Stress Levels == HIGH

I am so close to having filming done and dusted I can almost taste the relief. Yes, TASTE!

Spent the last two days chasing people up about locations, booking equipment, writing up call sheets and a schedule for each day, and annoying all available friends to take on crew duties for me (Thanks You Guys)

So I now have full permission for:
The Discovery
The Dudhope Skatepark
and S2K

Still waiting to hear about the city square :S

Jamie the Ex-Bassist from the band has manged to rally round three of the other band members and is chasing up the Ex-lead Singer for me (hopefully we'll get him in time! or Sydneys plans for kidnap will be a little bit redundant)

Also my sneaky-uni-wide email plea dragged me back a couple of interested Skaters for the scene up at the skate park, so I just need to let them know what time I'll be up at the park on Sunday and hopefully they'll meet me there. :)

AND the weather forecast is promising me it'll be sunny spells on both Saturday and Sunday (Death to the BBC if they are wrong!)

So all I need to do now is find a way to shift three ridiculously heavy (well one of them is the other two are manageable but not when combined with the first :S) metal storage boxes full of camera and lighting equipment back to my flat. Hmmm...

Oh and Sydney still needs his hair fixed. YEY

More Location Pictures Woot!

Went up to the Dudhope skate park about 2 hours ago and got some pictures while the weather was good. The pictures came out a bit bright what with the sun and all, but I'm pretty chuffed with them. There was a whole bunch of skateboarders watching me take the pictures so I couldn't be as adventurous as I would have liked. Anyways here they are enjoy.

Walkway leading to the Skatepark.

Tell me that's not pretty!

Cant get over how nice the light was up there earlier.

Sneaky mid trick pic :P


You cant see him to well, but this guy was pretty good.


Epic View huh?

The graffiti up there was pretty bad ass too. ^_^

Another sneaky mid trick pic

I really should have asked these guys if they'd have minded appearing in the music video, but ah well maybe they'll be there again over the weekend and I can bug them then (If my sneaky uni-wide-email-plea doesn't work)

Things are coming together...Slowly.

So far its been a long week, filled with faaaaaar to much project management for my liking.

I'm almost prepared for filming next weekend though...
Just got to sort out the props,
Write up a schedual/call sheet,
Have a meeting with the Band,
Get all the equipment fully booked,
and plan my audio for the introduction skit.

(Man that actually sounds like a lot now I think about it)

All day tomorrow is going to be dedicated to making up my presentation for Profesional practice which has been moved from wednesday next week to monday, grrrr. Still I've just about done all the work for my case studies so I really just need to think about what I want to say and put the slides together.

Anyway the weather is quite nice today so I may head up to Dudhope park and get the location pictures for my fourth location (FINALLY) So hopefully I'll have them up for you guys to see tomorrow.

Phew!

Done tones today!

Had a meeting with Paul at 10am so I was up early and got cracking sending emails to The Discovery Point and S2K about filming dates. I also sent an email to my contact Ed from Whitespace Solutions about the equipment I'll be needing for filming. Sent the script to one of the Band members and a disused band email address (oh well, back to the drawing board) Did a tone of research for my case study on the Arctic Monkeys AND , yes AND got Paul to look over my Rough Contents Page, which I have now revised and looks like this:

Contents
1.....Introduction: An Outline of the shift of new media
2.....Definition of viral marketing
2.1 Tribes, how they form and how to lead them.
2.2 The viral viewing phenomenon
2.3 Successful Internet marketing techniques
3.....Designing Content for mass consumption on the Internet
3.1 Narrative technigues
3.2 Production techniques
3.3 Technical constraints
4......Case Studies
4.1 The Arctics Monkeys
4.2 Smosh
4.3 Julia Nunes
4.4 Practical study of own YouTube user Channel
5.......Conclusion
6.......Bibliography

oh yeah, I've also been reading and taking notes from "The technology of Video and Audio Streaming" its a bit dated (by dated I mean like by two-threes years, damn a lots cropped up over the last couple of years) but it's got some good points in it. :)

And since my last few posts have been pretty text based (and I'm against this :P) I thought I'd let you guys see a video I produced for the Band (ex-Band) I'm working with. Its just footage from a gig they did Novemeber at fatsams Live. Its been up on Youtube since the end of Novemeber and is now on over 1100 views (and Counting)

You can watch the other three videos from the same gig on the Youtube Channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SecondGoLucky

Filming Dates

So the dates for filming have been set for Saturday the 28th of February and Sunday the 1st of March, but I'm still waiting on confirmation from the Band.

Since thats only 2 weeks away I have to insure that I get the following things sorted by the end of next week:

• Book all Equipment
• Re-contact the Discovery staff and Steve from S2K to confirm the dates
• Fill in and send away Risk assessment forms
• Fill in and send away the permissions forms for locations
• Write up a rough schedual for filming and a call sheet
• Contact the Band via email complete with the Call Sheet and Script attatched
• Set up a meeting with the band for the following week to discuss the filming schedual
• Put out an email to all students requesting Skateboarders to preform on camera
• PANICK (no must NOT do that! :P)

The following week will be spent obtaining equipment, checking it all works and all camera batteries are fully charged. Marking A roll and B roll tapes in preperation for filming. Gathering all the nessecary props and getting in touch with Myk about the sound.

In the mean time I may attempt to do an animatic of the video to let me see how the timing will pan out. Also I NEED to fix Sydneys hair for his big role. Man I have my work cut out for me :P

Phew! wish me luck.

Larry Jordan Seminar

Went to the Larry Jordan seminar today on Final Cut Pro editing. It was up at the Dundee College Kingsway Campus, which was fun to get to in the snow.

The seminar was excellent, learnt a lot about data storage for Macs and a great deal of useful tips about workflow in final cut.

Off to try and write a chapter breakdown for my dissertation so I can go over it with Paul tomorrow.

Location Pics

So last week I wandered down to to some of the locations I'll be using for filming to take some pictures and get an idea of lighting and framing and so on. So here are just a few of the nicer pictures for you to have a look at :)

Main entrance to S2K (primary location)

Second entrance to S2K

Entrance Corridor to S2K

More S2K Corridors (loving the freaking bright colours)

More Colourful Corridors

Entrance to a Rehersal room

Rehearsal Room 1

Rehearsal Room 2

Not a location but a Pretty Prop

Exit of S2K

The Discovery

Upper Deck of the Discovery

The City Square Fountians

The Fountains again

So I still need to go and take pictures at my fourth location, so I'll put those pictures up once I've got them.

First Blog Baby.

Right so I thought for my first blog I'd catch everyone up on what I've been doing for my Honours project.


The Project
So way back when (i.e. September) I decided to do a Music video for my Honours project and got started shuffling around on Myspace to find a local Band to work with. After a bit of searching I found a newly established Band called Second Go Lucky http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=376226595 With a fairly Decent Fanbase and a nifty style.

Second Go Lucky @ Fatsams live supporting the view

Having met with the Band I started to have a think about some ideas for the video. Over the summer I'd come up with this little guy in a moment of boredom.

Having become quite attached to the little critter I ended up wanting to bring him into my video somehow. Eventually the idea of reverse ventriliquism came about and "POOF" I had an Idea.


Plot
The basic plot breakdown for the Video is;
Sydney (Our little star from above) plays the role of a demon sock puppet (not to much of a stretch right) kidnaps the lead singer of the band, during a practice session, holds him captive and "controls" him to sing. Meanwhile the rest of the band go through a series of bizzarre events trying to rescue their buddy.

Dissertation
So basically for my dissertation I want to discuss how music videos as a marketing format have changed in the last couple of years since the boom of internet viewing, and how websites like YouTube have given artists/Musicians a new domian to use the music video format in.

I'm still tidying up my Research question but at the moment its looking like this;

“In a society where internet viewing is constantly rising, is there a formula to creating a cult loved YouTube video, and can it be used to successfully promote a Band or Musician?”