How our Project is Developing

Our original plans were to center our project around a key theme of sexuality, with a particular focus on homo sexuality because we wanted to challenge typical club scene conventions. However due to the issues we faced with our male cast we had to adapt the project to represent an all female scene whilst still trying to center it around sexuality and the issues of censorship of everyday life, these news articles are an example of societal condemnation which we aimed to challenge.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/06/17/lesbian-couple-told-to-stop-kissing-at-baseball-game/

•  'Taylor Campione and Kelsi Culpepper, from Minneapolis, say the Target Field guard told them: “We don’t play grab-ass here” and ordered them to “adhere to the ten commandments”.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2107896/Lesbian-couple-kicked-restaurant-sharing-brief-kiss.html









We filmed footage based on representing a sexually liberal environment where dominatrix acts weren't so much acts but second nature, regular behavior of the club. The concept was designed to create a club where nothing was labeled or judged. We filmed shots to incorporate our theme of voyeurism, the idea of watching and a fascination with what was going on. Despite it being completely normal to this club, which is why we filmed the scenes with the watchers watching.

 Our idea is developing and changing, partially due to the sensitivity of the material filmed but also due to the progressive development of a stronger narrative within the club scene. The dominatrix theme is progressively becoming a more key theme in our music video a long with the narrative of a strong female character dominating the club users. 

Brief Commentary

We filmed our music video a couple of weeks ago. We set up the studio in full black with panels of corrugated plastic that we had dancers dancing behind, we shone lights on these panels and varied the focus of the camera so it was about what you couldn't see. We filmed a variety of shots and angles of this and our other scenes like the two watchers on the sofa and club scene. We are now editing our music videos on mac computers using the editing programme Final Cut Pro. We started by downloading our song onto Final Cut Pro then playing through it and using markers to mark the beat throughout. After this we labeled our best shots so we knew which shots we definitly wanted to use in the video. We then began placing the clips into the sequence and seeing how they looked together before cutting it all together. We used the markers and slowed it down to find the beat and cut on it, we also have a lot of shots where the light flares into the camera so we used these to cut on as well as using the shots that move into black as a means of cutting.


The strengths of our rough cut so far are definitly the cutting between shots because we've made effective use of the flares that appear in our music video to try and hide cuts, also we've taken special care to make sure the cuts are on the beat of the song. The weakness and issue we've come up against in our editing process is the sensitivity of the material we filmed and trying to edit it in a way that is appropriately censored. Another main issue we've faced in the editing process is trying to edit the video so that it is sexually suggestive as oppose to explicit.

Evaluation of the Rough Cut Progress

Once we had finished editing together our rough cut of clips on final cut pro we put it on a hard drive in order to upload it to our blogs. The rough cut is used to show how the clips work together and to give us a basis of video to work around and put more into. It is part of the research and development of our finished product as it allows us to try out different clips together and begin creating meaning within the video before shaping it into the finished product. We still need to make it less explicit and shape narrative and characters into it as more key themes before the final cut, but the edit is strong in editing to the beat and cuts on lighting flares. It’s also allowed us to play around with the dominatrix character and the watchers to work out how we’re going to finally portray those characters before the final cut.

The Shoot Day

 Aside from this we had to dress the two watchers and make sure they were looking as identical as we could get them looking, for example making them switch their rings onto the same finger, take off one of their watches, do their hair the same way, make their suits look the same etc. After this we could begin setting up the lighting whilst one of us rehearsed the poses we created for them based on Man Ray photos.

Looking back at the Shoot Day

Our production group worked efficiently as a team, each swapping roles so everyone put equal effort into each aspect of the music video but also in learning off each other’s performance in each role and helping each other to perform each role to the best level. A lesson that I learnt during the shoot was to, in future, plan ahead for possible unreliability. In the case of our whole male cast dropping out, if we had planned for the unexpected we could’ve cast an understudy to step into their place and perform the roles we needed.

The only adjustments we may need to make to our website and album artwork designs are to take the focus of them off a male homosexual audience because of the issue of our male cast dropping out, however we still managed to create a similar looking club scene using women instead of a mix of both genders.

Problems and successes with the Shoot Day

We had one major issue in that our male cast for the dancing scenes didn’t turn up and we had to work around this by reworking the concept of no sexual identity, meaning that in this club there was no sexuality everyone did what they wanted. We had to rework this as it was pretty unclear without any male cast to play the parts, so we ended up just turning it into a female fetish bondage club with a minor freedom of sexuality theme. I think the scene with the plastic panels set was the best because the lighting and actors looked really genuine and it represented the most meaning throughout our video. The panels were almost like windows into a fantasy world where there were no rules or labels and no societal condemnations on what people did, this part for me was the most representational of our traditional idea of the ‘Grey Room’ taken from Fifty Shades of Grey’s ‘Red Room’.

The only part of the shoot I wish had gone better was the pole dancing in the dancing scene where the characters looked much less natural and looked more like they were performing to the camera rather than just in a club scene. We managed our talent well as we constantly had one of the group in a directory role constantly directing and telling the cast what to do how to act even throughout the shots were going on. The bit of the shoot I enjoyed the most was the plastic panels scene because there were parts of this that I filmed which I thought I filmed really well and it was also the most successful part in my opinion, especially in representation of the overall themes. The part I’m looking forward to most in the editing is the watchers scene with the rising floor as we filmed plenty of different shot types and angles for this scene and it’ll be interesting working out which shots to cut into and how create an interesting sequence that relates to voyeurism.

Dividing the roles on the Shoot Day

We divided the roles in the group into someone controlling playback so the cast could feel the mood of the song and act appropriately, someone filming and achieving varied angles to cut into, and a director to continually direct the cast and make sure they knew how we wanted them to act. We swapped these roles between the group members roughly every 40 minutes so that everyone could take an active role in each aspect of the music video production, however during the beginning scenes we needed someone to operate the inflatable floor as we filmed so we had to swap between this as well. I personally think I filmed one of the scenes particularly well where I had to film from outside the plastic into the plastic but varying angles and shot size whilst panning and blurring the shots, which I found difficult but much more interesting to film that just normal still shots.