Never gonna give you up

Over the course of the past month my class has been working on recreating music videos. My group chose Rick Astly's Never Gonna Give You Up music video. In this blog post I will break down the process of the creation of the video.

Pre-production

Our pre-production was very busy once we picked the song and music video. Ryan was tasked with the story boarding, which is quite a feat considering how many different shots there are. That took close to a week. I did the filmscaping as I was the cinematographer. That took about twenty minutes, I also helped find the props. Alexis was there to tell us what to do, can't exactly remember what her document was that she had to do. Alexis and I then did the casting, which was mostly her friends, I tried to get my amigo Zeph to do it but he was like nope so we cast Nathan as Rick. Once that was all finished, we finally got to start production.

Production

Our production was pretty hectic to be quite honest. Our main actor did not want to cooperate with us and was more interested in the legos at the church we filmed at than the video, our backup dancers we found out after the fact were not dancers and their choreography took the better part of that shooting day (something that contributed in our missing shots but I'll get to that later), and our director fell asleep midway through the shoot causing Joey, one of our actors, to be director for the last half of the video. Anyway, so when we filmed at the church we were there for three hours and to be quite honest did not get much done because our actor was goofing around and the whole thing with the backup dancers. By the end of that I estimate we got barely a quarter of the video done. Another thing that happened was that Alexis refused to have the video on in the background so they could lipsync to it because "It would be too much work" and we missed a ton of shots, something I brought up to her, as I had seen the video a million times (its one of my favorite music videos ever) and she just waved it off and claimed we didn't so I believed her and we wrapped up the shoot. A few days later on that snow day where it was 5 degrees we met up to film once more and the same problems occurred, actor was not cooperating, missing shots (ironically the part we had Joey as a director we did not have any missing), and this time Alexis fell asleep which created more trouble for the production. Finally though, after five hours of shooting we finished. Something I learned in the production was the camera which was interesting.

Post production

Our post went along relatively smoothly other than the missing shots, which is why you see repeated shots in the video. Alexis did try to not claim responsibility for these missing shots and claimed it was me and Joey's fault but Ryan and I pointed out that these shots were her shots in the first half of the video. Ryan edited the video very well though, he did the best we could with the shot material he had.

Overall Reflection

I had a bit of fun with the project, something I would do similarly is to work with people like Ryan who I could goof around with but still be professional about the video.  Something I would do differently is make sure I work with a director that is passionate about the project and made sure it all got done to the best of our ability. Next time I will also make sure to keep in mind the deadline.