For my music video, I have chosen the popular, established song 'Beez In The Trap' by mainstream artist Nicki Minaj who has a well established career in the RNB\hip-hop genre. Her successful career has produced and contributed many singles to the industry. Her unique image, portrayed through many of her music videos has made a lasting impression upon fans. I personally enjoy her unique sense of style and distinct ability as a female rapper. I admire her creativity and also her ability to perform with the other artists involved in the huge record label 'YMCMB'. She appeals to teenage/young audiences with many of her videos featuring nice cars, money, drinking and partying. The track I have chosen is performative, as are many of her videos as I have researched and gained audience feedback upon my chosen track.
Research also suggests the lyrics to my chosen track 'Beez In The Trap', 'In The Trap' relates to a quote from Nicki Minaj herself of 'anywhere you get your money' which is a prominent convention and prop used in a lot of her videos. From researching examples of other performative, abstract videos she has done, I decided my video needed to be focused on the artist and lyrics perhaps using lip sync as opposed to narrative structure. I used a series of close ups, mid shots and long shots of my chosen characters to achieve this. This encouraged promoting the artists and drew attention to the lyrics, ultimately resulting in a professional, performative video.
I began researching codes and conventions of the RNB/hip-hop genre that frequently occurred in various videos by Nicki Minaj. By doing this I found that a dominant convention was being materialistic with various images and shots of money, cars, jewellery and drinking being most frequently used and evident in nearly all the videos not just by American RNB star Nicki Minaj but other RNB artists such as Lil-Wayne and Chris Brown. I included examples of their videos and other videos from the RNB genre on my blog. Lil-Wayne and Chris Brown also share the same record label as Nicki Minaj, she is the only female artist on the label however, which was founded by Lil-Wayne and follows the motto of 'money over everything' which confirms money is a significant convention of the RNB genre. Research also confirmed the setting of most of the videos appears to be in a nightclub or featuring an atmosphere which would be appropriate for drinking and dancing. I decided I wanted to include and recreate this in my music video. Following are some examples of screen shots from my video and the video of Nicki Minaj-Beez InThe Trap:
Using the video enabled me to decide on the ideas and images I wanted to include in my video the most and how I was going to shoot and recreate them. Myself and my partner decided on the location of 'pozition nightclub' Hull as the location in which we would shoot the video, I contacted the owner via text message asking for permission to use the nightclub for filming, you are able to take mobile phones and other photographic devices into the nightclub when visiting but filming for a college assignment meant we needed to be granted permission. I have included this on my blog. This was granted but only during the clubs usual opening hours, this meant we could only film between 10.30pm and 3.30am and would have to work around members of the public that were also visiting the club during that time, this made filming slightly more challenging for our characters. We chose to film on the least popular night for the club with the aim there wouldn't be as many people for shooting. All the footage was used to create draft one. However when editing and reviewing the footage we found that it was too dark, and some of the shots were unclear. After receiving some audience feedback we reached the conclusion to reshoot in the college theatre. Booking a time in which myself and my partner were available, the actors and the theatre for a long enough period of time proved challenging. I had to get in touch with my college tutor in the first instance so. Could be directed to the individual in charge of booking time slots in the theatre, this was Andy Feetom, a drama teacher within the college. I emailed him to begin with but then decided to visit his office to arrange more efficiently. I wanted a dark room preferably with a black background which is why I did not use the college 'green room' a room designed for filming and editing as you can adjust and edit the background on the editing suite, I really didn't want the video to look overly edited. I have uploaded images of the college theatre filming space to my blog.
The black curtain meant we could adjust the setting ourselves and props and lighting were no longer an issue. Timing still remained a problem however so after enquiring for other available spaces we were lead to a slightly smaller college theatre filming space, however it still included mirrors and a black curtain which was what we needed but more importantly provided us with extended filming time which was more flexible for our actors and ideas. Using a bright light and varied camera angles, we were able to create a similar effect of a strobe light. It was important to collect an adequate amount of filming as our chosen song is 4 minutes 41 seconds long. The length of the song and the amount of times the chorus is repeated did make it seem very repetitive and I feel given the chance to complete this project again I would of considered this.
When editing for the second draft of the video, we included footage mostly from the reshooting of the video, however upon reflection of the first shoot we found some of the shots were able to include by overlapping shots and adjusting the editing of some of the existing shots created by strong mise en scene for the video. Audience feedback suggested that the video was a lot more effective, the lighting proved to have more positive feedback and a peer also quoted ' I thought the theatre was a section of position nightclub ' which complimented the lighting and adjustment of our location. Our aim was to create a well lit nightclub setting. When I created my storyboard and animatic for the video, I wanted it to comply exactly with that, so when writing my evaluation I could almost screenshot my video against my animatic, similarly like I did to the original music video, however when I began filming and experimenting with the camera, I found I wanted to improvise and include shots I hadn't previously planned to such as close ups, mid shots and long shots for example lip syncing an extreme close up of the female character's lips. By creating the animatic and gaining some audience feedback, filming and analysing the conventions I wanted to include in the video, including mise en scene and cinematography, I found I could work from the storyboard and animatic as opposed to towards them.
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