Greatest Hits!

“Greatest Hits” is a music video directed and produced by Russell Weeks. The video lasts 35 seconds and consists of a series of clips from different videos that had been made by Weekes whilst he was at college. To be honest with you, I'm not all certain what the remaining minuet or so is demonstrating, but i do really love the animation of the talking and blinking DVD logo!

Our job was to pay homage to Weekes ‘Greatest Hits’ by creating our own versions. However, instead of using existing clips of film, we had to obtain new footage through ways of random selection. We completed this task as follows:

To start with, using a 3 Chip Camera, we were required to shoot 3 x 10 second shots that we found, positioned and recorded completely at random. For this, we first shot a slow 10 second zoom into a close up shot of a half deflated football on the lower PCA roof. The second shot, was of a butterfly that we managed to catch a couple of seconds of footage off before it took flight. Unfortunately, this clip was rather shaky, as we didn’t have time to set up the tripod, as is often the way whilst filming wildlife. The third and final piece of random footage, we actually discovered accidentally whilst trying to blank the tape – you see the camera was fitted with an automatic lens cap, so we had to position the camera up against something black instead to record instead of the cap – in doing so we discovered that Michelle’s bag had a really awesome texture when viewed up close. We decided to film the material with a slow straight pan to the right. The final effect we really quite liked, it looked more like a creature or reptile moving past the camera then a piece of stationary material. 

After showing these clips to Lucy, we were given the words ‘Material’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Public’ to work with. For ‘public’, instead of just shooting people, we interpreted it to public transport and filmed a bus leaving the bus station; we speeded up the clip in the editing to make it a bit more interesting.  For ‘nature’ we filmed a very short clip of a little pink flower, bobbing around in the wind on the side of a hedge. The word, material, gave us some really nice ideas. We wanted to use an actual piece of material and film it drifting or snaking around in the wind, or a clip of a different piece of material being draped over an object. The clip we actually filmed consisted of my scarf being held up against the sky in front of the camera and just rippling slightly in the breeze. Because the material was so light, it worked really well as we could see the clouds through it, it was a really pretty clip.

Now for the three words obtained from the ‘Cup of Random Words’: Sunday, Circular and Organic. We cut out the word ‘day’ in a piece of paper and held it up so that the sun cast a shadow of it onto the pavement. For circular, I held the camera down to my feet and filmed them walking in a circle. In the editing it was awesome to find that I actually took each step at the same that the 1.2.3.4 was said in at the beginning of the track. Then, for the last word, we very simply recorded a clip of an apple being cut in half.

In the editing stage of making the video, we were required to try to fit the clips into some sort of a narrative. We decided that the best way for us to do this was to match the clips we had recorded with the lyrics of the song. For example, the clip of the apple being cut in two fitted with the lyrics ‘three … and a half’, and then the butterfly being shown as the lyric ‘I found’ was heard. Both I and Michelle were quite pleased with how the film turned out. I think it might have however made the film a bit more interesting if we had used split screen or other effects, but we lacked time in the editing stage.