Target Audience

My target audience is a teenage to adult age range. This is because they are able to watch and understand the more age appropriate content such as gore, strong language and dark imagery, without any consequences. As well as appealing to just an adult audience, my project will appeal to a slightly narrower audience - the heavy metal community. This is a group of people who like and listen to heavy metal, read the magazines, watch the music videos and go to the gigs/concerts.

The more extreme 'metalheads' would dress like the man in the image to the left; however not many do in comparison to the more 'normal' ones such as Jack, the boy who plays the main character in my production. I have not got an image of him but he can be seen in the final production throughout.

These heavy metal fans like the heavy music and enjoy the stylistic conventions of everything metal such as violent and gory themes, dark lyrics in songs and high contrasts between colours and imagery of a rather bold nature.

(This image was taken from http://metalheadguys.info/)

Locations - The Woods

I chose to film a large section of my music video in the woods - this is because it was not only the best place to make and record a fire but it was also very dark, eerie and the shadows caused a lot of high contrast lighting which is always good for making music videos and emphasising visual effects. These pictues below show the areas of the wood in which I filmed; however these were taken during the day so that you can see the detail better than the twilight shots I filmed in my production.

Editing

Due to some unforeseen weather conditions (despite constant forecast checking) I have been delaid by a considerable time; and consequently my video is suffering from this and has had to be shortened and been modified to allow huge changes. I could not film the fire parts very well, due to heavy snow fall and continuity errors, so I have had to replace sections, change sections and make allowances which will change the way my work pans out in the end. I will have title slides put in, more cutaways and I will loose the majority of my plot line.

Other than this huge issue, the rest of my project has gone well. The editing is starting to take shape and I am pleased with some of the effects that I have been able to use and produce on the software available.

Intertextuality and Borrowed Ideas

There are a few times in my production where I have used some imagery or ideas that have been taken from other places. Some are brief and some are quite obvious:
- I took the name (overlaid with fire) Mr. B. Breegs from an Iron Maiden album cover where the name Benjamin Breeg is written on a grave stone. (see big picture below.)

Iron Maiden -- The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg

-There are various posters, art work (on hoody) and visual representations of television, heavy metal and seemingly quite random characters. For example, the Teletubbies make an appearance along with Bob the Builder, King Kong and some other characters that you may have seen on television.

All of the ideas used have been placed to entertain the intended audience and it may be that only heavy metal fans will notice these references or will find them funny.

Costume Thoughts (before & after)

Before: I was thinking about what to make Jack (the character in the video) wear throughout it, so I let him decide how he wants to come across to the viewers - this seemed like a bold decision to me but it made sense because I knew that his sense of style is typical of the video's genre and that if he felt more comfortable in what he was wearing then he would do a petter and more confident performance.

After: He chose to wear all black (jeans, shirt, shoes, etc) and a 'heavy metal' hoody with the Iron Maiden artwork on the front (similar to the one in the picture to the left). This outfit seems appropriate enough when considering the genre and the music.

Filming Log

My First Film Shoot

The first shoot I did involved the lip syncing, the shots within the flat and the woods/fire shots. This was okay but it proved hard as Jack did not learn the lyrics before hand as I has asked and he could not stop laughing. The lighting was also a problem because there was very little natural light in the room and no room for spotlights, so we had to make do with normal, tungsten, house lights; this did not produce the high contrast imagery that I wanted. The shots in the flat went well and I got them all done on time as I had planned but the lighting again was an issue as if I had used the lights in the hallway shots, it would not have matched the bedroom shots; so I was stuck with no interesting lighting.

The footage of Jack walking through the woods got shot well and within the first few takes, but I had serious issues when trying to get some video of the flames on the fire because the wood was all damp and the fire would not catch. This set me back - majorly!

My Second Shoot

My Second Shoot was the guitar parts. I had to film myself play these pieces within my bedroom, so it was herd to get the lighting, angles and focus exactly right because it is impossible to be in front of the camera and behind it simultaneously; but I think they went well. I used a strobe light which I bought online a few weeks prior to filming; this gave the video a faster paced, metal theme which is an expected convention of this genre of music video.

My Third Shoot

This shoot was an attempt to recapture some of the failed shots from my first shoot. I had a little bit more luck with the lip syncing and my unreliable lead actor but the fire still would not work - and after looking at the weather forecast, I realised that I would have to change my plans by a great deal because there was lots of snow on the way; so I made the fire in my back garden and used only extreme close ups and shots which did not give away location changes. At this stage, my video was starting to look a lot less like my storyboard.

My Final Shoot

This final shoot was just cutaways and pick-ups such as the writing and the drums. This all went well once I had got a technical issue with the camera sorted out - this was where the camera kept picking up big black lines across my footage and rendering it useless and causing me to re-film.