'End Is Here' - Music Video

So this is me and Aaron’s music video that we created for our Media Diploma at college. For this unit the class was split up into groups to work on the videos, with group sizes ranging from 1 to 5. Fortunately we were allowed to work just as a two man group, and so didn’t have to work with any new confusing people!

So with the music video now done and dusted I thought we could go on a little walk down its production road, as well as go into the aftermath of the video.

To start, let's go right to the beginning.

So… I’m not exactly sure where this video came from…

Our initial task was to pick three songs and create music video pitches for them; basically a summary of the video, plot, tone, effects, etc. It’s somewhere between a synopsis and a full script. So once it was done for three different songs we then spent a few lessons narrowing it down to one choice through peer feedback and our own judgement.

And the choice we arrived at was a track created by Aaron himself; ‘End Is Here’.

Again, not sure where the concept emerged from… I guess just listening to the song really.  The mood and tone come straight from the song, that epic and screeching darkness but also quirky and amusing. Something about the song it’s self just makes it a black comedy, and for the video to be anything else would be just wrong.

The Zombies basically came from me and Aaron loving Zombies. As shallow as it may sound, the Zombies are there because we though, “wow Zombies are cool, we’ve gotta have some of those!” The chalk pit from our classic ‘Squid and the Daleks’ suggested it’s self as a good setting for a desolate wasteland with roaming Zombies.

So I had Zombies, the chalk pit as a location, and a black comedy tone. From these elements I knew we were going to be using Zombies in a slightly different way than usual. Something off beat and quirky and playful.

Even though I prepared three pitches I already had ‘End Is Here’ in my head as the one that would go through to be made. I loved the tone and the narrative, and the way it fit the music perfectly. It was also the most achievable of the pitches, it was designed around the things we knew we had; the chalk pit, the two of us being the zombies. Looking at this pitch we knew we could pull it off.

After this we spent a few weeks developing the pitch and getting it ready to shoot. We drew up storyboards and created shot lists. Take a look-see:

And we also did paperwork… so much horrible paperwork…

But finally after all that Pre-production we were ready to record.

Recording took two days and despite that rather short shooting time it proved to be a tricky and fiddly business. To save you the heart ache we endured, as well as to try and keep this post relatively entertaining, I shall pick just a few of the best filming moments.

MAKE UP! Oh that lovely lovely frustrating and itchy make up. We were aiming for a 'Night of the Living Dead' style make-up, simple pale face with black under the eyes.

We originally bought a make-up it from a party shop, which promised to contain all the elements needed to make a Zombie face. It did not. In fact the whole kit was a really bad buy and a waste of money. It contained no white make up and the grey face paint made me look like the Tin Man. We swiftly abandoned this kit.

Luckily we found some white powder lying around (god knows why it was lying around, but thank god that it was!), and basically brushed that all over our faces. You know talcum powder? It was basically just that. It only sort of stuck and flew around the room in great clouds.

We used some of the black face paint from the kit to darken under our eyes and complete the look. Of course once the make-up went on it wasn’t coming off until we finished shooting, this meant walking around a good chunk of town all Zombied up. Aaron took full advantage of wandering town fully Zombie-fied, moaning “brains” every time a civilian walked by. And oh boy, the looks they gave us.

The disgraced make-up kit...

I also learned a great lesson that YOU, yes YOU, can learn from. Back up. Buck up, back up back up. The specific lesson is camera related. For filming we used a very fancy college camera that could pull in and out of focus. It’s a lovely thing and can be used to make very nice shots. I've never really been able to play with the focus on a shot before, having never used a camera awesome enough to do that, so this was a very nice opportunity.

However this coolness comes at a price; the battery runs out really fast, it literally seems to just leak out the camera as you use it. And so I cunningly decided to take my own camera along as a backup. This saved the video. Whenever fancy camera ran out, old reliable camera was ready to take its place.

The moral of this tale is BACK UP! It can be applied to more situations then cameras. Basically when setting up a shoot, assume everything will go wrong, and make a plan for when it does. This is a time when destructive thinking is actually helpful!

One of our most striking locations was a very interesting slightly run down car park. Now there was a lot of graffiti on the place, and on our location scout me and Aaron suspected it might be a haunt of local gangs. So out of fear of “youths” we planned to shoot there on a weekday when all the sinister kiddies would be in schooling. However there is something we didn’t anticipate on being at the car park… CARS! We were just minding our own business, doing some sweet acting running up and down the car park, when a car pulled in. Aaron had his back to it, so I heroically spotted it first and dived out of the way shouting; “CAR” The best part was that it seemed like the driver totally didn’t even care he almost ran the two of us over. The dude didn’t even shout at us! Just carried on with his day unaffected… Good for you almost killer!

The chalk pit was just good clean fun in the chalk. It all went smoothly if I recall… A few passers-by gave us funny looks but that’s about it. Oh, there were these really annoying little fly’s that would settle on anything still. So of course when I put the storyboards down to shoot, I came back to find the page covered in flies. No harm done, just sort of shook them off, except it turned out that on one occasion I forgot to shake them off before turning the page. That’s right – One of the storyboard pages has bits of squished fly and blood stuck to it. Nice and professional.

After filming was all done and wrapped in a bow, it was time for the delights of editing.

This video is probably the trickiest bit of editing I’ve ever done (so far…). Usually when I edit I have the scene that I’m trying to construct, and it’s just a matter of puzzle piecing that scene together out of all the different shots and coverage and takes. And usually, since I’m a pretty visual guy, I’ll have a pretty clear view of what I want the edit to look like before I even begin shooting.

However, this is a non-linear music video fool! No script to refer back to and neither of us knew exactly when each shot would occur, or how the different sections would be laid out. All we knew was that the edits and the action had to match the beat of the song. This is quite a lot of freedom, and almost limitless possibilities of how every could bit together… It was quite daunting.

Editing this project was very different to others, and the video only really came together in editing. Everything depended on this, a narrative, suspense, flow…. Everything. This was basically like the writing stage, where we had to piece something together from everything we shot. I suspect this might be how it goes for a lot of music videos…

Don’t get me wrong, it was actually a lot of fun to edit, although the pressure of working to a rapidly approaching deadline was quite tense. 

However, we battled past the stress valiantly, and I think we managed to put together a very good edit.

There’s actually been quite a lot of confusion from audiences as to what the narrative of the video is. This seems really weird to me, I mean it’s there! Look at the screen, the story is right there taking place in front of you! Look, it’s Zombies! Look at the Zombies! They have a guitar! What don’t you understand?

But then again when a video lives in your head, and just basically takes over your life for three weeks it’s always going to be obvious to you what it’s about. The audience is presented with just this final product, fresh in their heads for the first time and then after 3 minutes it’s over. So I can’t be too harsh on the confused folk.

So I thought I’d just take this opportunity to explain, from my viewpoint, what the video is all about. So what you have first and foremost is a really simple story about two Zombies roaming a post-apocalyptic wasteland. This dystopic land is filled with relics of the fallen society; books, toys, cloths, etc. The first Zombie is a serious fellow, stalking the land and just being zombie-like in general. 

Zombie #2 is a more playful creature, toying with the abandoned junk filling the land. They are brought together when they both set their sights on a stray guitar on the ground. They both go after it, and so end up meeting and fighting. After this it’s basically a Zombie bromance, with the two running around this deserted world, getting past their differences, and eventually working together to put on a concert for their good friend the teddy bear. And then they walk off into the distance together. That’s it. That’s your story.

Okay, so that’s the video right at the surface level. But if you want… 

you can go deeper *cue Inception music*.

Like most works of Zombies, the creatures here are used as a metaphor. However we did something a bit different from the typical metaphor, that being along the lines of “we are all just Zombies!” Or, “man is the real monster!”

It’s about how teenagers can be sort of shell-shocked into acting like children. Both the Zombies wear pretty normal outfits for the un-dead, no tears or blood stains, and whilst this might just look like our budget showing, it was actually intentional. They look like just normal teens because that’s kind of what they’re supposed to be. It’s this idea that life has beat them down so much they’re reduced to this Zombie-like state, where all they can do is stagger around the world, and to try and cope they retreat into toys and hobbies, the guitar, the teddy bear are their coping devices. All of this is a very nice metaphor, wrapped up in a wasteland world full of Zombies.

Not to get too sappy here, but this is also a theme that’s kind of personal to me. The world has been kinda crappy to me through my life, and I have often felt rather Zombie-like, sort of barley stable but having to stagger on, not really sure why I’m doing things but just having to do them. And to cope I used to, and suppose still do to some degree, retreat into the world of playing with my Power Rangers and Transformer toys. It’s actually only recently that I’m starting to overcome this, finding myself and then taking that self that I have found and having the confidence to put him out there. And I think this college course as well as my own recent film-making is a big part of that… Wow, this got suddenly deep and heavy. Let’s take a breather.

But yeh, I thought this was quite a cool meaning to put into the video, and also something I thought would be quite relatable to a lot of viewers. However so far no one has picked up on this meaning, or at least commented on it. Again, everyone just seems to be a bit confused!

 Maybe we could have done more to make the metaphor more obvious, and yet I really like the video how it is, and adding a final twist where we reveal the zombies are just normal teens would have been VERY cheesy and Shyamalan-esque (yuck) and would have destroyed the atmosphere.

Of course this is getting into the “Matter of Interpretation” realm of viewing, so if you see some other meaning in there, or think “I didn't see that! He’s talking nonsense!” then it’s totally valid.

Ok, we’re all done now I promise. But before I go I will just add that we’re very pleased with the video. The acting, the editing, the locations… Everything. And even though audience reaction hasn't been that good in our class, we very much hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it. It turned out to be quite the little Halloween treat!

And here’s hoping for a disfinction! (goodness me, with have PWG video in-jokes now!)

Squid and the Daleks

‘Squid and the Daleks’ is the brain child of me and my friend Aaron Newbigging and our mutual love of Doctor Who and… Uh… Squids.  This post is quite late as the actual video came out a while ago, but I thought I’d throw it on here along with some musings and insights.

Not entirely sure how this came about! I think it started with the sound, the “GLAGHURAGLHG”! Aaron would make this sound and somehow it was given to a Squid character who would throw rocks. And somehow we had the idea of placing Squid into a Doctor Who story and making him the companion. We are sort of insane.

I wrote the script out in under and hour at about midnight, just feverishly tapping out the ideas. I had the chalk pit in mind as a location and I knew I wanted to use Daleks, and I knew I had to incorporate Squids love of rocks. My process was that I had 3 central jokes, the simple fact that Squid is the companion, Squid throwing the rock at the Dalek, and then Squid getting down on the floor when he should be running.  I then just sort of wrote all the stuff in between these jokes, filling it with random and mostly nonsense dialogue. Professional script writing!

I think a really cool tip actually is to write for any awesome locations you know you have. If I’d written a script set on a space ship then… Well it wouldn't have worked. But because I wrote for this chalk pit really close to my house it worked out really well. Take advantage of your surroundings, that’s what I’m saying!

Filming was… interesting. I don’t want to say it was a nightmare, because most of it was actually quite fun. But then think of how tough it was… the word “Nightmare” springs to mind. Okay, so a nice nightmare, like a nightmare in which you’re walking a tight rope whilst eating delicious chocolates. On the one hand: delicious chocolates, huzzah! On the other hand: you are on a tight rope and could fall down hard if you lose balance. Yes, filming was just like that.

The chalk pit is a gorgeous location, and I think a pretty big factor in the videos success. It looks straight out of a Classic Who story and sets the scene perfectly. Can you imagine if we’d done exactly the same video but just in the garden? It could have looked kind of lame.

Our main adversary upon reaching the chalk pit was the pretty strong wind. Now we anticipated that it would completely blow out the sound, meaning we would have to re-dub all the dialogue, however we did not foresee the epic battle of the wind V.S the tripod. The tripod was blown over several times despite our efforts to weigh it down with large pieces of chalk. Luckily the mighty camera is made of strong stuff and even though it was knocked down a few times it always got back up. Good work camera.

Aaron suffered much in the filming. He over dosed on jelly babies after I didn’t properly communicate to him that he didn’t need to actually eat the jelly babies, but just mime it. He also took one for the team when he got down and rolled about on the floor, injuring his shoulder greatly. He was not pleased. But rather awesomely he acted all the way through it, never once breaking the squid character despite the pain. However if you think his look of terror is rather convincing when he’s down on the ground, it’s probably because of the immense pain he’s feeling! Poor Aaron, we all love you!

Aaron in pain

So with the editing I basically had to just switch of the audio and completely reconstruct it from track. The wind distorted the sound of everything meaning the dialogue, foley sounds, and atmosphere had to be re-recorded or scavenged from the internet. This does give the video a sort of unnatural and synthetic sound, but this sort of suits the comedy, almost like it’s a live action cartoon.

An ultimately unused colour correction test

I contemplated doing some colour correction to make the scene look more alien, tint it purple or something, but decided that would sort of detract from the comedy. Whilst I wanted the effects to look nice I didn't want them to overpower the film. But then I didn't want them to be so awful that you couldn't concentrate on anything but they’re awfulness. So I had to be very careful with all my effects shots, to get them just right but not over-do them.

Then we have the effects, the lovely lovely effects. For putting the Dalek and the Tardis into the film I thought it might look cool and old school to composite models into the footage. So rather than rendering out a CGI police box and then popping it in the scene, I filmed a toy Tardis against a green screen. I even filmed the green screen outside so that the toys would have that natural outdoor lighting and so match the original footage. I think both effects work quite well, and the fact that the video is comedy means they don’t have to be perfect. The effects get away with being a bit cartoon-ish.

The rotoscoping was just a delightful walk in the park… *Sobs in corner*. I think I must have watched about 3 complete seasons of TV whilst rotoscoping me and Aarons flailing arms over top of the Tardis in After Effects. And let me tell you I got sick of seeing frame after frame of my face pretty quickly. If you don’t know, rotoscoping is basically taking the footage and tracing around the things you want to appear overtop of the Tardis. Because I suck at explaining tings, here are some visual explanations! Pictures yay!

Rotoscoping example

I edited to temporary music from Classic Who, with the idea that after editing was finished I would take it out and Aaron would then do his own score (he’s a musician you know!).  While he did do some very sweet tracks I did sort of fall in love with a few pieces from classic who, and so kept them in. Aaron did however do the very nice theme tune cover which I believe is up on his sound cloud if you want a better listen. 
https://soundcloud.com/aaron-newbigging

So what’s next for our beloved Squid?

Well we made this video without really thinking about the future. I mean when me and Aaron talk we talk utter nonsense and just throw video ideas back and forth. About half of these seem like a good idea five minutes later. A lot of these ideas have been Squid based, so I can probably confirm squid will return in some form. It’s all about grabbing the right idea out of this mess of random rubbish we create.

One thought was to put Squid into other films and franchises; Squid as Batman’s sidekick, Squid as captain of the Enterprise etc. Whilst this does comedic potential I have this feeling that Squid should stay in the Whoverse for now, along with his best friend, the slightly camp Doctor.

One question is whether or not to pick up the cliff-hanger left by ‘Squid and the Daleks’. A lot of peeps have asked when we’re making the next one and what happens to Squid. But an idea we had was to do Squid sketches and have each one be its own story with a cliff-hanger that’s endlessly left hanging, to have absolutely no continuity. Now I’m really into this idea and the potential it sets up, but we might in the end give in to public demand…

So basically Squid will return in his own little series of sorts… But we’re still figuring it out. And we’re definitely not doing a sequel for sequels sake, we have ideas!

To wrap this up I’m very pleased with the finished video and I think all the effort and time we put in really shows. Also the rock hitting the Dalek cracks me up every time, and I had to edit the damn thing! I’m also very pleased it’s had a positive response with viewers, and actually has quite a lot of views (well, by my videos standards). Thanks for reading/watching, and more cool stuff is coming in the future.

GLUAGH!!

The 'Raffers & Kay' Logos

So recently I designed a handful of logos for the comedy duo Raffers and Kay. So I thought I’d write up a little blog on the designing of the logos, mainly because this blog is very empty and I thought this might be a good something to fill it with.

The brief I got from Allen Rafferty was to create something “technical but quirky” and to use primary colours like red, blue, and yellow. Something I really wanted to get into the logos was a real sense of the characters, to evoke who they are, they’re eccentricity and childishness and friendly nature.

I had quite a few ideas just from the brief, and so decided to create a few designs that Allen could choose from. I tried to make them quite different, giving a couple of different directions to go from; however they all follow the brief in terms of style and colours.

Version One

So this was just my initial gut response to the task. This one was done simply on paper with big chunky coloured markers. I thought the sketchy doodle look would fit the energy of Raffers and Kay well, almost as if this is what the characters would draw if they were making their own logo. It tries to be big and epic with the perspective and 3d element, but the very imperfect style of it adds a quirkiness and childishness.

This first drawing also brought up a main problem to get around. Now I wanted to place the “Raffers” over top of the “Kay”, however “Kay” obviously has much less letters then “Raffers”. This made "Raffers" stand out much more and focus was pulled onto that name. But if I enlarged “Kay” then it became massive and focus was pulled to that. Now these two are a double act, I really didn't want the logo to make one of the names seem more important.  I probably wasn't very successful in making them equal in this first version, but the idea I hit on later was using the distance between the letters to make the two names fill the same amount of space.

Don’t understand? Use this handy dandy visual guide!

This logo also started the yellow oval background trend. It was only going to be the backing for this logo, done as a way to work the yellow colour into it, however I kept thinking that the latter logos needed some kind of back and kept coming back to that shape.

The hand drawn nature of this logo really sets it apart from the others. The others are all very similar and can be used together without clashing; they all have the clean graphical look. This leaves the first version looking almost more like concept art, figuring out the colours and spacing etc. before creating the finals in Illustrator.

However I really have a soft spot for this one. Yes it’s messy, yes it doesn't quite fit in, yes a 10 year old could probably have done it, but I think those might me just the reasons I love it so much…

Version Two

Next, I wanted to make a logo that incorporated Raffers and Kay themselves. The main reason I didn’t do any logos with really complex typography or graphic ideas was because I didn't want to pull focus away from the double act. The logo should really be about them as well as being their names.

So with this in mind I worked up some ideas of how they could fit in. I doodled out a few basic thoughts, one of which was to draw the two as cartoon characters.

I thought this was a bit distracting and hard to look at, as well as perhaps being misleading, as Raffers and Kay is not a cartoon. I thought a slightly more realistic version of this was in order, making the two guys into silhouettes, so that they’re sort of cartoons, but very realistic.

What this does is take the basic shape of the two and boil it down it its bare essentials. To create the simplified versions I had to ask myself; “What are the main features of Raffers and Kay?”

I also toyed with the idea of having the guys spell out the first letters of their names using their arms and legs. This idea was partly inspired by the “Change 4 Life” ads by Ardman.  In the end I thought this design would be too complex and hard to look at. At the size the figures would have to be at they would become unrecognizable as human figures, and just become weirdly distorted letters.





The reason the “Change 4 life” logo works is that the figures are large in the image and also very simple, just being clay models.

Now I had my idea of cut-out looking silhouettes of the guys, but I had to decide what to do with them. The concept of them holding up signs with their names on just sort of came to me. It’s a good way to tie together the figures and logo, and also show off the different personalities by the way each holds his sign. Allen Rafferty is sort of showing off his sign in a slightly cocky way, whilst Jacob Kay is really struggling with his, wobbling about with it.

Now the phrase from my brief; “Technical but quirky” immediately made me think of Adobe illustrator. All the vector art around the internet carries that very precise but very bizarre look. So after my hand drawn version, I turned to Illustrator for this next version.

To create the image I took a ton of reference pictures of myself holding up a large plastic lid. Now these are really out of focus (and slightly embarrassing) but they did the job well. As I couldn't get my whole body in frame I took to separate pictures and put them together in illustrator.

For the faces I just took screen shots of episodes of “Living with Raffers and Kay” and traced around them using the pen tool in illustrator, doing different shapes for the head and sections of hair. I then basically placed these on top of my body shapes. I did make the Kay figure slightly taller using a Raffers and Kay video as a rough guide.

Finally I sort of created a second variation on this logo. I thought perhaps that having the figures take up so much more space than the letters would stop you noticing them so much. The graphics might drown out the letters. So I just quickly did a version where I cut out the bottom halves of the characters, effectively halving the size of the logo.

Version Three

For the final logo I wanted to go back to something more based on the text. The letters aren’t made with an existing font; I drew them out with the pen tool. I thought a homemade font would add a certain charm to it, bringing it back to that quirkiness. I also thought this would avoid any sort of copyright on the font, because I really don’t want to be sued by anyone. Please.

The “&” symbol is traced from my hand drawn one from the first logo because… I thought it looked nice and liked the swish to it. Yes, it has a lot of swish to it. Swish being a technical term.

Even though I wanted it to be text focused I still wanted to find a way of incorporating the characters. I decided on placing them inside the letters, making them cut out pieces from the “A”. Luckily for me both of the names had A’s in so I could just place the guys’ heads into them. I’m also lucky in that the two’s most unique features are their hair styles, making them instantly recognizable from hair alone. Great hair guys, um… keep up the great style… Use shampoo… Um…

 I also discovered a cool way to solve my space problem of the two names not being equal. Whilst I did do a bit of spacing on the “Kay”, too much would have made it look weird and drawn out. So my adding the “&” sign I was able to fill space in the bottom half nicely. If that makes any sense at all.

I just copied the heads from the second logo and placed them into this one, and then added the now obligatory yellow circle backdrop, and presto. I’m rather pleased with this one and I think it really fills out the brief I was given. It also looks really quite snazzy and professional to me, like I can just imagine it sitting on the DVD cover of a sitcom season.

So in the end I’m very pleased with all the logos, with my favorites being version 1 and 2. Allen was very pleased with all of them and ended up throwing a couple up onto the Raffers and Kay Facebook page, Versions Two and Three, I believe. So yes, hop fully the pair can get a lot of use out of the logos and their audience can also get a kick out of them.

Thanks for listening… or… reading. And please check out “Raffers and Kay” (Now with a fancy logo) at these places:

https://www.facebook.com/raffersandkay?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/RaffersandKay

And find me at these spots, you know, if you feel like it:

https://twitter.com/SmithyPhox

https://www.youtube.com/user/doctorwhooutcast

http://pandawithgun.deviantart.com/