AICE Media Studies

  After the trials and tribulations that were encountered during the production period of the music video, it's time to reflect on the work that was done. The video is far from perfect, but the experience was informative and important to note.   The video has many aspects that both coincide with and challenge the conventions of Christmas music videos. A major difference between the product and productions in popular culture is that the product does not feature scenes of a musical artist or band performing the song. Most music videos feature this, but the production did not follow this standard in order to tell a story with the video. The video does, however, have many of the shots seen in major productions, such as three shots and pans. One shot that was included in the video that was uncommon among the videos was a POV shot. This shot was used to add diversity to the shots present in the project and add to the storytelling aspect. The props, costuming and sets present in the video

The time has finally come to publish the music video. We ended up using the song “ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams. Throughout the making of this video, I have learned a lot about editing and filming. Even though the filming process did not go without issues, I’m grateful for the experience. I hope you enjoy watching!

 Upon further inspection, our footage wasn’t as bad as I described. We had a lot of salvageable shots. As a result, we are going to keep the footage we have already taken. However, we are going to go back to the park to take some simple shots to make the beginning less choppy. Thankfully, we won’t have to pay to be in the area of the park we have to film this at.  Plans to reshoot went well. We got the basic shots we needed to fill out certain spots in the video. Now, it’s time to edit. We choose to split up the work between us. This was to ensure that each of us had a say in the vision for the video. Splitting the work also alleviates the burden of editing it all by one’s self.  Unfortunately, the equipment I was using didn’t allow me to work with computer software to edit the video. The laptop I had was broken and unreliable, so I went back to the editing software I used in the previous project. I started by putting all the takes we took in a big project and muting each clip. Then I

 Now that we have recorded a good amount of footage, it's time to put it together and chop it up. Upon completion review, a lot of our takes were not very good. This was most likely due to us shifting the responsibility of filming between each other due to the number of people we had. Despite this, we had some very nice shots.  We had several shots of the decorations and us playing games. One of the things we needed more of were shots that would help with the flow of the video. We had a lot of takes of us going in to activities. Our issue lied in the amount of videos we had of us going out of them. These were much harder to procure because the staff would often kick us off of rides to let other people get on. As a result, many of the tales were blurry or rushed. While we were filming, we thought that we took too many shots of us walking and talking. This turned out to be opposite of the truth. We needed more transition shots to show we were getting in and out of activities and how

 Because we decided to go through with Santa’s Enchanted Forest, we had to make some changes to our video. We decided to base it around a group of three people to reduce costs. Since there are three members in our group, we needed an actor so that one of us could film. Unfortunately, we did not find one in time for our filming date. This caused a lot of problems for us. It was extremely difficult to film the three of us and also be in the videos. We ended up filming after school, so we were also working against time.  During shooting, we took several takes of us walking and participating in activities at the park. We ended up having to detour from our storyboard because they did not have all the events that they used to have. Because we went to the park on a Wednesday, it wasn’t nearly as busy as it usually is, so it was easier to film than we expected. To film the scenes, one of us would film the other two walking to an activity. Then, we would angle the camera so that it would show a

 It’s time to have a serious conversation. I have to admit something important - we had no idea what we were going to wear for this music video. We went back and forth between our options, and that’s normal! We did land on some simple costumes for the characters, but not without some conversation about the subject. Originally, we wanted to put the characters in  ugly sweaters to add to the theme of the video. Warm clothing was the goal because it imitated the many videos we watched during the research process. We quickly came to the conclusion that this was not feasible. The weather in Florida is extremely hot, regardless of what time of year it is. It would be way too uncomfortable to have our characters in thick fabrics. Especially since we would be filming for a few hours. Our second option was to wear Christmas pajamas. This was a cute and fun option that gets the point across without being too uncomfortable for the characters. Seeing as only one of us had Christmas pajamas to wear