Set Building

The afternoon before shooting Alex and I were able to go along and help with the painting and putting together of the set. The set for our video had three main functions: inside the space craft, the outside of the space craft and the blue screen background. Our first shot of the day according to the shooting schedule was the rappers within the space craft so we therefore set up the ship to save time the following day. Apart from the initial painting there were other areas like ensuring the panel on the set were straight and which colours to use on the knobs of the control pads that took up a lot of time.

We felt that by putting in small details and paying attention to detail it would create more of a professional vide and ultimately make our video look better. One of the largest issues we had whilst set building was deciding what to do with the doors. Firstly we had decided to try to incorporate them into the set so they could be shown at all time and equally so the audience would be more aware that the alien was leaving the ship that had the rappers in, not that they were separate. But after a short chat, we felt that it would be more advantageous to not include the doors and have them separately and instead build up narrative of many reactions shots of the rappers from the actions of the alien. Now the only issue was getting the doors to open at the same time and at the same speed with people pulling them apart. This was very difficult, especially with lots of smoke and flashing lights but after around four attempts the doors were starting to move evenly and the monitor showed promising results.

Another issue we discovered on the day was that we were intending to use the green screen; however our alien had previously been painted green. Therefore he would not show up when in after effects. So luckily a blue screen was also available for us to use, otherwise our video would have been a disaster!

The reason for the attention to detail within the spacecraft set was to tie in with the music video convention of reality. We wanted to audience to feel as if the band could actually be in a space ship, making them feel, even more so, the quirky nature of the band. The more real the set felt, the bigger impression the band would have on the audience in my opinion. Equally, it would also high light their seemingly low socio-economic grouping, that they are in a fabulous state of the art space ship, yet they are lower classed. Specifically, the part of the set that ties the most into the narrative strand of the video is the control boards located on the left hand side of the set. This relates dominantly as there are parts of the video where the rapper are frantically switching the knob to help stabilise the aircraft.