I started to plan and make a music video as soon as i found out we were going to be making one for the course. I instantly knew i wanted to do Alestorm as they are a small band, so it wouldn't be hard to get permission to use the music, they're pirates, so i love them and, well, they're a good band. The hard part was choosing a good song to use. In the end i did 3 different stroyboards, which all got very comlicated as i decided i wanted things to happen. However, i first needed to get the artists permission to use their track as otherwise i would be going through copyright stuff and that wasn't a good idea. So i sent them a message on 'MySpace' and they replied and said i could use whatever i wanted. I had also decided to create a plasticine video, as i think some animated music videos are much better than any real time videos. I really like 'Sledgehammer' by Peter Gabriel and 'Stay Alive' by Trapt. After that i drew up a final storyboard of the one i wanted to use and made a list of things i would need in the video, and subsequently the amounts and different colours i would need.
The first stroyboard i did was for the song Wenches and Mead. Basically it started with the boat going along in the water, then it zoomed in to the deck to see the pirates playing their instruments on deck. At this stage, the pirates were meant to respresent the members of the band. The song is only about 3 minutes at most, so i didn't think all that much needed to happen. Halfway through the first verse, a wench comes on and gives the band members some beer. They take it and give her a swift kick up the backside and she falls over the side of the boat into the water. They then continue to play. After the first chorus, the camera rotates round the boat, the mast opbscuring the view temporarily, and when it spins round you see the actual band, playing live bluescreened onto the boat. This would then fade out at the end. I decided not to use this idea as i figures even though it is a catchy, short song the video would get quite boring, and i would need to see the band several times to get some footage of them playing.The second storyboard was much more visually intense, however the song was 5 and a half
minutes long, so it would have to be to keep viewer attention up. It starts at a long shot of a boat, like the previous one, but this time it zooms in on one of the connon holes, and you see a guy there dressed as a pirate, grinning. It then cuts to a shot from behind as you see him aiming the cannon at a wall and lighting it. The scene then switches to show an explosion and the wall caving in. You then see a close up of some steps and feet running up them. The next shot is from high up, possibly as if someone was looking down from the crows nest of the ship, as the crew throw a plank of wood down and run over it into the town. The next few minutes of various shots of fight scenes, mainly swordfights of pirates vs guards. One of the pirates then runs up a building, jumps to another one and swings on a conveniently places bit of rope. He jumps off and sails down, his sword landing on top of a guards and slicing him in half. Then he runs up to the tavern, meets up with his crew and kick the door in. They wander in, grab a tankard of ale and drink it. Then they wander over and pick up some instruments. The next bit would be hard as i was going to have some live action footage and move the figurines around to exactly the same places as the real footage so it could fade out seamlessly and go into live footage. I didn't do this because i decided it was slightly too adventurous and would take far too long. I also figured that i would again need to get some live footage and as none of the figures stood up on their own, getting them to run, jump and wsing on things would have been nearly impossible.
When i had gone and bought all the plasticine and stuff i started to make the models. I hadn't really thought about it too much, but i made a very basic wireframe, then covered it in plasticine. I didn't really think about the fact that they would have a hard time standing up and would be quite top heavy. That was a problem we came across while shooting the video and we had to work out how to overcome it during filming. After we spent almost an entire day creating the figures (Including makingthe wireframes and stuff) we put them down for the night and hoped they wouldn't harden too much. When we got around to doing the filming, they hadn't hardened much and we were able to move them about quite well with very little trouble.
Unfortunately, the tripod i had didn't have the screw bit on it to keep the camera attatched, so we had to improve using string, blu-tack and whatever we could find to change the angle and prop the camera up. I had to change certain bits of the stroyboard as they were simply too long, too short or wouldn't work with the resources we had, and we ran out of idea near the end so bits of it is simply looped round, which i really don't like, but there wasn't much i could do about it. I wanted to re-shoot some bits, but i didn't have a camera and when i got one the models had all fallen apart or hardened up.While we (my brother helped) were filming, we had to overcome several problems. The first main
one being that the ideas looked much better on paper and we thought they could go on for a bit longer than they actually could without getting dull. To get past this we had to add in extra bits and change things so it seemed worth watching and didn't just bore you having one long shot after another. Another very large problem we had was simply that only 3 of the models could stand up on their own. The wench, the 3 headed monkey (TOTALLY a Monkey Island™ reference), and Davy Jones (The weird dragon thing). In order for the other pirates to stand up, we had to wedge pencils and pens in their backs, and prop them up, which then made it hard when we changed angles to keep the things out of shot.
Another problem was that i wanted some shots of the captain singing, as he was vaguely based around the singer of the band, but when i tried to move his mouth, it simply smudged and looked a mess. So we covered his mouth with more white plasticine, and then just got 3 different shaped bits of black plasticine and simply alternated them every few frames to make it look like his mouth is moving. This worked surprisingly well and when you watch it, given that it is all animated, it seems quite convincing.Here is the final video, that i uploaded to YouTube. It is quite low quality, and has the words across the screen plainly because it han't been marked, and i have yet to deicde if i am going to use it for my actual project. If i do, i don't really want someone else stealing it first. Alongside it, is Alestorms video for the song, which they released AFTER i had made mine. I was very surprised to see some of the ideas i had (but didn't use) for my videos were very similar to scenes and shots that were used in the official video. I was even more surprised to see that some of the scenes and shots i did use are quite similar. Not exactly the same, but they ideas were there.
