Song Ideas for Production

Choosing the right song for my production is the most important and most challenging point of the whole project in my opinion. The video needs to be able to match the song correctly and reflect the mood that the song gives. It also needs to be able to fit the timings of the song so that certain things can happen accurately and correctly such as slowing down the video when the song becomes slower or ensuring the actors lip sync the lyrics accurately etc.

I have chosen a few songs that I feel will be able to reflect the mood of my story. There are two which I definitely feel will reflect the correct mood of the song through the pace of the music and the softness of the lyrics and there is a third option which has a different approach to it and if I choose to do this song I think I will have to change the dynamics of my storyboard slightly in order to incorporate the faster paced music and the louder, much harsher lyrics. The three songs will be listed below with the titles of both the song and the artist:

Song 1: Alex G - Find You

Song 2: Tyler Ward - Dashes

Song 3: Against the Current - Gravity

Production Story Outline

Since choosing to do a music video for my coursework, I have been brainstorming different ideas and seeing what I could do to make the video and music link together perfectly. After a lot of thought, I have decided on doing the following:

Intro Scene:

·         Girl lying on bed playing with phone.

·         Drops phone off the side of the bed and it bounces slightly under the bed.

·         Shot from one side of bed looking under as she leans down to look under the bed.

·         She picks up phone but sees a dusty book further back.

·         Picks up the box and looks at it, rubs off some of the dust to reveal the title.

·         Moves it over to her desk and sits down to start looking through the photos.

·         As she opens the box the song begins to play.

Music Begins To Play

·         Starts flicking through pictures.

·         Stops on a specific picture.

·         Flashback 1 begins just before chorus starts.

·         Chorus starts at 1:09 hopefully start at roughly 0:40

Flashback 1 – preferably sunny and dry, may have to film very close to finish.

·         First meeting.

·         Park Bench, Train Station, Party, Classroom?

·         Classroom – First day at school, sat next to each other, start talking, girl smiling as boy speaks to her.

·         Park Bench – Boy walks up to girl, introduces himself, start talking, and eye contact, smiling/laughing.

·         Train Station – Boy on train, girl is rushing to train, by holds door for the girl door closes just behind?

·         Train Station – Boy walking through a carriage to find a seat, girl moves her bag so he can sit next to her/opposite her, start talking, eye contact, smiling/laughing.

·         Party – Boy and girl both with different sets of friends, they both look at each other, begin to talk to each other away from everyone else, start talking, eye contact, smiling/laughing.

·         Party, Train Station will be more difficult than the other two.

Flashback 2 – Certain time frame for filming (Christmas Holidays)

·         Oxford Covered Market/Cornmarket Street at Christmas

·         Covered Market – Lights, Christmas trees, festive atmosphere, and festive food.

·         Cornmarket Street – Lights, couple running around, laughing, hold hands.

·         Women dressed in a puffed up coat/fur hood? With a hat and gloves. Man dressed in darker colours just a basic autumn/winter coat, jeans, boots/dark shoes. Woman has more vibrant colours (red).

·         A shot of them walking holding hands from behind, then cuts to just the girl in the same pace, darker coloured atmosphere (Navy Blue or Grey).

·         Walking around, barely anyone else there, looking at similar things as the couple were earlier.

·         Ends with her looking at the same object the photo was taken.

Flashback 3 – Only film on rainy evening

·         Break up scene.

·         Inside a car, argument, rain outside, girl gets out of the car, cuts between boy and girl both showing emotion, anger at first turns to sadness.

·         Location – Car park (Pear Tree services, somewhere in Oxford, Woodstock?)

·         Ideally in the rain but need to find way of keeping camera dry. (Umbrella?) 

Youth Culture Essay - Film

A2 Media – Youth Culture

The way youth culture is represented is hugely depicted through the various forms of media available to the public. Youth culture is often illustrated as being very disruptive, violent and troublesome through the news in both newspapers and on television. Part of this is true and is backed up through evidence of knife crime, drug use, vandalism etc. but it is only a part of the entire youth culture that is accurately represented through the media. The main reasoning for the news and other media platforms (TV and Film mostly) illustrate youth culture like this is because it draws more attention from those outside youth culture and makes the specified media platform more interesting to watch. If these platforms decided to document the life of most young people, they wouldn’t gain as many ratings or views which would render the showing pointless. There are other different ways in which the youth culture of today is represented. Most films such as Kidulthood and Attack the Block focus on the teenagers living in inner city London, Manchester, Birmingham etc. which the public would generally associate with knife crime and drug use as this is how these teenagers are portrayed in the media.


At the other end of the spectrum there are films such as Juno and Superbad which have a more comical approach to them but address issues that affect teenagers. Juno tackles the teen pregnancy issue but has a twist as the girl is not someone who would be seen as sexually active and neither is the father but they end up having a baby together. Another twist is that the girl does not expect her parents to do everything for her; instead she acts more independent about the situation and manages to sort things out. Superbad does not particularly tackle a serious issue such as teen pregnancy or knife crime but illustrates how three teenage boys who struggle with being unpopular at school overcome obstacles to lose their virginity before college. The film is based around this issue and has a very similar element to the British TV series ‘The Inbetweeners’ with the story line and the added comical effect.


The main youth culture film I have watched is My Brother the Devil. This film is set in Hackney and follows a family who have migrated from Egypt to find a better lifestyle. The eldest brother, Rashid, is involved in a gang and is considered one of the senior members of the gang. He is also highly idolised by his brother Mo who has just received is GCSE grades and Rashid has set a goal for him to go to college. Mo however wants to be like Rashid and starts doing work for the gang behind his brother’s back. Rashid then decides he wants out of the gang due to personal reasons and the two brothers begin to cross paths and become near enough enemies. The film illustrates the issues of gang violence, drug use, murder and also homosexuality which is different for a gang culture film as it is not widely accepted in areas such as Hackney.

Creative Task 1

Myself and my class mate Abel were given the task of creating a short piece using specific camera techniques. We decided to look at creative ideas others had done and we looked into a man who walked backwards through areas of Japan and then reversed it so that he was walking forwards whilst everyone else did their actions backwards. Below are both the original piece and our creation:

A2 Media Ideas Powerpoint

A2 Brief Ideas

For the A2 side of my Media Course, I have been given a selection of design briefs in which I am allowed to choose from as the base of my coursework. After some thought, I decided that I wanted work singularly rather than in a pair or group as I felt it would be easier to get to do exactly what I wanted even if it meant more work has to be done on my part. I analysed the selection of briefs and found that the main two the caught my attention were the music video and the short film. Again I looked over these two options and searched up some past exemplar work on YouTube before deciding that I wanted to do a music video. However I do not want to do just any old mainstream song, I am a big believer in promoting artists who do not get the same recognition as the artists who currently dominate the charts. Therefore I would like to look into songs I enjoy listening too and that I can provide an adequate music video for. Below are some of the songs I want to try and base my music video around:

AS Overview

As part of my Media A Level course, I had to do an opening sequence in a group with two other people. This was also my AS Media Production. The whole project was in my eyes a huge improvement from when our group did a preliminary task to get to learn about some of the key aspects in making a film which included camera movement, editing and script and storyboard writing. Below is a video showing my group's final piece that was sent to examination to be marked.