Preliminary Production Evaluation (Moving Image)

Our Recreation of "H&M Close The Loop"

We have recreated H&M's Close the Loop video. I am going to go through the most important shots in the video and I am going to compare the original to our recreation. Unfortunately we were unable to collect all the shots that we needed so are missing a couple, so we have put place holding pictures in the place of where those scenes should be.

- Wear brown shoes after six

• Camera Shot / Angle-When we have the shoes get out of the car, the recreation is very accurate as the angle is low to the floor and focused on the shoes as they get out of the car. We could have made it so that we did not have the car door in shot as the attention of the audience may be drawn to that rather than the shoes because the camera light is reflecting off of the door. 
• Location, Editing-We had a slight continuity error in the fact that when the shoes get out the car it is night time, yet in the full length shot of the man it is daytime and he is not wearing the brown shoes. The location is on a street corner however so the location is accurate.
• Sound-There is no diegetic sound in this scene, so we just had the original voice over from the video to say the name of the shot with the non-diegetic soundtrack over the top.
• Mise en scene-We have the man holding the umbrella in our recreation, as well as the car behind him in the long shot. The brown shoes we used for our scene were very accurate to the ones in the original video, and we tried to find a street for our actor to stand on yet we had to use a side street instead.
• Lighting-Once again, the lighting changes in this scene as the first shot is at night whilst the other two are in the daytime.

- Wear a hat indoors

• Camera Shot / Angle-We do have the three shots which we needed, as we have a shot of the two girls walking into the 'restaurant' and then a close up of their faces, followed by a wide shot containing them both sat/standing on some seats.
• Location, Editing-We had planned to shoot this shot in an actual restaurant, yet we ended up filming the scene in an area that did not look particularly like the one in the video. Also in the editing process the camera shots were edited to make the footage less shaky as we did not use a tripod to film these shots.
• Sound-Again, there is no diegetic sound in this scene, but there is the non-diegetic sound of the voice over and music.
• Mise en scene-We had two red hats in our recreation, and we also had our two actors wearing glasses to replicate the sunglasses worn by the actual actors in the H&M video. 
• Lighting-The actual video is a lot darker than our clip as it was filmed at night whilst ours was filmed during the day in an area with lots of windows. This resulted in a clip that was not a very accurate representation of the actual video, yet it has the same feel to it, and you are able to differentiate the clips and see that the clip we made is supposed to be this scene. 

- Wear a short skirt after 40

• Camera Shot / Angle-The scene starts off with a close up of the older lady's face and the with an aerial view of the bed with the three actors on it. We unfortunately only have one of the shots as it was a struggle to find the right actors to be in our recreation. This means we only have the aerial shot.
• Location, Editing-We did film this in an accurate location as we had the older lady lying down on a bed whilst two younger actors laid next to her. Again we made the shot less shaky in editing as we did not use a tripod to film it. 
• Sound-There is no diegetic sound, but we do have the original voice over and soundtrack from the actual video, so there is non-diegetic sound.
• Mise en scene-We had the older lady in the skirt which was the most important thing as we needed the shot to match the caption in the voice over, but she is not wearing the jewelry that is in the original, but also the two other people are not wearing the formal clothes that the original actors are wearing.  
• Lighting-The lighting is similar in our shot as in the video as we had the actors in the dark, but we had a light that illuminated the are that we needed lit up.

- Wear a short skirt if you're a man

• Camera Shot / Angle-We have the wide shot of the actor, and we have him placed in the centre of the shot, facing towards the camera and looking into the lens.
• Location, Editing-We did our shot in a white room so there is nothing else in the shot apart from the white wall and the actor with the sign. In the original there are rectangles of different colours on the wall and we do not have that in our shot, yet the white background in our shot makes the actor the main focus of the shot, so I believe our shot is slightly more effective in gaining the audiences attention on the main focus point of the shot.
• Sound-There is only non-diegetic sound in this shot, as the voice over says "Wear a short skirt if you're a man". In the background we have the song that plays all the way through the video.
• Mise en scene-The man in our scene has on a white skirt whilst the skirt in the original is a navy colour. The sign that the man is holding in the original is the same as the one that we used in our recreation as we copied the text exactly.
• Lighting-We used studio lights in our scene where as it looks as if they used natural light in the original, yet you get a similar effect either way.

- Don't try at all.

• Camera Shot / Angle-The shot is a full view of the child whilst they are sat on the floor, we have this view, yet it is from the opposite angle to the one in the original video.
• Location, Editing-We have our child sat on a floor near a wall, so our location is quite accurate to the original shot.
• Sound-The voice over is the only non-diegetic sound, which means the actors cannot hear the music or the narrative.
• Mise en scene-Our scene had the shoes in it, yet we did not have the bicycle helmet or the dressing gown. Even though we didn't have these props I believe the shot still resembles the original so that was a success in its own right.
• Lighting-We filmed our scene at night so it is dark whilst the original was filmed in the daytime so we have not got an accurate shot in this way, but you can still tell that the scene we filmed was meant to be this one.

- Dress like a girl

• Camera Shot / Angle-There are three scenes to this clip, one where the girl is walking into the lit up room, then she is looking at her reflection and then she looks directly at the camera and plays with her hair. We got all three scenes for this and remembered to use the different angles, like in the last scene when she is looking at the camera, it was taken from an angle looking up at the girl, which is the angle we also filmed our clip from.
• Location, Editing-We used a plastic sheet on a foam form and used fairy lights to recreate the colourful lights used in the original clip. This was effective to use as then background as it looked like the original as the lights merged to make lots of different coloured 'spots'.
• Sound-There is only the non-diegetic voice over and music in this scene.
• Mise en scene-The girl is wearing a fluffy dress with her hair in pigtails and a large bow. When recreating this shot we tried to make the costume resemble the original as best as possible.
• Lighting-As I said before, we used fairy lights to recreate the multi coloured lighting in this scene, so we did not have any other light source as in the original, the shot is only lit by the fairy lights.

- Dress like a man

• Camera Shot / Angle-The first shot in this scene is of a woman walking across a road and looking to the left, we did get this shot, as well as the tracking shot where the camera follows the woman as she spins round whilst walking.
• Location, Editing-We had to use the bus lanes to film this shot, yet we do have a crossing in shot which is key for the first shot. We used the side of college to film the second scene, and it did resemble the actual shot, yet does not look as accurate as it could have. 
• Sound-There again is only non-diegetic sound in this scene as the narrator says "Dress like a man". With many of the scenes there is no diegetic sound so we could not include it in our recreation apart from the train scene where there is a small amount of diegetic sound.
• Mise en scene-The woman in the actual scene is wearing a two piece suit and a white t shirt, unfortunately we did not have this costume in our scene, but we had our actor wearing a camouflage jacket with a white top, so the scene we made has similarities to the original.
• Lighting-We shot our recreation in the daytime so this is accurate to the actual scene. We also only used natural lighting as that is all that has been used in the actual scene.

- Stand out / Blend in

• Camera Shot / Angle-The first shot is a long shot where your can see the whole of the man and the street behind him, as he stands on the corner of the street with the corner directly behind him to create an interesting point of view. We did recreate the long shot in our clip and we tried to make the clip as steady as we could because we didn't use a tripod when we filmed this scene.
• Location, Editing-We did use the corner of a building to film this scene, yet it is not a white building, but it has the same effect as the original scene.
• Sound-There is only the non-diegetic sound in this clip.
• Mise en scene- In our recreation of this scene we didn't have the men in suits, instead we had them all in feather bowers and holding their phones. This was because we didn't have access to the right props so we improvised the best we could, and the scene still fits with the caption that the narrator reads so it fits quite well.
• Lighting-The original clip uses natural lighting as it is filmed outside in the daytime, so we did the same and tried to film the clip in an area without a lot of shadow so that it resembled the original as best as we could get it.

- Wear pink and red 

• Camera Shot / Angle-Unfortunately when we filmed this clip we filmed it in portrait mode so it is not landscape like the rest of the video, this is a continuity error in our video. The first shot is supposed to be a really long shot from a distance, yet our scene was not as far from the actress, but still resembles the original clip. The second clip is supposed to be a close up on the face of the actress, yet our scene is more of a moving shot that goes past our actress who should be looking directly into the camera, yet isn't. This makes our recreation of this clip not resemble the original very much just because the shots are different.
• Location, Editing-We used a pink wall for this shot so it did look like the original, and we tried to make sure that the pink wall was high enough so that it resembled the shot as best as we could make it. 
• Sound-There again is only the non-diegetic sound in this clip of the narrator and the music.
• Mise en scene-We had our actress wearing a red top and holding a plant, which is not in the original, but replaces the letterbox in the original. The most important thing for this scene was to have the actress wearing red so we tried to make this as obvious as possible.
• Lighting- The original clip uses sunlight as the lighting, which we also did, but we were careful to make sure that there were no shadows on the building so we had no continuity errors in this scene.

1. How organised were you as a group? What elements of organisation were vital to you as a production group?-We used a plan sheet which had all of our different shots on it and what sort of props etc. we would need to shoot the shot effectively. As we went through and filmed clips we would tick them off of the sheet to help us see how many more scenes we had to film. Some members of the group may not have organised themselves as well as others, which resulted in us not having all the shots that we needed.
2. What technologies did you use and how did they serve to develop your skills as a media practitioner?-We used iMovie to edit our video and this has helped us understand the basics of video editing which we can use in our final piece.
3. How creative do you think you were during this process? What elements of the project required creativity and imagination, even though you were given a very structured brief to 'copy'?- We tried to make the scenes our own by copying them in the way that they were recognisable, yet we also added our own little twists to our recreations by using slightly different props and backgrounds etc.
4. How successful do you think your first draft video is? Use examples from the film to illustrate your evaluations-I think our first draft was quite successful as we managed to recreate most scenes with a high level of accuracy, and you can definitely tell that this was the video that we were copying.
5. In preparation for the next stage of your production work, what knowledge of experience will you take with you into the next project?- I am now going to take forward that it is important to plan the scenes and have a physical plan to refer to so actually filming your scenes is a lot more organised and easy. I also now know the basics of editing and can effectively edit clips to form one whole video.