Recreating a scene from a music video

By Charlotte, Lizzie and Xanthe

The original music video We decided to recreate a scene from the music video ‘Royals’ by Lorde.

Here are some screenshots of the shots we decided to recreate:

Why we chose this music video

We decided to recreate a scene from this particular music video, because we liked the minimalistic style and simple editing techniques that it used, as it made it seem very professional yet effective.

We thought that the effect of just singing straight to the camera and using lots of still or 2 second shots was extremely effective.

Our storyboard These images show our original storyboard:

This is our original story board, but as we started filming, we decided to not to use the first 8 second tracking shot of the street, because we couldn’t find an appropriate street to create the shot, and we wanted to make it look as professional as possible.

The editing processWe edited the footage in iMovie. It is an amateur editing program, and although it is very easy to use, for our real music video we will use a different editing program as iMovie didn’t allow for more complicated editing techniques that we were using, and simple ones such as a letterbox effect on some of the clips.

Here are some screenshots showing the editing process:

This screenshot shows the early stages of the editing process. We have imported the audio off Youtube and have started to try to match the video footage to the audio. You can also see here that we have made the title shot of the video in iMovie, recreating how it was in the original music video. We have also matched the fonts to be exactly the same, to improve the realism.

In this screenshot, you can see that we are further along in the editing process. The shots are now in time with the audio, and we are just fine-tuning the shots so that the lip-syncing is completely in time.

How we shot the footageAs we were writing the storyboard, we gathered ideas of the sort of location we

would need, we thought about were would be accessible to film (e.g. sockets for lights,). We also new the location would have to be indoors that looks home-like and as we only had school available to us, this proved difficult. The area also would have to include areas to shoot other shots such as the shots of the plant and window. We also knew that we would need windows with curtains, this proved the biggest problem as our school doesn’t’t have many windows with curtains.  

We continued to look around school for a small room, with curtained windows that had furniture in which related to a home setting. After a long search we found the LAMDA room, this was the perfect location.

The equipment we used was a DSLR camera, (EO5 650D), a tripod which we placed on a desk, and one lighting box. We used the lighting box because we thought an important element was the intense brightness and clarity of the video. We continued to show Shannon (our actress) where she would be sitting and lip-syncing; we also told her what expression she should be singing with.

We set the camera up, framed and focused it, but then found we could have the direct light we wanted from the light-box unless it was being blocked slightly by the camera. This took a while to correct as we needed the camera in the perfect position but also did not want any shadowing created by angled light. We continued to film and got most of the needed shots, after this we moved onto getting the other shots including, the cropped in version of the plant and window. However, because we did not have a plant to use, we decided to use a wooden chair, we believe this would work well because it created the home like atmosphere we wanted.

One problem we encountered when moving the camera outwards to get the wide shot of the window and chair, was that there weren’t any available sockets to plug the light box into, this meant pressing the camera up against the light-box which we had pushed as far back as we could. This changed the lighting of the shot completely, so we decided to take the light box off its stand and hold it in position, this gave us a bit more space to put the camera further back. Despite this there was still a slight brightness difference.

We downloaded this footage and uploaded it to IMovie; we then got rough bits of the clips and put them in position. After this we cut them down to more precise lengths. Another problem we encountered was the lip-syncing and timing with the song. We converted the song from a MP4 to an MP3, and had it running along side the footage.

We then looked at our storyboard to check how long the shots were, so we could match it up with our own video to make it as accurate as possible. After seeing how long each of them would be applied the lengths of time, however if we edited one, it would change the duration and timing of the other clips, so we made sure we went back over and checked that the timing was correct. Once we had completed the editing, we uploaded the video to YouTube, so we could then embed it onto our blogs.