Creativity

Creativity is is the thoughts or outcome of an origional idea that has value.Have the ability to say what you think and take risks without the fear of being wrong. Ken Robinson believes that creativity is being squeezed out of us during our time in education. He states when we are younger we are more likely to take a risk in life
eithought fear of being incorrect. "If kids dont know they will have a go, they are not frightrned of being wrong" Tought to comform in a way that means if they believe they know the answer to a question raise their hsnd and answer. However such a young person in vunerable in situations like this and if the answer is incorrect and as a result will not contribute in future and begin to stop thinking creativily in fear of being 'wrong'.
        To be able to be more createful, we need to loose this fear of being incorrect. Risks must be taken and we must act upon our thoughts spontaineously. Only when we prepare to be wrong will we come out with something right, a new origional idea. It is said there are three ways to improve and maintain creative thoughts. These being sleep, exercise and continuing eduction. Sleep is needed as allows you to access, maintain and retrieve more information from your head when your are not tired. This helps as the more information you have access to the more likely you are to mix multiple thoughts together to find something new. Exercise helps as it is said for up to around an hour after exercise things are released into the body, and the things released actually allow you to think more creativily. Continuing education is needed because in further education you learn new skills, use different equiptment and experiment with different sources of information. This helps as you could mix multiple thoughts together, this could be a simple thought or action learnt in primary school education with something learnt in higher education e.g make potato shapes, paint them but make a story with the prints and upload them to premier and turn it into a short movie clip rather than just a picture.
         We are not creative by choice. It is believe it is something you are born with. Just as others have the ability to be academically smart or a natural ability to be good at sport. However this is not to say the most creative people were always that way. This skill to be creative could be chanelled through the options made in education, or the hobbies you choose to pick up. You can practice the skill to be creative and actually improve on it.
         In the AS and A2 course of media it would be a challenge to study these subjects without being createful. It has a huge influence on the work e.g the music videos, without creativity they would be very basic, have the most simple shots, wouldnt be enjoyable to watch and would actually be very boring. This is why the creativity task was set. To make us think about what we are doing a bit more, try and unlock the talent. We want to harnice this skill and use it to its full effect to come up with an exciting, enjoyable and original video.

Creativity Skills Learning

Over the creativity week as a class we were asked to use methods like drawing and making things out of play-doh to show synasthesia to sevel music tracks. It was not necassarily to match i,ages to the lyrics but to match to the music itself and the sounds of the instruments to give them a whole new meaning. The point of the task was to create some new ideas, something different. not the same generic music video to match the majority in the same genr of music playing.

     Individually in our groups a task was set, for us to come up with some 'Creative' ideas maybe to be used for our own music video. Me and my partner had decided to experiment with stop motion. We took approximately 60 shots of the construction of a pencil house, then a short story of two lovers which where also made using pencil. Once each individual shot had been taken we uploaded them to the computer. As the task was to be creative we chose instead of putting the shots into premier and putting them together electronically to make a short video we would place all the shots into photoshop, make each shot the same size with a small black frame, print them off, cut them out and then staple together in order to make a flick book.

 

 

   

         

I found this exercise very worth while as it allowed me to think more open minded about the origionality of the video im going to mske. I also found that creativity is something that can just happen in an instant. I believe iif you try to hard too think of something new and different it will be almost impossible, however if you actually turn of from the thought process it will just come to you and it is best to bullet point options/idea or jot them as notes, in a pad, or phone. Write the ideas whilst there still fresh as they dont stay in your mind for long.

Music video analysis sheet. Ed sheeran A-team

 

There are various shot types used the video from Ed Sheeran's single A-team. Each used to create this feeling of this girl who is cast away from reality, isolated from all around her.

 This shots above are the second shot in the sequence but also the second from last. It is a high angled close up. It actually is a shot of the lead character in this video. It shows a sad emotion, it is a pull focus shot too. The pull focus is used to connote that the emotion is actually no longer significant as she has passed away.

 This shot above left is the establishing shot. From this shot the type of music video it is going to be has been set. We see this is going to be a dark and sad video this is also connoted by the dim lighting and colour design of the black and white.  It is also a close up reaction shot to the above right shot. It shows her crying. It is portraying emotion towards this person who is lay dead.

This mid shot shows a few of the mise-en-scene characteristics. We see the location which is a empty park, there is a bench and some bare tree's in the back ground. The props used would be the blanket she is holding around her and the costume used are some ragged clothes which are too big for her. This is all done to emphasise the fact she lives a fairly tramp type life and doesn't have a lot of money. This is very similar to other videos in this genre or music. Not necessarily that women are tramps but that they aren't sexualised and have more to them however the end of this video does share some of those aspects.
                                    
Throughout the video pull focus shots are used quite frequently and the three to the right are just a few examples of this. The shots are used to show she is separated from the rest of the world. Connoting that her
as a person is non significant. She is unimportant to anyone, that she is just a blurred figure in the eyes of everyone else and hardly noticeable.

                                                   The top left long shot is also a slight high angled shot. It shows the women sat outside a shop with her blanket over herself selling 'the big issue' a very stereotypical view of a tramp. The proximities of this shot every are seen in the background and very distant from her, like they don't want to go near her. Its like she is dirty, she is an infection and people want to avoid her. However this changes in the top right mid shot. You see a person actually approaching her and talking to her and buying a copy of the magazine. This shot is also a low angles shot, the person who approaches her is the singer of the song 'ed sheeran' and this is his only appearance in the video. The camera is position. Shot taken in low angle to show he is more important than all other characters except the women.  However this show his being helpful, he is the good Samaritan connoting he is above the rest of society.

This next shot is a close up. We see the women's emotion, her pain and vulnerability. She is crying, tears and make up running down her face perhaps her tears are a comparison to her life, running away from her.

Post Production: Digital Technology

After filming we were left with the task of transfering the clips from the cameras' SD memory card to the computor and editing each individual shot to make the video. Although this probably should have been one of the easiest parts of the whole projects we made a slight mistake and actually ended up loosing some of clips from the first day which we immediately had to re-shoot. Also we had found the shots had saved as a file type different to what we where expecting, however this was no major problem and was easily changed.
 I didnt find any initial problems when it come to the actual editing as this was all done on 'Premier Pro' a programme I was already familiar with as I had used it for work in my AS Media studies course. However this was different to the previous video I had made as the last one was the titles for a title scene to a film and did not need to necassarily be in time with the music. However this being a music video all of the shots taken of an actor/actress where they were singing had to be in sing with the mouth movements. Although I had previously done a lip sync task in preporation to this it was made harder as the previous shot was one long shot and this was lots of different shots that all had to link.

In the editing I found tools such as the speed/duration button a big help as it ment I could speed certain shots up and slow others down to make the lip sync match up. Also it helped as in the real video there is a point where a pencil is dropped from the table to the floor and obviously as you cant film in slow motion without this tool i wouldnt be able to do the shot and make it so realistic to the real video. The zoom option on the bottom bar as it meant I was able to break down the shots, analysise them,cut it down and edit them in more detail. This helped as regularly I had found myself just milliseconds off a perfect shot but without it would not be able to make the change needed.

Production

Involved in the filming of the video there was approximately 10 of us. This meant there was alot of thoughts and opinions on what would give the best outcome. Although this is different to how our final A2 video will be recorded, as there will only be two to a group. It was good practice to listen and take in the different views of a lot of other people who you probably would not interact with and manage to work together as a team.
The shooting of our video went very smoothly taking around a lesson and half (2hours) to do all the filming. I believe it ran so well as the shotlist helped the people in control of the camera to get each shot filmed as quickly and time efficiently as possible and the storyboard helped the actors/actresses know exactly what they where ment to be doing meaning there was no delay to the filming.
As there was a large number of actors/actresses in the real video and we had not planned to get any outside people in the plays the minor roles we made a deal that when there was a shot featuring a large group of people in at one time we would be in their video at that shot aslong as they where in ours. This can be seen in the final shot with the people in the background who jump. This just means in the future when we do our video we must make sure we remember to cast everyone in advance.
No major problems occured during the filming. A couple of group members had been away the lesson prior to filming and where not informed to bring uniform however that was easily sorted on the day as they where just used in the background of shots and luckily where not ever cast as the main characters anyway. However when such a task is undertook in the future we must make sure everyone is aware of the dates of filming and everyone brings approriate clothing.

Pre Production: Digital technology

During the pre production of the video I found I didn't really gain any more skills or progress the knowledge already obtained further. I was already familiar in all of the the digital aspects of the process to at least a basic level of skill such as print screening to create a storyboard in photoshop

Research and Planning

Initially when we got put into groups we made the decision to stop working as one and give each individual a specific task. The jobs being Creating a shotlist or storyboard, casting for the video and doing a health and safety assessment. I helped with the storyboard.

 
The two images above show screen grabs of the storyboards. We had a total of 6 pages of the storyboarding showing just shy of 30 shots. For 45 seconds worth of filming. It helped alot though as when it come to filming we new exactly how many shots and exactly what shots types were needed.

We had a shot list was created. This was done to decide when each shot would be filmed in which order. When making a decision on this we took into concideration that some shots where very similar and some different shots had the same actors/actresses in etc. This was planned in such a way to make it as least time consuming as possible. As each shot was filmed we ticked it off so that there was no confussion as to which shots we had filmed and which we had not.

When planning on doing a task such as filming, a risk assessment has to be to make sure there is no harm to any of the cast or crew members. It must list potential dangers and what we are going to do to stop these.

During A2 media studies and when we shoot our own clip in the future we are going to make sure we have a shotlist, storyboard, prop list, cast list, location list and a health and safety risk assessment

Introduction

Recently we had been filming and editing the video for Busteds 'I'ts what I go to school for'. The task set was to recreate the original video using the same shot types. The task was set as a warm up for when we make our own video it was to show us how much planning, filming and editing is needed for a music video.