Personal Achievement

For our A2 prelim, we are filming a remake of the music video for "Girls" by The 1975. Being a drama student, I am used to acting for stage and therefore I think this activity will be an experience for me to learn to act in a different way and use entirely new skills which I have not used before

One of these skills is the ability to lip sync to the song. This involved singing along to the music as opposed to simply miming the words as I first believed, which then enabled us to match up the sound during the editing process in order to make the lip sync as accurate as possible and develop my skills in editing a music video.

In terms of acting, I am used to acting for the stage and sometimes for film, both of which are entirely different to acting for a music video. When on stage I have to make my actions and facial expressions extremely exaggerated and project my voice. When addressing the audience, I have to make sure to make eye contact with as many people as possible and look around the whole room in order to make the whole audience feel included. However, for the music video it is entirely different. I have a fixed point to look at  and it is important to maintain eye contact with the camera as much as possible. Actions, while still exaggerated, do not need to be as big as they do when on stage as the audience is not as far away as they are when in the theatre and I do not need to project as the sound will be cut in and replaced by the track during the edit.

I find this task particularly interesting in terms of finding out how a shoot for a professional music video works as a whole. I have been on sets for Hollywood films in the past and from my experience it seems to be repetitive shooting for many days and a large budget. Even when speaking to directors of Independent films, I have not encountered a film which has been filmed entirely in a day. However, for the music video prelim, we have to shoot the whole video in an entire day, which we soon found out is a norm.

Building contacts is an important aspect of any industry and in particular the media industry. I have already spoken to the crew and befriended them as I find them to be extremely interesting and fun to be around. As well as this, I can use this as an opportunity to gain contacts and find more about them and the different roles needed for a successful music video. They are unusual, unconventional role models and I would like to learn skills which are transferable.