of what you want to do but also for highlighting any problems that could come out of it before they happen with the shot types like timing or camera positions which can then be fixed before showing the client or your DP.

Now for my storyboard I tried to make it as detailed as possible so I made sure to include what shot types that I wanted, their length and positions too. Each one has a maximum of 10 seconds with a minimum of four to make sure that each portion gets enough exposure time to ensure that the idea of curiosity comes across in the video and makes the audience want to explore the app on their own to find out more about it and maybe themselves too.

In terms of content I feel that I covered it well with what's on camera and how long it would be, visual edits and camera shot types as well as distancing for the angle. In terms of detail however I feel that I could have included more but but as this is only meant to be the start of the planning stage I feel that the content within it covers it well enough.

Now I could have worked to try and include more detail in the actual lists themselves such as what different types of audio that I would be using in each shot or talking about the physical actions that would be happening within them.

So hopefully this has given you a good idea into what goes behind the development of a storyboard and how effective they can be when used within a production.

Have a great day! 

Scripts, what's the point?

 Writing and checking

So what's a script and more to the point, what's the use of them? I mean all they tell you is the words of the actors in the scene or clip being filmed. WRONG! While it's true that this is a part of it there's more to them than meets the eye, they dictate the chronology of the sequence or film and help to give a guidance to the client and editors of how they want the scene to flow as well as the director for what they want the scene to contain and/or the events, characters and dialogue within it.

So what's the purpose behind having a script? Well you can begin to nail down some more secure ideas for a structure of the video your making whilst working out what edits you think work best alongside the structure that you made for it.

So how can this be useful for the client? I mean surely all that they need to know is the progress. Well that's not exactly true before you make the product for the client you need to show them what the idea is that you have on paper to see if it's something that works with them and meets what they wanted to get out of them and to ensure it meets the target audience. So when making a script you have to make sure it ticks off on the objectives made by the client in order to achieve what they wanted.

In the brief that our client gave us he asked for our ads to be appealing to the wider age scale of 24-60 so when making the script I had to think about how I could making appealing in a general sense rather than having a narrow down in mind. He also asked for a certain demographic to be people who are explorers or mainstreamers or aspirers so in order to make sure that I hit that goal the language I have used is more tailored to promote that idea of curiosity within my audience.

   

So from here it's difficult to see but in essence this is all the content that the video will have in it the structure lets you clearly see where the actors lines are but also where the edits for them are so you know where in the sequence that you need a scene change or where you want an edit to be place to fulfil your mandate in the production of the video and more importantly where it will be most effective.

So a good point about this type of script is that it actually shows the length of the clip without saying it specifically, so for example this script is a page long and this means that from the content of the video will roughly last for a minute long which is good for the type of ad that you do which helps promote the objective given by the client in order to get people curious and thinking about topics covered.

However there's a bad point from this and that's also the run-time as for the money being put into it if the quality of the video isn't great then this will cause a lot of issues for me as a producer of the video but this will be covered in the legal & health post later on.

Well hopefully this has given you a clearer insight into script making and how useful it can be to have it written out to get a general idea of how it will flow but also how long your product will be.

Have a great day!

Budgeting-Prices galore

 The ins and outs

So when budgeting is mentioned I know that a lot of people begin to sweat thinking about the amount of money that goes into things that life revolves around but when it comes to the world of video making and production it does still total a large amount of money but the structure is less intimidating than the source image used here.

So one of the biggest factors that influence the production of a professional film or video is the budget that's made and given. In essence what happens is when you get the base of your idea down and the research behind renting costs for equipment as well as actor costs and additional expenses like travel and food.

Now ordinarily when you receive a commission you might get the budget that they're willing to use that might be willing to be negotiated or that there's a small range available.

When it comes to the commission that I have received I got a rough amount of two budgets for the commission the first was the major budget for the actual production itself which stemmed between £8,000 to £20,000 which allowed for more flexibility when it came to going away and taking the feedback on the idea process itself.

So with this knowledge I went away and began to get more solid ideas on the budget itself, first thing I went away to figure out is how much the standard rate is for actor hire. So for the length of that the production would be one actor for the period of filming as well as the possibility of doing re-shoots and use of the contingency would be £2,251 so in my production I would need three actors meaning that the cost would come to £6,753 which would cover the time it would take to film and any need for contingencies or re-shoots that would take up time and would be blocked in just in case we need to use a back-up actor or a schedule changes.

Now armed with a baseline I could refer back to I could then begin to make arrangements for the cost of an editor against this as the total for the production and post post production of the video. An editors standard rate is around £25.40 an hour as is the suggested hourly rate as of the 1st of March 2021 so using this I managed to work out a total cost for the amount of time that I would need (in and around roughly four days or so) giving me a total of £2,438 for use in the Post production stage. Now this is a small price to pay to ensure that you make sure the client gets what they want.

Now onto the bread and butter of things that make a scene a scene apart from the human elements. The equipment you use for the making of the scene will determine anything from acting quality if your using props how the actors interact with them to the quality of the recording that you get from the materials themselves. In order to make sure that there was no panic when it comes to the use of cameras (excluding microphone attachment as we have supply enough for them) we looked into surpassing our roughly estimated time for recording to make sure that we successfully covered re-shoot and contingency time. From a company called HireCamera we were able to get a good deal of two cameras at an estimated rate of £960 for two cameras across two weeks. Below is a screenshot of said camera and the costings list for it. 

So for a grand total for the production budget is £10,151 which works right into the middle of what the client was hoping for when it came to the total cost of the production itself.

Now when it comes to getting it out we can use apps like Facebook or Instagram and advertise effectively for no cost it's about how the message has gotten out, promotions on Facebook cost roughly £0.79 which if used can be taken out of potential surplus of the production costs but then we come to the nitty gritty of things.

Below I have included a conversation between me and the client about budget for TV advertising:

Now in this we can see that the possibility of TV broadcast advertising on two majors networks has been mentioned NatGeo and Discovery so when exploring this you have to think about not only the costs but the payoff in the reach that it could have.

When researching we discovered that National Geographic has more viewers at 9.5 million people which when wanting to promote for a new product would make the most obvious choice as it gets the message out better and more than likely to get even more views and allow for more advertising on the social media end and vice-versa.

According to the website tvadvertising the rough cost of advertising on a Peak time slot is £10-£34 for a 30 second ad so for use across multiple slots at the top end of price in a minute ad would total ~£500 or around that area. This makes sure that we get the total amount of viewers that we can as we hit peak times and spread as much as we can and get people using Facebook and Instagram to see more of it and promotes one of the goals that the client wanted which is the discovery in its customers.

Well hopefully this gives you an overview of how finance and budgeting can influence a decision and how it impacts the choices made in a production and how much consideration is needed when making them.

Have a great day!

Gantt what's?

 The Charts and what?

Now this name sounds confusing and trust me it gets more bizarre in visuals but we shall persevere and try nonetheless. So when we talk about production schedules we might normally go to things like shot log and things similar to them too, however where this differs is the detail and the actual list itself its more dedicated to time management and dedication.

In terms of what you can relate it too, think of a bar chart that you might use for quantities of things, on the left hand side (or the y-axis) shows what tasks need to be done and along the bottom (x-axis) how long you want to spend on a particular task for that time and can help you plan for overlap in the tasks that you want to complete.

By completing this chart you can get a clearer picture of how long each stage of production will last and how to divide your staff in the most effective way to make sure the production reaches the maximum potential that you see it becoming.

So what did I do for my production? Well in the image below you can see how I structured my Gantt chart.

So how I structured this is different to the industry standard similar to the one above in a few quickly identifiable ways like for example actual structure of the chart itself isn't built how you'd expect without any real way of telling the weeks into production. However we do have good methods of structure such as the separation of the production itself in its three stages (pre, main, and post) a structure that shows what fits into where such as the back-ups incase of emergency and how they would fit into the production process if they're needed. 

It's always a good idea to have a contingency plan drawn up in the case that say your location loses its time slot then you have something that you know that you can go to and use which always helps, making sure that the plan has blocks on the chart to make sure that they have a suitable amount of time dedicated to them to make sure that they have the same effect as the main idea.

Now one thing that could be potentially confusing from the way that I have used the chart is the coloring system as this could be misleading to the outside perspective, so I could have made two separate charts one for the main idea production and the other for the contingency but having the two in different shades on the same doc has a better demonstration for how the contingency would fit into the initial plan for the main video idea.

To make a long story short, when you use a Gantt chart make sure that you have plan and idea of where you want it to go and how you want the plan to work together. The chart itself is more for a visual representation of how you would structure the the production itself across days and how long each section of the production would take across each day.

Hopefully this has shown about how Gantt charts are used in the production process and how one is built.

Have a great day!

Health & Safety

What and why?

So we've talked a lot about different shots within cinematography and phtotography, but in all of these we haven't actually discussed the main thing that's almost always covered first in any project that's undertaken is health and safety concerns.

Below are some shots of a studio being used and we're going to discuss what are some of the health and safety concerns and factors that have to be looked at.

There's one factor that's common with all of these images and that's the exposure. As you can see there's a lot of light and light sources in all of these images which can cause damage to the eyes if there's enough exposure to high intensity light for too long and if your filming an interview or doing a long photoshoot then this becomes something to consider.

Another thing to consider which is more obvious is electrics. Looking at all of these photos you see a lot of appliances that need plugs or cords in order to work.

This leaves a lot of sockets on and exposed to the room which can cause a few problems if there's any drinks in the room. While it may seem obvious that you wouldn't generally have a drink in the studio while it's active temperature does mean that you'd be more inclined to have a drink, and if something goes wrong like the drink gets knocked then items could get damaged or an electrical fire could break out.

So for safety and general practice leave any drinks outside of the room for safety of you as well as others and equipment.

Last which is related to the previous point is the cables in a darkened room (such as the studio however I adjusted the brightness of the images so you can see setting and appliances etc.) the cables are generally exposed and in that kind of lighting when you're moving around behind the scenes could cause some major issues. As you can see by the images in front of the model and behind the camera is quite dark and when your moving around to try and get a better angle of different effect of the subject you can trip and fall injuring yourself and possibly others as the equipment may go with you.

So general advice would be that if you're needing to move then keep an eye on the ground as you do.