Preliminary Evaluation- Pre Production

The music video I chose to re create with a group of seven including myself was Four Five Seconds by Rhianna, Kanye West and Paul McCartney. We split into three groups creating a story board for a different section of the music video. Alongside two others, we constructed the storyboard from 02:00 to 03:11 having one individual draw the images and myself and the other group member working out the timings and camera angles. The benefit of creating a storyboard is that we can use later on in the production of our music video accurately filming for the correct amount of time whilst positioning the camera so the frames look similar to the original video. As we all completed a part of the video, it meant we could chose which part of the video we wanted to re create and we eventually settled on the first minute.


For the roles of the music video, we chose to star one of our group members Tegan as Rhianna and selected two drama students having a student named Joel as Kanye and a student named Will as Paul McCarthy. It was beneficial having confident students as our music video roles as it meant they were comfortable in front of the camera which meant we could adapt our characters as closely to the original roles as possible.


In preparation for recording our music video, we hired the white room at our school following the background of the original music video and we also hired the Panasonic HC-V700 camera to ensure our video looked as professional as possible by maintaining a high camera quality. We also maintained this professional level by using a tripod ensuring the camera is kept steady so the final product is as polished as possible. All of this was filmed on a 16GB SD card.


In preparation for the filming of our video, we gathered any suitable props that would make the recreation of the music video look as similar as possible to the original. For clothing, Tegan borrowed a denim jacket from a friend and remembered to bring in a belt whilst ensuring she was wearing jeans on the day of the filming to recreate the outfit Rhianna was wearing. We looked in the school drama costume cupboard and discovered a leather jacket we can use for Will for his recreation of the role as Paul McCartney and we asked Joel to just wear a plain black top as Kanye had very plain clothing in the music video. This ensures our music video will look as professional as possible and by planning costumes beforehand, it will create a realistic music video and will look similar to the original. This shows me the benefits of planning beforehand and the importance of this to create a professional product.


Overall, the pre-production of my music video has shown me the importance of planning and preparation before hand in order for our production to be a smooth process and will create a professional product and a similar replica of the original video. The story board allowed us to recreate similar camera angles and reminding us the duration of each shot to ensure the recreation is similar to the original. However, next time I would have liked to include more detail in the storyboard such as where the model is standing but our story board was still accurate and it allowed us to create a professional and effective recreation video.