My group started off with Georgia Frend, Eleanor Jordan, Calum Wilkes, Jodie Hadley and Megan Silvester. We started off working with a group of girl musicians. I had started to do the risk assessments for that project when Ellie and Georgia informed the rest of us that they would prefer to move on with the project without us. They felt that we were moving too slow and felt that we’d become too lethargic.
So with our decreased group we began to search for a new artist. After drawing up a shortlist of artists, we decided to go with Calum’s choice, a BOA artist called George Hatton. We felt that it would be considerably easier to use an artist within BOA as they would be extremely easy to contact as they should be in college everyday. George came to us and explained the song that he was in the process of writing. The song was about the true story of a girl that George knew; she was kicked out of her house due to using drugs and ended up sleeping with men so she wasn’t left out on the street. Although the song hadn’t been written, I was confident that, after seeing the passion George had for telling the story of his friend, that the song would get written.
We ran with the story that George had told us and came up with a few ideas. Our original narrative for our story was to have our actress getting kicked out, of the house, sleeping with guys,running out of guys to sleep with and committing suicide. For inspiration we looked at music videos such as Ed Sheeran’s A-Team and Ed Sheeran’s Give Me Love. We also looked at having George performing the song to cut back to. We also looked at having the whole video backwards, but decided that it wouldn’t fit with the song. We then began to look at casting and eventually,after drawing another short-list decided that using Jodie and Megan’s suggestion of Lauren Milwain would be the right choice. We used Lauren because she is a very reliable actress and she would be comfortable with performing certain scenes that we may have to do.
George then came back to us and performed the song acoustically, to confirm that it fit our ideas. We were happy with the song and printed off lyrics of the song to begin compiling a storyboard and shot list. I suggested the idea of calling the song Hazy Eyes after many different suggestions and the name stuck.
I then began doing the call sheet after contacting Lauren so we could formally offer her the role of the lead actress. We also began scouting for locations. Calum knew a large amount of Birmingham’s historic canals and so he showed us a stretch of canal that we might want to use for filming. Adjacent to the canal we found a suitable place to film on the Curzon Street car-park. We also talked about the various bedrooms that we could use and decided that we would keep it relatively simple and close and use Calum Wilkes’ house.
Shoot day came and the crew (minus Calum), Lauren and Jonas met outside BOA at 9:15. George and Christina were not present so we decided to move on and do some shots without them as we were not going to be far from our meet-up point. We started shooting in the Curzon Street Car park, however we were kicked out, as there was an incident with a separate team filming there earlier. In hindsight, we should have double-checked that we had permission to film there. Luckily, we had a contingency plan and the shots we were getting were expendable. We packed up, moved to the canal and began shooting. It was here that we also met George and Christina. As it was cold, the cast were eager to shoot and so we actually finished with the cast at 11:40. Jodie, Megan and I then took some quick filler shots and finished production at 12:20.
Day Two came and we arranged to meet at 9:30. However due to almost every member of the production being late, we were assembled at 11:00. We were also told on the day by Calum that we could not use his house and instead we were using his Nan’s house, although this turned out to be more than perfect. We started shooting at 11 at Ms Wilkes’ house and broke more lunch at 14:00 for forty minutes. We finished shooting at 17:00. There was some miscommunication when we began editing the music video and it ended up being edited and submitted later than we had anticipated, however both edits came out very well.
We had yet another production meeting to work out when we’d be filming our last pick-up scenes. We filmed some party scenes on Friday 15th March, quickly gathering together extras, which turned out to be very successful as it was during a Futures lesson.
In conclusion, things went fairly smoothly. I am happy with the end product, although I feel if had edited earlier it could have been slightly more polished, however it is really good the way it is. One of the main issues with the production was that there were miscommunication issues. When Calum first showed us George’s song, it was just him singing. However, when George handed it to us on a disc he had recorded an almost completely different song, by this point all of our paperwork was already done. For future music videos, I will definitely not start planning until I have heard the full song and it has been recorded. Another communication issue that I found was with Calum Wilkes. Although Calum came through on various occasions, I found that often he didn’t have enough time to dedicate to the project as he had other commitments.
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