Letter to Island Records

When finding the information to get in contact with Ben Howard's record label I was pleasantly surprised. I had only started listening to his music recently and I hadn't met anyone who had heard of him, so I didn’t think he would very well known or heard of. So when I found out that his label was Island records I was really surprised that a label supporting artists such as Kelly Rowland, Florence and The Machine and Tom Jones would have such a new, not very known artist. I was pleased because I really enjoy his music and thought Island Records will really expose him and get his music out there.








Since my last post on 11th July, Ben Howard has released his new album 'Every Kingdom' and it reached 7 in the UK charts. He is also touring England in the New Year 2012

Mood board

When initially listening to Ben Howard's 'London' I immediately pictured wintery/autumn weather. The dull dark colours and shots of the surroundings will a couple of my main focus'. Researching similar genres, their music videos also focused on surrounding and weather, steering away from pop disco parties but focusing more on countryside or a gritty city feeling. This is good because at this point I am thinking of using a city location but filming throughout December to create that dull, cool atmosphere.

CAST

We decided on these actors as our main characters because we wanted our target audience to be able to re-late to the characters. We needed characters that the age of the public 16-20 who would be watching it so they would be able to recognise the characters personalities and traits which would therefore keep them interested and entertained.

Animatic

Animatic Print Screened

Unable to upload our animatic as a video we printscreened main parts of our film ‘Guardian’ to show the basic outline. When filming our animatic we did not use the actors which we want to use for our short film and so this will change when we start filming and editing. Also the timing was not perfect and therefore when we do start filming some shots may be longer than shown in our animatic.

In this shot we have dialogue which we will edit in once we have filmed the scene. We added an extra 2 seconds to this shot to add our black shot and our white writing of ‘G U A R D’.  For our actual film we have decided to use our own typewriter sounds which we will record and edit in but for the time being we used a copyright free sound online.

In this scene we want it to merge with the shot two shots before. In the shot before ‘Kerry’ closes her eyes because she is sad and in this shot she waked up. In-between is the name of the film and so the two faces link without a huge interruption.

Filming schedule

Preliminary task

Evaluation on editing skills

We went to the CLC centre to edit our preliminary task. I was really interested to know about what kind of software would be able to merge all of our shots so that our scene made sense. The software that we used was Adobe premiere pro CS4 and I haven’t used this before so learning about how it works was difficult at first but I soon got used to it. Once I got used to the software and was given instruction on how to create my scene I was able to take shots that weren’t to be used and weren’t as good as others I had done.

Once I had chosen what shots I was going to use for my final product I made sure I had the three tasks which were going to give me the full marks, the ‘shot-reverse-shot’, ‘match on action’ and ‘180 degree wall’. Also to make each clip run more smoothly you had to check that each action was followed correctly, for example opening to door on one side and then switching to the person walking towards the camera through the opened door and into the room. ‘Merging’ and ‘cutting’ helped with this a lot.

I feel that my final piece was successful. I have included all that was needed for the preliminary task and edited it well. I will be using this software for my coursework as it was quite simple to use and was effective. And so by using it for this task gave me good practice for when I use it for my coursework.