Background
For my deconstruction and
reconstruction of a music video I chose to do the first 30 seconds of Miley
Cyrus Party in the USA. "Party in the U.S.A" is a pop song
performed by American recording artist Miley Cyrus. The song was written by Jessie
J, Dr. Luke and Claude Kelly and was produced by Dr. Luke. It was released on
August 11th 2009 by Hollywood Records. The song was originally
written for Jessie J, however it didn’t seem ‘edgy’ enough and so was passed on
to Miley Cyrus as her album Time of our
lives needed more songs. It fitted with the fact Miley had just moved from
her home town Nashville, Tennessee, to California, Hollywood. The music video
for "Party in the U.S.A", directed by Chris Applebaum, pays tribute
to the 1978 film Grease and Cyrus' parents' courting days. It occurs
mainly at a drive-in theater and also won the MuchMusic Video Award for Best
International Artist Video at the 2010 award show.
My Video Evaluation
Before we started any planning or
filming, we allocated the various roles to each person in the group. Lauren –
Producer and Cast, Abbie – Director and Cast, Kiera – Camera and Cast, Becky –
Editing and Cast, Charlotte – Cast. We realised we needed an extra few people
to create the feeling or a large group of people. So we decided to ask around
our friends to see who were available and willing to take part in our video. We
finally managed to recruit 3 extra people to be in our video. Mason – Cast,
Autumn – Cast, Alex – Cast. After allocating roles, we swapped mobile numbers and came up with the idea of producing a timetable to show when everyone was free.
As we all had a study period last on Wednesday afternoon, we decided to use this to our advantage. We all met up in the college atrium and travelled to our location. This idea can also help me in producing my coursework music video. If I produce a timetable of when the cast and myself are free, it’s an easy way to decide when to meet up and what to do and when.
As you can see, the shot is the
same, but the location isn’t. We also tried to get the best likeness to the
boots Miley is wearing in this shot, and the one’s Charlotte are wearing are
the best we could get hold of.
We also had a problem with the
fact there are a lot of cars around in the video. Although we tried to find
somewhere suitable to film, the college are park wasn’t appropriate as there
was a lot of traffic at the times we wanted to film. We actually used the KC
stadium car park, which only had 1 car in it when we went to film, but this
meant it was extremely quiet so we didn’t have to keep moving out of the way of
vehicles. We then decided to add in a few shots from the college car park. This
was because we didn’t have enough time at the KC car park as although it was
sunny, towards the end of filming it started to rain. The next week, Charlotte
and I did some filming in the college car park with our media teacher, John,
using his car to feature in our video. We were slightly worried that the change
in location would easily show in our finished video, however because we were
aware of this, we were able to shoot in a place where it wouldn’t be noticeable
that the location was different.
We did around 5-7 different shots
of the section of the video we were doing to enable us to be able to pick the
best one. This proved to be a really good idea as in most of the clips, at
least one person was looking the wrong way each time! This has helped me
realise that when I’m filming my music video for my coursework, one take is
never enough! Something else that we noticed was that in order for the video to
flow nicely, the people on camera had to start walking before we started
filming. At first, some of the shots we did looked extremely staged as you
could tell that the first step in the shot was from a standstill. This resulted
in us re-shooting a few clips. This is a useful tip to remember for shooting my
music video for my coursework.
Another problem was that we
couldn’t find a car owner that would let us sit on their car bonnet, so we had
to fill the gap in our video with a different shot. However I don’t think it
looks out of place as we tried to keep to the tempo and beat of the video so it
didn’t look odd. We also couldn’t find a car suitable to get out of the boot
of, so again, we filled the gap with a different shot.
Another problem was the weather.
In the video, it’s sunny and bright, however we don’t have much sunny weather
in Hull at this time of year. So the brightness needed to be added in
post-production. I never realised that this editing could be done to the clip
before this task, so it’s proved as a handy tip to remember for when I’m
filming for my coursework. A few of the takes we did were extremely dark, so in
post-production we took out some blue and added a bit of yellow. This made the
clip seem much brighter than originally so it fitted more with the actual
video.
Another feature we had to include
lip syncing in our video. At first we thought it would be impossible to get it
exactly perfect, however I think it worked really well. While we were shooting
each clip, we had the song playing right next to the speaker on the camera,
loud enough so that Charlotte could hear it. This meant that she was miming in
time to the actual song, and when it came to editing, she was exactly in time
with the track. In post-production, we turned the sound off on the clip, just
listening to the track to make sure it looked right before saving it.
Overall, this has been an
extremely useful project to take part in. It has taught me about many different
post-production techniques and also about how to produce various different
camera shots. For example, the crane shot in our video we thought wasn’t
achievable as we couldn’t find a tripod that would hold the camera in that
position. We actually asked John, our media teacher to our advantage here! He
is just over 6” tall, so we asked him to hold the camera up as high as he could
to achieve a crane shot. We realised that when creating a music video, without
the funds that professionals have, you have to be creative and almost cheeky in
some ways. This again, is another useful piece of information to remember when
filming my music video for my coursework.
