The Growlers - Good Advice

 

This project was for the first unit of my Media Studies - Diploma (Level 3) course in which we had to create a music video for a chosen song, taken from a list of pre-selected artists, covering a wide selection of popular music genres. The song my group chose to visually represent was Good Advice, by indie-rock band The Growlers.

 

As the members of my group left the course, I had to take on the project individually. This meant that the pre-production work such as story-boarding, recces and risk assessments etc. had to be handled by myself rather than shared between the group - though much of the required amount of pre-production was halved in some cases, due to the situation I was in.

Ultimately, this helped me in managing my time and resources so I could complete the project to a high enough standard. I took advantage of my position in a band to utilize my band members within the video to add legitimacy through conforming to one of the conventions of a typical 'rock' music video (as in: seeing musicians play their instruments to the song) - The second half of footage centers on a adolescent protagonist performing arbitrary and antisocial actions to capture the angst ridden and narcissistic tone of the lyrics. I also made use of simple transitions of fading to black contextually within a shot (through panning the camera behind an object; or into a surface) to seamlessly cut between the two halves of footage.

​

This project was my introduction to using the editing software Final Cut Pro. I quickly became family with it's user friendly interface and features. I focused on colour correction, to evoke the playfully melancholy tone of the song; as well as editing to the beat of the song.

As an introduction to the course, this unit helped me to prioritize the work I needed to do and to make sure I could produce a good standard of work independently.