Research National Media Museum

We have recently visited the National Media Museum in Bradford,West Yorkshire. We then went onto having a presentation from Paul Morricone who is part of the Poison Pen Films team, Poison Pen is a new team that helps create music videos for both well known bands and bands that are just starting up on a minimal budget. He went on to talk about how he started within the industry and that he at first called in a lot of favours to friends already within companies. He started by building up a portfolio of different music videos that he did for his own band and also other new bands that have not yet been discovered. He looks at the song and lyrics and decides what ideas he gets from them and pitches ideas to the band. Once decided they then start filming.
He showed us some of his videos that he has done, which range from Fightstar to The Young Knives, and then started going through the process of which they go through to get the end product. At first Paul looks at the song and decides what ideas he can gather from it and what comes to mind. He then starts to film the band. He tries to make the music video fit to the song, for example if the song goes up in dynamic and gets faster then the video will then become more dynamic and will consist of faster shots. Paul then went on to tell us about the 'quality triangle'. The triangle consists of three points, one is money the second is time and the third is quality. He then went on to say that a lot of money but no time can still create a quality product and also a lot of time but less money can still create a good quality product, but nobody ever has all three points. While filming with the bands that have a low budget of sometimes £5000 he has to call in a lot of favors for him to finish with a quality product.

During filming of the video not everything can go to plan e.g. the band may not like doing a certain thing but would prefer doing something different, this can sometimes make it better. Also while editing it is a good idea to mix things up and keep looking through it as different versions can look better in a different sequence. We then finished by watching a few more music videos to get information from then and to see dirfferent styles and ways of editing it all together.

Ashley Hartley