'Aggyness' Technique

A term we are constantly using for Emma to portray whilst we are filming is 'aggyness'.  As it is quite a slang term of today's youth and you may not know what this means, it is how we feel she should embrace the anger and hatred for the 'bitch' character (played by Amy).

As the song goes a long Emma's character is getting more and more angry about the fact that she has lost the boy of the video.  To show this we use alcohol constantly which is also creating a depressing feeling with her character.  When filming we often feel as though Emma might not like us this isn't me talking badly of her but in fact positively, and we might feel like it because of how well she is portraying the character which she has to play.  When she is infront of the camera she is very focussed and knows what is wanted for her from what we have planned as a group.  When we ask her to give an 'aggy' look she knows exactly what we mean, and the looks are often to help us fill some of the instrumental parts of the song which we need to fill but, it is also helping to show how the character is moving emotionally throughout the music video.

Filming Session: Field Scenes

In 'Better Than Revenge' we have a part of the song where Emma as the lead character is going to be in a field reading through a diary as if she is telling a story.  This is because of the line "The story starts when it was hot and it was summer and".

During the day we had already been filming for our live performance part of the music video.  We were originally going to be doing a lot more of the field part during the day, however we didn't feel that it was appropriate to be filming it in as it needs to look like summer.  After we had finished school though we realised that the weather had picked up and the weather would now portray the appropriate atmosphere for which we needed in our video.

As me and Emma live near each other and a big field and we still had the camera on us, we thought we should take advantage of the weather for as long as we had it.  The scene which we were creating needed to look summery, and so had to have the right lighting etc to fit perfectly with how we had planned it all.

Emma got into costume which was how we had planned as a group, this consisted of a white dress and leggings.  The white dress was to symbolise how she was the 'good' and 'pure' character and the victim of the music video apposed to the comparison of the 'bitch' character of whom I play. In music videos hair styles are always changing, to show different parts of the story of the video so it was appropriate that we kept up with that so for Emma to make her hair look different she decided on doing a different style,  this was because for quite a lot of the video it is the same, down and curly.

For props we took a long a diary, as it would be what she is reading from as well as a country straw hat.

During the filming we didn't encounter any problems, except the occasional person walking behind the shot.  Although that would have added a sense realism, it wasn't going to make it look like a professional musical video to the standard of which we want to obtain.  Therefore every now and then there was a lot of waiting around for people to move but all in all the footage which we got was what we wanted.

For the filming of this part, as well as quite a lot of the other filming I was responsible for.

On top of what we had wanted to get and planned on getting, we realised that there is a lot of instrumental parts within the song and so to help fill those up we just filmed random parts of the field and walking round.  A term we are constantly using for Emma to do is 'aggyness' and although you might not know what this means, it is how we feel she should portray her anger and hatred for the 'bitch' character.  So we tried to show this in the fields but improv of angry jumping, and looks and just spinning with the camera in the field.

Production Name

We three have decided to produce our music video under the production name of A.S.E  productions. We decided this because it short and rememberable and represents the initials of our names. It should be pronounced in the same way as 'ace'.

Lip Syncing

For our lip syncing task we decided that we wanted something light, not very serious and with a change of tempo so that we could experiment properly. Amy originally wanted to do Dinosaur - Ke$ha we looked into that. It was fun, but after the second verse we'd all become sick of it and no longer wanted to work on it. After individually Youtubing songs Amy came across the track - Mono Mono from Madagascar 2. We chose this for several reasons, it had a good up-beat tempo but not to fast so we are able to mime the words easily. Another reason is that its repetitive therefore making it simple for us to remember the words. The song also has a certain comedy to it which also allows us to have fun and allows us to be creative in preparation for our main piece. 

Group Meeting

We first got together to come up with ideas for our music video on Thursday 21st Oct.  We discussed our intentions to reach mutual decisions about what direction we intend to aim for. We decided that:

• We don't want a slow song - we want to be able to use fast cuts so we need an upbeat track
• We don't want anything too serious; facing real issues for example - we want to have fun with this project
• None of us were biased to any particular genre, so we agreed to go away over half term and each come back with a few song ideas that match our previous decisions (fast, fun)