Costume Casting and props

The cast

We used two of our friends Aaron Harris playing the role of the boyfriend and JJ Moss, playing the role of the girlfriend, we choose these two for the character roles in our video because they have both been filmed before and are comfortable on camera, they are both easy to get hold of so any re shooting needed would be easy for us and they fit in perfectly with the stereotypes we would need within our music video, anyone else involved or seen in the video are extras which were at the party we filmed at. The cast :

The costume

The costumes we used had to be stereotypical of the genre of music, we found out in our three textual analysis essays that the clothing characters wore were extremely similar, the people often featured in these music videos and fans of the music often wear designer clothes, hoodies of some sort and sometimes flat caps, the people are often dressed to suit the urban youth look. To follow this theme we have Aaron dressed in a Ralph Lauren Barbour jacket, wearing jeans and an Abercrombie & Fitch top, this is similar to what he would wear daily so is easy for us to create this costume and for him to feel comfortable in it. JJ we have dressed in a particular way where she is always wearing a hoodies, we have done this because she is being treated badly on many occasions and it shows her enclosed feelings and a sense of hiding away from these problems, The hood is kept up throughout the video until the final few shots where she announces “its over” to Aaron ending their relationship, showing a release of freedom for her. Other than the hoodie JJ is dressed in a standard stereotypical manor, in jeans and a top.

The props

The party scene we have done in our film was a scene I was not looking forward to filming as we would have to set up the speakers and lighting for the party as our props whilst playing music and we would also have to film at the same time, I perceived this to be very difficult but we asked a friend Ollie Webster who was part of our group last year to sort out the music and lighting whilst we focused on filming, this made the scene easy to film and the scene looked very good on camera due to the props we had used.

The props we used in our film made particular parts of our scenes a lot harder to create, for example the idea of having seven clocks appearing on the wall meant I needed seven clocks and I happened to have none at home so out came the kindness of my neighbours as I asked people up and down my street to borrow their clocks for filming. Not only did I find a problem with getting the clocks I then needed to find a way to hang them on the wall, a quick trip to B&Q and we had solved the problem, either way the use of these props made creating the scene a lot harder than I had first thought. I also encountered the problem of I was borrowing the clocks for a few hours and once I had taken them down I would not be able to replace them back on the wall accurately, this meant I had to complete all of the filming in those few hours and to make sure we didn’t need to refilm this scene we did many shots and a lot of over filming to give us a lot of footage.

The only other props we used was mobile phones to show the interactions and texting between Aaron and JJ (boyfriend and girlfriend). These props were easy to get hold of as they already both owned phones and the scenes involving texting were easy to film.