Shooting a Music Video

A music video, much like a drama, should be firstly well planned out before filming, or even well scripted before you think about shooting. You must also gather a lot of useful and creative film of the band that you are making a music promo video before. With this you will then have a much better and progressed chance of creating something well made and edited. Along with the basics of filming, with new film companies, especially me and my group, we will be shooting the video with no investment from anyone, which is in no way a problem due to many good influences have come from really low budget videos. For example, Rizzle Kicks 'Down With the Trumpets' video was a low cost production cost, due to it being very simplistic and not must technology or producing extras were needed.

Also, for music video shoots, it's always a good step to record the track that you are playing back on set as you shoot. This 'scratch track' as it's known as, will help you synchronize the shots with the clean track post-position. Along with instructing the singer/band to sing properly, and not just too mine the words or even sing it half-hearted. If they mumble the words or mine, it won't look right when you lay the shots against the song, because the tension and movements of the face and body will not be consistent with the sound and track of the song, making it look disjointed and not professional. This is something that I will be very concerned about and will want too make sure it done well.


Not only is just about the singing, a variety of shots, angels and how you capture the singer/band is a main factor of how the audience will see and relate to the video. I will make sure that most angles cover the entire song. If I don't shoot enough angles of the whole song, the final edit I do of the video might be too slow. Also I've been looking at many influences and they use plenty of cutaways, which are also known as 'B-roll' shots. I would use these just like different angles to give some variety to the video. Many of the videos I've seen have inter cut a performance or dance routine shot with random cuts to shots in which the singer is neither singing nor dancing, but doing something vaguely relevant to the music video's genre and theme. As mine is punk/rock, I will make them do something stereotypical such as: being antisocial in an appropriate manner, or going a bit off the rails and not abiding by the rules or laws that are set. One of these videos is Blink-182's 'In Too Deep' which shows them over-running a swimming pool and playing their song with all the equipment in it, along with many other things such as jumping off the diving board.