Lauren MawerTask 1My Music Video Diary

On the first day of filming our music video, we went to Eccles train station and shot some footage for the train scene when the main character leaves her home in a small town to go to a bigger city and achieve her dream of becoming an actress. The screenshot below demonstrates an emotional departure as the girl comes from a ‘rough’ background which consists of many family troubles and difficulties and it means she has to leave her family behind in order to go to a bigger place alone in order to achieve her dream. This piece of footage would be used to help her reflect back into the past and reminisce on the things that have happened. We filmed here as we needed a form of transport and a scene to show that she is travelling from one part of the country to another.

The next time we filmed was on a weekend in our own time so we could get more time to film and get a lot more done and be ahead, so if any extra footage needed to be filmed, we would have more time to do that in. We filmed the scene which shows a silhouette of a fight between the girl’s parents and a pan around the room which you can see the girl on the sofa reading an acceptance letter which she got from an acting academy. That day it was raining but luckily enough we were filming inside for the whole day. We then did

another scene which was of a male and female, known to be the parents of the girl in the video, arguing in the kitchen. It has been edited into black and white to show that the girl is looking back into the past and remembering how bad things got to give her more of a motive to leave it all behind. It took about 3-4 attempts to shoot the silhouette fighting scene in order to make it look more realistic and more ‘heat of the moment’ to give it a more realistic effect. We also had to make sure it all fitted in the frame so we could get a good view on what was going on, as well as adjusting the lighting many times to make the silhouettes more distinct and visible.

On the same day, we went to another venue which was a community hall where we would film two scenes there. The café scene where the girl would be in a bigger town and now had a job to help her survive, and the final scene which would consist of a girl with a script rehearsing a play on stage, which shows she eventually managed to

get to where she wants to be and to prove that the difficulty of leaving her family behind and her bad past would all be worth it in the end. The café scene includes 2 other co-workers and a customer which the main girl is cleaning up after.

Her shift at the café then finishes and she leaves and goes straight to her rehearsal at the acting academy, which is where we cut to the stage scene towards the end of the music video. It shows her rehearsing the end of the play and about to take a bow.

During the half term, the group went and filmed some extra scenes and re-done some shots so we had more footage to put in our music video. We did another scene where the girl walks down the stairs at the train station to show that she is going to move away from her home town. We also got a close up of her walking down the stairs of the train station.

We got footage of the girl running through a shopping precinct in her home town on her way to the train station. We also got a close up of her running through a puddle to get different angles of footage.

We got a blurred close up of another shot of her running through the shopping precinct and one of her running away from the place she lived in. Another shot we got was her sitting down outside an estate playing with a bracelet. This is meant to be a significant object throughout the music video and a link to her flash backs. We also got a closer shot of it.

We got more shots of her running to show her journey from her home to the train station where she will make her way to London. We also managed to get footage of a train pulling away from the station to make it look like she got on it and left. The first time we went to Eccles to film, we did have problems trying to get footage of a train leaving the station as we weren’t there at the times the train was due to leave, however, the second time we went to film in Eccles, it was just a case of being there at the right time, so we managed to get footage of a train which we were really pleased with.

We got some footage in the actual Manchester City centre too. We got some footage of an alleyway, which we wanted to use to give the image that she has had to sleep in the streets for a while as she has had nowhere else to go. To also get this across, we got a shot of her in some public toilets washing her face, which then I made flash into the future to show how far she had got in that she has a job working at a café and is finally earning money and getting by. We got some

close up’s of the main character in the music video and close ups of other objects, such as cigarettes and bottles of alcohol.

We took a day out of college to go and film some more shots in Eccles. These included shots of the motorway from above on a bridge, some more shots of the train station and of the estate she lived on.

One of the team members went to London in the half term, which was a great advantage for us to actually get some footage in London to make it appear as if she was actually there. We got footage of her view in a taxi, some shots of the London underground tube, as well as certain landmarks in London, like the London Eye, Big Ben and Buckingham palace.