Lecture with Pete Fraser

Today we had a two hour lecture with Pete Fraser a media teacher who has been in the industry for over 25 years. He gave the entire class tips on how to succeed in their work including the breakdown of the course and how it was important to pick up as much as possible from your digipack blog and other things. He encouraged me to post more on my blog and that it was important to get everything onto our blogs. This will help to give an examiner a clearer understanding of the development of our work and ideas.

He told us that it is important not to get hung up on the band original ideas and looks and that it was important to create our own idea and branding of the product. An interesting idea was that he said that a video does not have to be over-complicated by extravagant ideas. He followed this point up by showing us a video of a song called razorblades in a Radiohead style technique.

In essence the video was just a teenager laying on the pavement singing the song.You could see people walking past and just them going by and him staying still. It was as if the whole world kept moving and he was the only one remaining still. The video also showed him having his shoes and wallet being taken highlighting the fact that people will seize any chance they get to acquire materialistic product. The video was so simple and basic yet incredibly effective. I believe this is how student videos should be. We are not a high budget production so keeping it simple and clear is a good technique for getting the best grades, over complicating the idea causes the video to look quite cheap and tacky.

He also mentioned the power of editing and how it can amek or break a video. This was clearly evident in a video he showed us called "Pop Culture".

It tells a story of a youtubers rise to fame and then crash of losing this fame due to drug related issues. The video is a clever idea and different which is what makes it so successful. The video has clearly taken a lot of editing to make it so swift. So many cuts and pictures of the artist on a massive stage, magazine articles to big stage shows. It is important to stand out when making a video as you want to interest the audience/examiner into seeing something new.

Finally, I spoke to Pete about our idea for the song The Rifles- Go Lucky. He said he liked the song choice and that the fast rhythm to the song could make a good video. I spoke to him about our ideas for the shots and he said that they were interesting and that we would need to film a lot of takes to get it right. He also stressed the importance of encouraging the actors to go for it and push themselves when acting to get the most realistic video possible. Another helpful piece of advice was that it is not imperative to use a GoPro throughout the video. This means that we could vary our shots more dramatically when filming performance. We can use a greater variety of shots and angles to get a more realistic video impression. This is prominent in things such as close ups or panning shots.

This is Pete's presentation in full which will help me as i can refer back to it should i need to reconsider his advice or memory jog anything he told us.