Classwork

This post will include most of the studies we did in class to show how we learned the things we know now. One of the most important keys in media studies we learnt was camera angles, mis-en-scene, editing, and sound. We learned this in class through the presentation Mr gave us last year. Here are most of the things we learnt. 

CAMERA ANGLES

Long Shot	Medium Shot	Close Up
Extreme Long Shot	Cowboy Shot	Extreme Close Up
POV	High Angle	Dutch Angle
Over The Shoulder	Low Angle	Establishing Shot

Effects of each shot

Long Shot: Shows the full object alongside the setting and background

Extreme Long Shot: Shows the subject from a more extreme range, will give emphasis more to the setting of the whole movie.

Medium Shot: Allows the audience to see the characters body language, facial expressions and reactions.

Cowboy Shot: Cowboy shots create an effect that makes the character look cool and dominant.

Close Up: Enables the audience to focus on expressions and dialogues.

Extreme Close Up: Enables audience to feel real time emotion of the character

POV: To place the audience in the characters' shoes.

Over the Shoulder: It creates a new point of view that creates a spatial and connectional perspective of the audience and the character

High Angle: Makes subject look weaker and smaller.

Low Angle: Makes the subject look stronger and dominant.

Dutch Angle: Emphasizes confusion and disorientation due to the inconvenient angle.

Establishing shot: Introduces audience to setting of the movie. 

CAMERA MOVEMENT

These are some videos that helped us understand the aspects of filming

Ultimate Guide to Camera Angles: Every Camera Shot Explained [Shot List, Ep. 3]

Ultimate Guide to Camera Movement — Every Camera Movement Technique Explained [The Shot List Ep6]

Mis En Scene

Props	Set Design	Costume
Hair	Make Up	Colour
Performance	Lighting	Blocking
Focus	Weather	Environment

Here is a video that helped us understand mis en scene

What is Mise en Scene — How Directors Like Kubrick Master the Elements of Visual Storytelling

Other than camera angles and camera movements, there are other key elements to creating a suspenseful and meaningful scene. This includes the 3 types of songs diegetic, non-diegetic and trans-diegetic.  

Diegetic: Sound that the characters within the media text can hear. This adds a sense of realism and could reveal some information about the character inside the media and soon to the audience. 

Non-diegetic: This type of sound can only be heard by the audience instead of the characters. This is used to enhance the meaning of the audience to decode and create an emotional response in the audience. 

Trans-diegetic: Trans-diegetic is the type of sound that transitions from one to another, for example from a diegetic sound turning into a non-diegetic sound. A trans-diegetic sound usually helps reflect the character's inner state for example it may start with a diegetic sound at first to connect with the character’s feelings and soon be heard by the character which is revealed as the character’s internal feeling/experience. 

We were also given a video by our teacher in case we wanted to dive deeper into the topic which helped me a lot. As the upcoming projects which were a documentary and a music video needed these skills. 

( Insert this video to your blogs https://youtu.be/2vlwm4VyyTc )

After some more lessons, we learned that there were 3 types of non-diegetic sound.

	Description	Effect
Melodie	Positive and pleasing connotations	Enhances a positive scene. Create positive emotions in the audience
DIscordant	Harsh and unpleasant connotations	Enhance negative scenes. Create suspense, tension, and anxiety
Contrapuntal	Has an opposite tone to the on-screen visuals	Adds deeper meaning to scenes. Insight into the character’s thoughts. Maybe they seek pleasure in doing bad things.

These are some examples of all three types of non-diegetic sound. 

Melodic:

Niscaya - Bilal Indrajaya

Discordant: 

Alien Scene

Contrapuntal: 

Reservoir dogs

The fourth key element is the edit. The edit in a media text is crucial as it sets the tone and message and can deliver more impact to the audience. 

There are 2 types of editing which are long takes, and short takes each one having a uniqueness and drawbacks of its own. 

A long take is used to : 

• Build suspense

• Makes it feel slow for the audience.

• Extend the feelings of the scene

• Makes it more immersive

While a short take is used to:

• Increase the pace of the scenes 

• Makes it more exciting and high-energy

• Mostly used to show actions

• Focuses more on the details

These 2 videos helped me discover more things about the deeper understanding of editing in the media world.

https://youtu.be/h9AEYFYPYTM?si=Ld4P7wqL-rwagdbY (Deeper understanding of long takes)

https://youtu.be/OAH0MoAv2CI?si=ebTKXYxE-ilEa82l (Focuses more on the cuts and transitions)

Not only the duration of each scenes but editing can be classified as another 2 which are continuity editing and non-continuity editing. 

Examples:

Continuity:

• Straight cuts

• Eyeline match

• Shot/reverse shot

• Cutaway/insert

• Match cut

This video helped us understand the deeper level of continuity editing https://youtu.be/33eWqDZ6sRc?si=a_D1Bdcd5sJTM3yZ 

Non-continuity:

• Cross cut

• Flash back

• Flash forward

• Jump cut 

• Match cut. 

This is the youtube video I found that helped us learn the understanding of a discontinuity editing https://youtu.be/-d6Dp04NV0E?si=dqxmiMNjRene02DE 

Making this classwork was a throwback for me to how i learned these things. We split the work between the both of us me and Bagus. We did this blog post to show how we learned all of these things and how much effect it has after a year in media studies. These are the 4 key elements to media which were the camera angles/movements, edit, mis-en-scene and sound. We didn't make this post right after we learned about the theories and elements which makes the notes less detailed. We can improve this for the future and take notes of the important things we will be learning such as more theories, key terms, to be able to help us for studying for the upcoming exams.

Screen test

 We need to conduct a screen test to find a star for our music video. Here is a video of our class's group audition. We did this as a class. 

We conducted this screen test as a whole class and chose the song Dont stop me now by Queen to lypsinc.

Benefits of this screen test:

- It is ore efficient as all of us did it at the same time meaning we only needed around 5 minutes to give everyone a chance to try to be the star

- Doing it as a whole class makes all of us more comfortable as we wouldn't we put in a awkward position to lypsyn 1 on 1 with our teacher

Drawbacks of this method:

- The song wasn''t everyone's song as we all know the song but not every lyric of the song which makes some of the actors look bad when singing

- The song was around 3 minutes which means the screen time for each student is fast. This means we cant see their performances in depth and as detailed as when doing it alone with the teacher. 

Conducting a screen test is new for everyone and to be completely honest i didn't know the beginning lyrics of the song. This makes my scene look bad and horrible which is fine as i wasn't the star for our music video anyway. Although it was awkward, it was a fun experience to share this embarrassing moment with every one of grade 12's media students. In the future, i would like to memorise the song better and act a little more enthusiastically as how a singer would be inside of their music video. The screen test made us realise how passionate our chosen star was which was Bagus the first guy to sing as he is shown to sing to passionately. I was feeling more confident of him being the star of our music video. 

Song Research

This post will include our sound research, background, and a general idea of why we chose the song made by my teammate Bagus 

We will look in detail at our song choice 'Here with me, d4vd' released in 2022

Song background:

- Here With Me” starts off with a dreamy guitar riff over a steady beat. As d4vd starts singing, listeners are immersed in the story he tells about his relationship with a partner watching the sunset, growing old together and knowing that regardless of the circumstances, everything will be alright with that person by his side" - Met Radio, 25 March 2023, written by Jordyn Lalonde

https://www.metradio.ca/review/here-with-me-by-d4vd-is-a-moody-tiktok-anthem-about-the-longevity-of-a-relationship/

- It’s a reflection of the human heart’s deepest desires and fears. Through its poignant lyrics and emotive composition, the track stands as a testament to the power of music to articulate the complexities of love and companionship.

Source: https://primesound.org/here-with-me-meaning

The reason of choosing this particular song:

We chose this song because it has a simple meaning that we can decipher as a group to convert it into a project. The song also has a very emotive and deep lyrics about love, this will make it good as this song can be relatable to young teenagers. Even the singer himself is 17 years old when he released this music video. He was probably younger when he wrote it, which makes it a strong point. 

How we would change it:

We would subvert away from this music video by by changing the initially sunset and beach vibes of the original music video to somewhat a daily life of a teenage relationship that is not too deep. We also decided to make the flow of the music video chronological. Unlike the original music video where there were random cuts and the storyline goes back and forth with them getting old. Here, its just a normal teenage relationship.

This song research was done by my teammate Bagus who answered questions like the background and why we chose this song. Conducting this song research is essential for us as it would help us understand the meaning of our song choice on a deeper level. Understanding the background helps give meaning to us and could affect how we would make the plot of the music video. Understanding this, I helped Bagus answer some of the questions and gave him ideas on why we chose this song. I also with the help of the teacher provided him with a website that shows the general background of the song. Overall, there was no problem in answering these questions and there was no hesitation in choosing this song out of many songs that were in our head. 

Storyboard

 My teammate Saka and Bagas made this storyboard to help with the music video production 

Realising how much time we would spend if all of our scenes were to be drawn in this format, we made it into a much simpler format to focus more on other things rather than the drawing as we already have the general imagination of how we would like the scene to look at and a few detailed missing on the storyboard would not be much of a hassle. 

So this is the new format of our storyboard:

Changing the format of the storyboard really did save time that can be used for other things. As they already have the experience of making a storyboard for every last project they did this is something usual for both of them. What I did to help was basically help both Saka and Bagas imagine how the scene would look like and try to recreate the scenes with myself in real life. This way it will help them imagine the scene and make it easier for them to draw. We got in a little trouble tho as after receiving advice we decided to change some scenes from the music video. After discussing it with the whole group we decided to only change a bit of the plot as we would like to keep our original idea.

Lyric Sheet

This blog post will have our lyric sheet which includes our draft and what we will do in each part of the music. 

This is our lyric sheet:

Editing our lyric sheet and giving ideas on what we should do for each line is beneficial as we can plan how we want our music video to look like from this early time. This would also help us remember what our star will be doing when this line is played. This helps with John being pretty all the time. Not much detail is put into this but it is helping us make sure that our music video will turn out how we planned it to be. We had to change it a couple of times due to clashing opinions and how our star did not agree with singing the chorus we gave him. After a few more discussions with the group, we did our finalised draft and wrote it in the lyric sheet. For the future, we should discuss as a whole from the start to avoid having to erase a whole plan which is more demotivating. 

Moodboard

This will be the mood board i created for our music video research, helping to keep us on track and ensure that our music video matches the aesthetic of the mood board. 

This was our first mood board

After finishing our first mood board, we realised it was way too similar to the original music video so we decided to change our mood board but still conforming some conventions of it. 

This is the final mood board for our music video:

The mood board of our first chorus

The mood board of our second chorus

This moodboard was an emotional journey created while listening to Here with Me by David. The song's longing vs. intimacy perfectly mirrored the themes we chose. Which was the romanticism of sunsets, speaking to bonding moments in time, and a basketball date with a fighting couple. The "day in the life" feelings capture the ups and downs of relationships, while the rejection adds an emotional weight, really connecting with the moodboard in reality. While compiling these visuals, at first it started to look too similar to the original music video so we decided to subvert the conventions and make a new moodboard. We decided to change the narrative of the music video to subvert the conventions and new locations to film our music video.