Telephone Music Video

Our first video of second semester and the beginning of our entertainment unit was the music video. For our music video we chose the song Telephone by Lady Gaga. The story follows a girl who has just experienced a breakup, her friends are there for her and throw a girls' night to cheer her up. By the end, she has regained her confidence and she moves on from the bad relationship. The theme for our video was uplifting and overcoming to show that you can move on from hard times and even become a better person from them.

Pre-Production 

Our pre-production stages consisted of storyboarding, beat sheet preparation, song choosing, location scouting, and casting. We first had to decide what song we wanted to do. Our three songs we were deciding between were Fireflies by Owl City, Party In the USA by Miley Cyrus, and Telephone by Lady Gaga. Then we planned out our story, we were originally going to film inside/around outside a store like Target or Walmart and use a payphone in different locations all around town. We had issues with getting permission to film in the public spaces so we brainstormed our next idea which became our video. One of our final steps before we began filming was choosing and actor and setting up a date to film that would work best for them. One of my group members knew a girl from another high school that would be a strong choice for our main character. We got to know her before casting her, and we filmed the next Saturday in the basement of my house.

 Production

While filming we had a few issues with getting a variety of shots because of the limited space and time we had to film in. Another obstacle we found out later was that some of our shots looked a bit yellow because of the lighting in the room, next time we are going to pay more attention to this and make adjustments accordingly. It was easy to get off track and distracted since the environment we were trying to create for the film was similar to a party scene. If I were to film another video like this I would try to steer clear of any party-like environments because they prove to be rather problematic. In the end we had plenty of shots but many of them couldn't be used due to actors looking at the camera and low quality.

Post-Production

Many of our mistakes from the production stage of our video carried over into editing and post-production and made it a bit difficult. Our original ending for the video did not make sense with what we had envisioned and we had complications with finding a time to reshoot with our actor. We decided to end the video with a flashback type of edit in which all of the previous shots were played in reversed order at a sped up speed and closing with a shot of our main actor smiling. During reedits we are going to revise this and make sure it isn't as abrupt of an ending. I believe we did the best we could with what we had and it turned out decent. I consider this project to be a major learning experience for all of my team and we are hoping to treat the next project with a more serious and professional attitude.