Pre - Production Planning: Props

Props are an extremely pivotal instrument in the making of my music video, as they feature prominently and aid the story telling process and create better visuals for the target audience.

My music video is titled "Selfies", and a common occurrence and presence in the video will be the inclusion of polaroid pictures, depicting the actor in character posing or pulling amusing faces to the camera. The scenes in where the polaroid will be featured are:

This scene will include the stop motion technique to show how the tower of polaroids is getting increasingly taller.

The scene where my actor is standing in front of a white screen, surrounded by polaroids attached to a net hanging above the scene by string.

This scene depicts my actor lying on the floor, surrounded by polaroid selfies.

Instead of sweets falling out of the piñata, the typical reward, polaroid selfies will instead fall out to show the escalation of the character's selfie habit.

It is evident that I will have to accumulate a lot of polaroid pictures in order to produce my music video. Initially, I wanted to use authentic polaroid photos as they had the grainy, vintage aesthetics that I thought would fit in perfectly with my music video. 

However, after further research I decided that it would be too expensive to use real polaroid photos:

To produce just 10 polaroid photos, it would cost £14.99. This is incredibly expensive considering the vast amount of polaroids I would actually need to take. In addition, there is no guarantee that every photo would be a suitable standard to include. Due to all of these factors, I chose not to feature real polaroids in my music video. I did consider using ordinary tangible photographs. However, I then decided to try and create my own polaroids, replicating the exact look of them.

The above photos detail a small sample of the photographs I took of my chosen actor - some shots had to be taken by myself, however, others could be taken by the actor so the photographs were actually selfies. In all photos, the actor (the character in the video) is smiling or pulling a funny expression which conveys that she was happy, and these photos were taken before her heart break. Alternatively, they were taken to spite her ex and she was indeed faking her happiness to make her ex jealous.
 

This is the process of creating a replica of a polaroid photo:

Firstly, I measured out with a ruler the dimensions of a polaroid photo.

Next, I cut out the carefully measured card which would become the polaroid.

Using a polaroid photo template, I placed it against a photo I had taken of the actor that will star in my music video. I traced lightly with a pencil the template of the polaroid onto the photograph.

Then I cut out the outline of the tracing so the photo is the correct size to fit onto the card which I had previously cut out.

Next, I glued the back of the photograph so it would stick onto the card.

Finally, I placed and pressed it firmly onto the card.

The final product and end result.

If I had used a polaroid camera, the image to the right depicts what the photos would have looked like. As you can see, apart from the colouring, there is not much difference between my hand made polaroid and an authentic one.

Although the process is longer, it is much more cost efficient and allows me to spend my budget on other props, costumes and lighting.

I repeated the process of making the polaroids many times, and eventually made approximately 90 photos. I believe this will be enough for my video shoot, as they can be reused in different scenes. For example, the polaroids that hang around my actor on a string can be re used at a later date, and be the polaroids that fall out of the piñata.

I chose a variety of selfies to include to show a range and create a more visually interesting video for the audience - the same picture does not appear twice. I took many more photos of my actor, so if I wanted more variety or I ran out of photos to use,  I could create more easily.

All of the photos were taken in the same day, but I cropped most of the photos so you cannot see her clothing entirely; therefore, an audience could assume they were taken on separate occasions.

Next, I intend to continue pre - production and gather more planning evidence for my props, as props are more heavily utilised than other factors including costume.