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Music video pre-production

1) Music video treatment

You may already have a finished music video treatment from your summer project and/or preliminary exercise - definitely use or develop that if it works with your project. 
However, you may need to update your treatment or even change it completely now you have finished your preliminary exercise. The original example from the summer for music video treatments can be found here.

Green day - Wake me up when September ends - Original Artist + Song
ClueS (will abbreviate to CS for treatment) - Artist
Warm tones: Orange, teal

2 shots, low angle, Nostalgia/friendship

The camera is on a close up of the pavement curb as 'CS' steps up revealing shoe brand. Then the camera moves anticlockwise and up to meet the face of 'CS' and cuts to a medium shot of him walking towards a bridge. Camera cuts to a side view and as 'CS' walks, the time changes and man is introduced walking alongside 'CS' towards the bridge.

Montage of both actors having fun in their youth, swings, running around, shopping cart riding in a parking lot, walking down a path laughing. Cut to close up of 'CS' laughing and man laughing separately with tears running down faces in slow motion. A bell can be seen ringing before the next scene.

Back and forth between present and past as fun continues. Return to bridge where 'CS' now back in the present will arrive to a certain point of the bridge and stop to give a fist bump to his right at which point the camera goes to the past and man is there to return the fist bump and ends with the music fading out allowing us to hear the actors with 'CS' saying "that was fun, wanna do it again sometime?" man replies "yeah, sure" and both proceed to exit off frame laughing.

2) Mise-en-scene planning

Plan everything that will appear in front of the camera in your music video - and this is vital when it comes to music video and music genre. 
Remember CLAMPS: Costume, Lighting, Actors (cast, placement, movement, expression), Make-up, Props, Setting.

Costume - Casual streetwear + Converse shoes for main artist

Lighting - Use of mostly High key lighting especially in narrative aspect, instead, there will be a use of colour grading for outside scenes/shots while indoors and the performance aspect will most likely have low key with strong lights.

Actors - 2 actors the Artist ClueS and his friend, will be together usually side by side or approaching each other some scenes may have one chasing after the other. When both actors together for narrative, will use smiling and happy facial expressions with lots of hand gestures and movement while when artist is alone or in performance, will be more emotionless possibly even frowning with less movement and most likely little to no hand movement when possible.

Make-up - possible make-up use to make eyes look teary-eyed

Props - Microphone, Guitar, Drums, Shopping cart, TV, 

Setting - Side walk, bridge, park, inside of home, parking lot, staircase

3) Shot list

The final aspect of your pre-production planning is to write a comprehensive shot list for every single possible shot you plan to film for your music video. For three minutes of music video, that is going to be a LOT of shots - quite possibly more than 200.

Remember, a shot list is a full list of all the shots in your video with information for each of them (shot type, action/movement etc.) Creative shot choices aside, it’s easy to forget that a shot list is a strategic document. Creating a shot list is essentially like creating a shooting game plan for the day.


4) Shooting schedule

Days - 13 / 14 / 17

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