Music Video Assignment

This is a music video I made for the song "Royals" by Lorde. 

Music Video Project - Written Reflection

  For this assignment, I made a music video for the song Royals by Lorde.  In my video, I wanted to keep a very simple yet rich and fancy theme to it.  The song “Royals” by Lorde talks about everything that she wants but can’t have.  In my video, I took that main idea of not being able to have everything and made my video based on that.  I started my video off with a plain, white sheet with nothing on top of it to represent that feeling of emptiness.  The model in my video is featured about 6-8 times.  Every time she is featured, she starts off with no emotion and as the video progresses she becomes more happier and happier.  The reason for this is because everything in the video becomes more and more luxurious and fancy.  The happier the model is the more she has, which is the exact meaning of Lorde’s song.  The pace of my video is a lot slower.  The transitions in my video were In each of the scenes, I slowed them down and let them play for longer because of the pace of the song.  I wanted them to match based on the pace of the music.

 In my video, I feel like I did achieve unity and continuity because I kept the common theme going throughout my video.  The clips I shot all were off jewelry, landscapes, lights at night and people around the city.  I decided to film these things because it matched with the theme and message I wanted to show in my video.  While filming my video, I had some technical difficulties when it came to filming actual scenes.  I had some problems shooting lights and focusing on them. Especially if they were at night.  I overcame this by lowering the amount of light entering in the shot and increased the shutter speed so I could immediately get the shot.  Something new I learned while filming this video was how to hold your camera steady so it doesn’t shake if a tripod isn’t with you.  For example, the scene where it has the ferris wheel at night with blurred lights was shot without a tripod but I used my technique to keep the camera steady and stable as possible.  That turned out into a success.

The music video that I filmed was nothing like the storyboard I originally designed.  There were some similarities but mainly everything changed.  In my storyboard, I didn’t have the idea of the model being in the video and getting happier every time she sees something classified as “royal”.  I added it as I began filming because I thought it was a better way to represent the meaning behind the video.  I met my expectations in terms of how the video turned out.  It was a video that showed what it was like to be royal and have everything and be happy about it.  In some areas, I see room for improvement.  For next time, I want to focus on following the plan on my storyboard, rather than having a plan, but freestyling the video.  Overall, I am very satisfied with my final product.

By Basma