MUSIC VIDEO PRE-PRODUCTION

I actually started planning my music video a little while before we received the official brief for it from college. In September 2016 during the process of my 30 second narrative project, I started to think about my music video, as I'm the kind of person who likes to plan ahead, and from when I've done video projects in the past I knew that planning ahead as much as possible was crucial for the music video project, I really wanted it to be stellar.

I already knew that I wanted to make a video for a band that was involved in the London DIY Punk Scene, a scene which I am involved in and so I was thinking of different bands, considering various different bands that I've seen and worked with (my part time sound tech experience) at local venues. Many names went through my head, but when the name Active Slaughter popped into my mind, it immediately clicked that they would be the perfect band to make a music video for;

I'd seen them live for their first gig since they reformed in June 2016, and as they're a band with outspoken views and lyrical themes of anarchism, animal rights activism and anti-government agenda, I knew I'd be able to work well with them on a music video.

I'd met their bassist Jeannie at the Rebellion Punk Music Festival in August that year, and met her again at a local gig a few days after I came up with the idea and asked her about it, she said she loved the idea and that I should talk to the singer JJ about it. On the 22nd September, I messaged JJ on Facebook and proposed the idea to him:

JJ responded and he too thought it was a great idea, he mentioned that the band were recording their new song 2 weeks ahead of our chat:

After these messages, we met up for a drink (I'm 18 don't worry) on September 29th and I gave JJ a detailed run down of the music video project, and talked to him about my initial ideas for what I wanted from the music video. He'd already decided that we should use their new song "Sea Shepherd", about the wildlife conservation organisation Sea Shepherd.

At the time, the Active Slaughter lineup was made up of 4 vegans who were all actively and directly involved in animal rights activism, and they'd written a song about Sea Shepherd who go into international waters and stop things like whale poaching, overfishing, and cruelty to marine wildlife. It's an organisation I already knew about and supported, so I was definitely excited to make a Sea Shepherd themed music video, JJ suggested contacting them about using their footage, which I thought was a great idea to mix into the music video.

For the rest of my contact with JJ and the rest of the band, you can see all of the necessary information in my Client Liaison document

LOCATION PLANNING

When it came to planning to shoot the music video, we had two venues in mind. T Chances in Tottenham being the main one, as it's essentially a hub for the DIY punk scene in north London, and as I've spent hours doing sound tech work experience there, I knew they'd allow us to film there for a small fee which we could all pay as a collective.

As I've been to a lot of gigs and done a lot of sound tech at t chances, I contacted Andy Howells who works at the venue and is the manager of the small stage bar room. I asked him if it would be possible to book the room for a Sunday and asked him about prices. He said that we could use the stage and the room for free as there's rarely anything going on in there on Sundays, and because he knows me and the band personally.

A few weeks after my initial contact with Andy (sometime in December) I had a production meeting with Sam and Luke as we'd become a powerful trio who had come together to make the Active Slaughter music video. We contacted Andy to talk about cementing a date to film at T Chances. We wanted to do it on Sunday the 8th of January, and Andy said that he'd be out of the country however the venue would be open and available, we then contacted the band about it and Jeannie made us aware that she'd be out of the country until the 11th so we talked to both Andy and the band and everyone was free to do it on Sunday the 15th January, a week later than our originally planned date.

EQUIPMENT HIRE

For the equipment hire, me and the team went to the media pod in college and spoke to our favourite superheroes Juan and Geoff. We had them give us a list of available equipment that we'd be able to borrow during the date range of our shoot and we took the list away with us.

During the next production meeting that we had after speaking to them, we had a look at the list, looked up all of the available equipment online and looked at the main features of the cameras, microphones, tripods and lights available to us and then compared them all to each other and decided on which equipment we were going to borrow from the college for our shoot.

We ended up deciding on booking a Nikon D3200 DSLR and a Panasonic HD Camcorder because the Nikon would be good for static/tripod shots, and the Camcorder has amazing shake reduction and 50fps filming capability. We also used my own DSLR from home for the shoot.

Apart from all of that, the rest of the pre-production process was minimal and straightforward. All of the necessary paperwork can be found in my production paperwork folder.

CRITICAL INCIDENTS

During the pre-production, we had very few problems with planning, however we did have one or two critical incidents.

- Andy being out of the country on the first weekend of January, which meant we had to contact Marc who is the resident sound tech for the small stage at T Chances

- Jeannie also being out of the country on the first weekend of January meaning we had to push the shoot back by a week, and then go over all of the plans we'd set up again to make sure everyone was able to do that day

- Physically printing off Call Sheets before realising that the next time we'd see the band in person was actually the day of the shoot, so we had to convert it to a digital format which we sent to the band members in a Facebook group chat.