Looking Back On The Awesomeness

Shahel Ahmed

The song we submitted was a music video for Mad World by Gary Jules, as our task was to produce a music video that used the convention that specific genre had. We had created two music videos within our genre, as we wanted to get feedback from our audience in which one they like more, as they’re our target audience and this how we make sure we have the best music video we can feasibly achieve. I was in charge of making sure our work was as perfect as possible, checking through what everyone had done, reviewing the grammar, and their choice of words. Also, during the production I was partly the creator of the video taking the input of peers in my group and combining everyone’s ideas including mines to make the plan of our video. In addition, I played the protagonist, and the only character, in the music video.

Our general theme was ‘Isolation”. We never specifically chose a typical musical genre; such as rock, pop, classical, because we wanted to base it more on a theme as we can use a concept to build toward. This way we can have a skeleton for our video and the way we build around it can be fitted to any genre as we couldn’t decide on a song but we needed to start planning. The main conventions we based our video on was isolated scenes, where the character is just all alone away from everyone, we also wanted to use height so that the character can be seen as being observant and again, isolated. Ed Sheeran’s A-team where the character is sat down and the world is passing them in a flash inspired us, we even used that shot in our video as I felt it was an effective method to demonstrate the world moving on, whilst the character is being left behind. Most of our planning were deciding where to record our scenes as we comprehended our video would just be full of isolated scenes, where the character is alone and either singing or just contemplating life. We decided Alexandra Palace to be a good place for our scenes as , from previous experiences, know how high above it is and how the view of the town below looked from up there. However we encountered our first problem as we got lost on our way there we hadn’t had planned how we’d get there, and so we were generally going with the flow; a journey which should have taken about an hour ended up taking us three. However we got there in the end, and instead of breaking the group apart in an argument, we enjoyed the experience of getting lost and exploring London as such and when we got there we felt a sense of accomplishment! Inspired by disorientation, the second time we went out to shoot we decided to go get lost again in order to find areas to record where most others would unlikely have thought of. This gave our video a unique aspect to the other ones and made our video that little more intriguing. Overall I would suggest our recording went smoothly, and efficiently, knowing what we were to do and getting it done wasn’t much of a challenge as we stuck together and worked with one another. I took responsibility of editing the footage as I have a MacBook at home and using my creative I combined everyone’s ideas together to create the best possible outcome obtainable.

We uploaded our video to YouTube as a way for our audience to get hold of the video at demand (VOD) this way it would be of easy access to people interested, or potentially interested, as they would either get a link or a recommendation by YouTube. To broaden our reach in order to get even more viewers I would allow Music Channels such as Chart Show TV to play the video at their regard, in order to get a higher viewing toll. In general, I believe my group have produced, pardon the quality, an almost professional product. Barring the pixelated shots, I think that our music video is almost at the level of professionalism, add a few tweaks, and props which we were limited by budget by, I think we could’ve made a music video to be accepted as an official Music Video for Gary Jules’ Mad World. My personal favourite shot would be at the end from 2:39 – 2:45, as it sums the song up in a way: it has the world in the back being ‘Mad’ and looking hectic with all the lights, and at the front is the character being isolated, which is our theme. Our Target audience is people who feel isolated from the world, and I think our video helps them feel a sense of belonging, as our character is almost depressed and alone throughout. This aids with the viewer’s appreciation of the video because people tend to welcome things that they can relate to a lot more easily. The main thing I had learnt from this project would be to be a little more time-efficient; I found it distracting and I would seclude myself for hours before I realizing that I have. If I was to do this again, I would be more efficient with my time management.

I enjoyed making this video, and I feel proud with our end product.