Preliminary Exercise

In order to understand the basics of filming a typical music video, we were given the opportunity to reenact Britney Spears' video for the song 'Hit Me Baby One More Time'. To begin with, we watched the video and used a sheet to collect the times the shots start and end and how long they are, also what's included in the shot therefore we can reenact it ourselves. As we were recording the times for the shots, we began to realize how different it was in comparison to our last preliminary exercise (extract from TV show, 'Life On Mars'.) I learned that in a pop video, there are a large amount of shots and the camera doesn't usually stay in the same position for a long time. There is frequent fast paced movement with the camera which also makes the video more interesting as opposed to a long, dragged out shot.

We decided to just reenact the opening of the video, were the singer (Spears) is in the classroom, and eventually the bell rings signalling the end of the lesson, then everyone running out and the song starts (where we stop). After recording the times for the multiple different shots, me, myself and Romina then started to reenact the scene at school, with the help of our teacher. The different shot proved to be quite difficult to achieve, however we managed to pull through in the end. For instance, during the part where the bell rings and everyone leaves their classrooms and enters the halls, the camera is placed in the air looking down at all the students in a high angle shot. However in order to achieve this, our teacher had to stand on a tall table in order to get the shot, and this ended up helping us in the end. 

Other difficulties we found were continuity issues. Through doing this exercise it helped me understand how important continuity is within anything you're filming in order to help the scene make sense. However in the end we began to get the hand of taking continuity into account and filming was successful!