Filming Update

We have now finished the filming for our music video and we will begin editing on 8th November.

On the first day of filming we encountered problems with hiring a bear suit, meaning that the morning's planned scenes in the museum gardens, and the other scenes featuring the bear, would have to be postponed. Instead we managed to get all of the house scenes completed, by which time we now had a bear suit and could move straight on to the bus stop and shop scenes as scheduled. While we were at the house we also took some pictures for the digipak.

On the second day we were free to shoot all of the scenes in town, including Coney Streeet, the museum gardens and Clifford's Tower. This was a very productive day because we had time to shoot some extra scenes for the shooting script's "man walking as background changes" to make sure we had more than enough footage to work with when editing. We got several shots of the main character walking down some typically English streets, often accompanied by the bear and tambourine characters. We also took some more photos for the digipak, which we will be working on during the first week of November. We are due to start editing from the 8th November.

Shooting Schedules

Shooting Script

More Locations

Here are the locations in the centre of York we will be using in the video:

Coney Street:

A typical English high street to show the main character arriving in town. We could use the large clock just to reinforce the face that it's the morning.

Museum Gardens:

English gardens for the characters to dance in. We hope to find a clearing that has plenty of greenery with the combination of the stone abbey ruins or city walls which are defining features of these gardens and always look good on camera.

Clifford's Tower:

Another historical and English location which York is well known for and would fit well in a Coral video.

Parliament Street:

We like the way the trees are spread out on this street and we plan to film down the centre of this path with the main character walking down towards the camera.

Friargate:

We like the cobbled path on this street, another typically English feature.

These images are copyright of Google Maps

Locations

This is the bedroom we will be filming in at the beginning of our video. We are also hoping to use it for our digipak front cover, and will bring more posters and a drum kit.We like the idea of placing guitars all over the room as well as the drum kit. The yellow colour of the room is a good bright colour that we associated with the morning sun, and also with The Coral's own video for In The Morning which features lots of yellows and oranges:

Filming Days

We have found out that we will be filming our video on the 18th and 19th of October.

Storyboard

As part of our planning process, we have created a storyboard. We are also creating a shooting schedule and shooting script.

Digipak Final Plan

Here is the improved plan for our digipak - the 'messy bedroom' has been moved to the CD panel and the front cover has been replaced by a shot of the characters in the video standing casually in an outdoor, typically English location:

We will bring a digital camera with us on the shoot to take the pictures for this.

We hope that the front cover photo will capture The Coral's laid back, indie-like image as this picture shows:

For the magazine advert we plan to take one of the photos we take for the digipak and add the band title and some logos. We will choose our favourite photo on the filming day.

Planning

We have been planning our video over the last couple of weeks, and this is what we have so far:

The Story
The Coral's videos are unusual yet quite simplistic, so we came up with a similar theme, but expanded on it with our own ideas.
The general storyline for our video is an ordinary man going about his seemingly daily routine, with random positive events occurring throughout eg. no food in the kitchen so someone hands him some toast, no money for the bus but there is a spare ticket at the bus stop, balloons handed to him. The positive events remedy the negatives.

Performance
We are going to have an actor who plays the tambourine and is also the one who gives the main character some of the positive objects (balloon, toast etc).
The bear costume appears in several Coral videos, almost like a mascot for the band, taking part in certain activities, so we wanted to depict this in our video. The bear will pop up occasionally in the shots 'playing' the acoustic guitar.

Locations
The video begins in the main character's home as he is getting up and leaving. He then moves on later in the video to the streets of town and York city walls. This is to reflect the distinctly English look that The Coral's videos give, which are often filmed in generally average streets or fields etc.

Costumes
The main character will be wearing clothes that The Coral typically wear in their videos - casually stressed jeans, a t shirt with some sort of design on it, a dark casual cargo style jacket and perhaps Converse trainers.
The tambourine man is probably going to be dressed as a busker, so in scruffy dirty clothes, but we might give him other surreal costumes as well.

Dreaming Of You

'Dreaming of You' begins with the band members performing in a confined space, away from the outside world to show that they are 'dreaming' and don't want to come back to reality. The walls are plastered with posters that would be typically seen in a young male's bedroom. Later on in the video the band are in various locations, such as cycling quite unrealistically through English streets, suggesting that they are in a dream world.

The man in a bear costume makes another appearance in this video, taking part in random activities, such as playing a trumpet, like in the '1000 Years' video. We have decided that we would like to feature the bear costume in our video, as a link to previous The Coral videos and as something familiar to the fans.

Digipak

We have been thinking further about the design of our digipak, and for the cover we have had the idea of setting up an image of a messy bedroom. The bedroom could have items featured in our video strewn all over the room, such as a guitar and drumkit.

This had been developed from our idea to make a 'scrapbook' cover image, but allowing us to give a better picture of the kind of person that would be listening to this music - I have the image of a man with a positive outlook who enjoys indie bands who are dedicated to their music, regularly going to see them in concert. Their bedroom would be colourful with lots of retro posters and band photos - they might even be in a band themselves.

This was the first draft we created for the digipak, but we will go back and improve it later, also adding in the bedroom idea:

Album Covers

As well as creating a music video, our group has also got to produce a digipak and magazine advert for our song. The Coral's past album covers are, much like their videos, very surreal and varied.

While there are covers like 'The Invisible Invasion' and 'Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker' (featuring the bear's head again, as seen in '1000 years' below) which are completely different from one another, the majority of the album covers are in the style of a scrapbook.

There is a mixture of drawings and photos which have all been stuck randomly onto the cover, continuing the 'casual' and laid back image of The Coral, and giving it a 'home-made' feel.

We are thinking of continuing with this scrapbook idea for our digipak, incorporating images we take while filming our video with perhaps some hand-drawn images.

The Coral Album Covers

1000 Years

This music video features a vague story line of a man in a space suit perhaps trying to "find your way" - the space suit clearly shows just how lost and alienated the man is. He is also joined by a range of bizarre characters, including someone with a bear's head and a cowboy.

Meanwhile the video also cuts to shots of the band performing, who are wearing casual clothes such as denim jackets and shirts with jeans, giving a very laid back look. There are some artistic shots of the location - a deserted, dry rocky landscape - and of the sun setting above the sea.
The majority of the video is given an 'old-fashioned' camera effect, playing on the title of the song '1000 Years'. This along with the jumping, jerking picture adds to the surrealism of the video and is an effect we are considering using in our video.