preperation

Genre Conventions

Our artist Kid Harpoon defines himself as lyrical/Alternative. This is not too difficult as many contemporary artists define themselves as this today. Wikipedia defines it as: Alternative (also called alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative; known primarily in the UK as indie) is a genre of rock music that emerged in the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s. The term "alternative" was coined in the 1980s to describe punk rock-inspired bands on independent record label that did not fit into the mainstream genres of the time.
We will create our video with this in mind, which is why we think our mixture of animation and real footage is so effective, we will also be able to follow some of the more conventional and traditional elements of a video such as lots of shots with the artist (or in our case actor) and the images highlighting the unusual lyrics thus promoting the song whist giving the impression of going against commercialism, which this artist and his fans clearly values.

Performance/ Lip sync.

Before choosing our actor we asked him to show us if he would be able to lip-sync convincingly in our video, luckily he was sufficiant and is practising with Caitlin to improve. We are teaching him instead of finding someone who has more skill as he general apearance and natural attitude fits with the character in the song. We practiced our lip syncing with Caitlin and posted it on the blog, so our actor could get more of a feel of his task.

Camera work

whist thinking about our camera work, we decided to look at previous Kid Harpoon videos to see if their was a clear style, and if it would be appropriate for our video, we noticed it used a lot of long still shots, then contrasted them with sudden close ups and broken up with angle changes. we thought the bases of this (the unique contrast) would be appropritat with our video but we decided that a lot more moving shots would 'go' with the the song better, as their are few location changes and a lot of camera movement would give the feeling of being trapped and unable to get out as this song so strongly places empasise on.

Editing

Obviously, when editing caitlin and I will have more of a task because we have to edit in all the animation gabby and lauren will produce, in addition to all the standard footage cutting and lip syncing. We plan to use a veriaty of quick cuts and slow fades depending on the tone of lyrics, if it is a line such as 'whenyou know damn well you will survive' it will have a quick cut to the next shot, however when there's a line like 'its a few years on, and i'm still inside' we'll have a slow fade. we feel this interesting mix will add to the unique look of the video, and not solely rely on the animation for uniquity.