Coursework: Pre-production planning

Pre-production is an essential part of the filmmaking process. You now need to plan your music video in detail to ensure you capture everything you need when filming.

There are four key elements to pre-production: music video treatment, mise-en-scene planning, a comprehensive shot list and a well-planned shooting schedule.

Create a new blogpost on your coursework blog called 'Music video pre-production' and work through the following planning tasks:

1) Music video treatment

You may already have a finished music video treatment from your summer project and/or preliminary exercise - definitely use or develop that if it works with your project. 

However, you may need to update your treatment or even change it completely now you have finished your preliminary exercise. The original example from the summer for music video treatments can be found here.

2) Mise-en-scene planning

Plan everything that will appear in front of the camera in your music video - and this is vital when it comes to music video and music genre. 

Remember CLAMPS: Costume, Lighting, Actors (cast, placement, movement, expression), Make-up, Props, Setting.

Costume
What will your artist wear? What other costumes will be required? What is the costume supposed to communicate to the audience? How does this link to genre or constructing representations?

Lighting
How will you light the different scenes in your music video? Day or night? Interior or exterior? If outside, can you use streetlights, shadows, reflected sunlight or other creative techniques to achieve the lighting style you want? If inside, experiment with creative lighting techniques using windows, blinds, artificial lights, phone flashes, ring lights and more. You may also want to use our professional lighting set-up with a white or greenscreen background depending on how you plan to conduct the interviews - speak to Mr Ray if you want to arrange this for an after-school filming session.

Actors/performers
The first thing you need to plan is your cast - who will be in your production? The key casting is obviously your artist but you may have other characters too. Try and cast people who are reasonably similar to the character or performer they are playing (both in age and personality). Next, plan their placement and movement in key scenes - how will the audience get to know them? How do you plan to position the audience to connect with your artist?

Make-up
Plan any make-up you require - this can be very important for music video.

Props
What props will you require? Remember, you can't use anything that might resemble a weapon in a public or school location (this is VERY important). Well-planned props can help to communicate genre and narrative quickly - vital in a music video where you can't use dialogue.

Setting
This should already be largely planned using your music video treatment. However, now is the time to specify exact locations. For external locations, try and take pictures of settings or use Google Maps and Google Earth. Spending quality time planning your locations can make a huge difference to the professionalism of your production. AQA also seem to prefer external rather than school-based locations - particularly for a brief like this.

If you have a bit of budget to work with you may want to look at booking a rehearsal studio to get more of a band or performance feel to your music video. Pirate studios are an example of a rehearsal and recording studio with several London locations.

YouTube guidance

There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube to help with the pre-production process.

Here's a video guide to Mise-en-scene at degree or film-school level:



...And here's Darius Britt on the top 15 mistakes new filmmakers make - there are a few key aspects of Mise-en-scene in there:



3) Shot list

The final aspect of your pre-production planning is to write a comprehensive shot list for every single possible shot you plan to film for your music video. For three minutes of music video, that is going to be a LOT of shots - quite possibly more than 200.

Remember, a shot list is a full list of all the shots in your video with information for each of them (shot type, action/movement etc.) Creative shot choices aside, it’s easy to forget that a shot list is a strategic document. Creating a shot list is essentially like creating a shooting gameplan for the day.

Here's our friend Darius with a reminder of the different shot types and angles:

 

Here are some top tips for writing a shot list:

 

Your shot list needs to contain EVERY shot you plan to film for your whole music video AND additional shots to create flexibility when editing. These additional shots are often close-ups, cutaways, alternative angles or similar. Cutaways are important as music videos generally have fast-paced editing so you'll need a LOT of shots.

We advise using a simple table on Microsoft Word or Google Docs to set out your shot list - you can find an example from a short film here. It makes sense to write your shot list by scene or location rather than a huge list of every shot in the promo video in chronological order. 

If you're artistic, you may want to sketch out your shot list in the form of a storyboard. You can find a storyboard template here that you can print and then sketch if that's your preferred way of working.

4) Shooting schedule

See our separate post on filming for this.

Pre-production due date - see Google Classroom.