editing lady sovereign footage

After we had finished filming all of Lady Sovereign's involvement in the music video we set about editing our footage on Final Cut Express, we chose to use this piece of software over I Movie as it is a more professional piece of software and there are more different effects and editing options. Here are some screen shots of us editing our work:

Whilst we were editing we discovered the difficulties of matching the lip-syncing to the music with a rap artist, as the pace that Lady Sovereign was rapping at was sometimes quicker than that of our actor. We also realised that we would have to re-film some parts of Lady Sovereign's scene to make the video flow better and to also re-film any shots that did not quite go according to plan. We also need to move onto filming our lead male role and band performance scenes

Day 1 of Filming

In our first day of filming we shot the majority of Lady Sovereign's involvement in the song, we did all of her parts down and alleyway and in a park to emphasise the urban genre that the artist is related with.

We started off filming down an alleyway using a range of different camera angles and shots whilst Lady Sovereign was rapping, so we could cut and edit them during editing to give a flow to the footage in the music video that matched the fast tempo of the lyrics in the song. We then continued our filming in a park where we shot some of our footage against a brick wall with a tripod, we could then use this shot as the base of Lady Sovereign's involvement in the music video and cut away to different angles and shots in different locations. It could be seen that this was influenced by Azealia Bank's music video to the song '212' as it is shot in a similar way.

We may go back and re-film some of the footage as it did not come out quite as I would have like it to and also film a few other ideas to give ourselves more of a range of shots to play with in editing.

Here are some photos from our 1st day of filming our music video:

Props and Costumes for Lady Sovereign

We had to use specific costumes and props to create the right image for the lead female role in our film, she would need to match the same look as Lady Sovereign whilst we did not want to make her identical as it may come across that we were copying the music video. Lady Sovereign's image is very urban/street based so we chose some of the below items of clothing to create the right look. Props are limited for her role but we might match the song lyrics by using red bull and a sandwich as stated in the lyrics 'Whoops im being rude wheres my red bull and my sandwich, I need food,'

Band Identity

The Ordinary Boys

The Ordinary Boys are an English indie rock band from Worthing, in West Sussex, England. Originally named Next in Line, they were influenced by mod revival and Britpop music, as well as the bands Madness, The Specials, The Kinks and The Smiths. Their name derives from a Morrissey song, "The Ordinary Boys". The membership of the band that originally split up in 2008 consisted of founding members Samuel Preston (vocals, guitar) – generally known simply by his surname "Preston", William Brown (guitar), James Gregory (bass) plus Simon Goldring (drums) 


Following limited success on the UK charts, their popularity revived and grew particularly due to media coverage that Preston, received when participating in Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother UK in January 2006, where he also met Chantelle Houghton, who he subsequently married and then divorced. Following the Celebrity Big Brother appearance, sales of the band's albums increased and the "Boys Will Be Boys" single moved from No. 33 to No. 3 in four weeks. The song "Boys Will Be Boys" featured in the fifth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 

An infamous media incident occurred when Preston appeared on an episode of BBC's comedy music quiz show 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' broadcast on 14.2.2007 and he terminated his participation in the show by leaving the set during recording when the host Simon Amstell persistently read extracts from his wife Chantelle's at that time recently published autobiography. Preston later stated regret for his actions, speaking of Amstell as "funny, charming and likeable", making his walking off "all the more embarrassing". The band were referenced in episode five ("Smoke and Mirrors") of series two of The IT Crowd.

Lady Sovereign 

 Louise Amanda Harman (born 19 December 1985), better known by the stage name Lady Sovereign, is an English rapper and grime artist.She is noted for her professional success in performing styles of music generally dominated by males. In 2010, she appeared on the seventh series of the reality show Celebrity Big Brother, being the third housemate to be evicted from the house.

Lady Sovereign began uploading some of her songs and a picture to various music web sites when she was 15. She told Newsweek in 2006 that comments initially ran along the lines of, "You're white. You're a girl. You're British. You're crap.". She went on to sign with Universal in 2004. Lady Sovereign released a number of solo records and opened for Basement Jaxx, The Streets, Dizzee Rascal, D12, and Obie Trice.

Aside from her own records, 2005 saw Lady Sovereign appear as a guest or contributor on several projects. She began 2005 by appearing on the grime compilation Run the Road, both as a solo artist and with The Streets. When The Ordinary Boys released the single "Boys Will Be Boys", Lady Sovereign came back with a reply remix, featuring the music and chorus of the original, but with mostly her own vocals to the tune of "girls will be girls". In May 2006, she was featured on the Ordinary Boys single, "Nine2Five", a remixed version of her own "9 to 5", credited as "The Ordinary Boys vs Lady Sovereign." "Nine2Five" entered at 39th in the UK top 40 singles on downloads only, and jumped to 6th upon availability as a CD and 7" vinyl single during the week commencing 22 May 2005. This is her highest chart position to date. On 17 October 2006 "Love Me or Hate Me" became the first video by a British artist to reach number 1 on the United States version of MTV's Total Request Live. "Love Me Or Hate Me" was released in the UK on 29 January 2007, with the album following on 5 February 2007.

In late 2006, "Love Me Or Hate Me" was played in a Verizon Wireless advertisement. It also appears on the soundtrack of the video game Need for Speed: Carbon, and is the theme music for the show The Bad Girls Club. "9 to 5" also appears on The Bad Girls Club, as well as on the soundtrack of the Xbox 360's version of EA Sports' FIFA World Cup 2006 video game, on the Ugly Betty soundtrack and features in the 2007 film St. Trinian's, "Random" appears on the Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix soundtrack, and features on an episode of Malcolm in The Middle, "I Got You Dancing" was featured in Need for Speed: Nitro, "Hoodie" was used for a Mario Party Nintendo DS commercial.


Some of Lady Sovereign's such as "9 to 5" and "So Human" were also used on the BBC 1 show Waterloo Road in 2009/10. Bizarre Creation's Project Gotham Racing 4 video game on the Xbox 360 features the song "Blah Blah" by Lady Sovereign, EA's Fight Night Round 4 video game features Lady Sovereign's "Bang Bang" track, "So Human" appears in season 2 episode 1 of the television series '90210', "Jigsaw" was featured in the second episode of the fifth season of MTV-show The Hills, called 'Everything Happens For A Reason'.

Meeting Six

We had once again altered our idea slightly, whilst we were still focused on using intertextuality in the song 'Nine 2 Five' by The Ordinary Boys and Lady Sovereign, we decided we wanted to change our idea from a news reporter to a man who holds down several different 9 to 5 jobs, as we felt that this would match the lyrics to better effect and would also give us more props, costumes and locations to play around with. We also decided that as Lady Sovereign was only a featuring artist in the video she would have no involvement in the job aspect of the video and her input would be purely performance based. We were also interested in the idea of using clocks in the music video as there are lots of different references to time in the song.

Meeting Five

Now we had scrapped the 'St Jimmy' Green Day idea we now went on to further our thoughts related to the 'Nine 2 Five' news reporter idea, we went on to find some music videos that had already been produced with this use of intertextuality implemented into them, here are two examples that we had found:

By furthering our research on these kind of music videos we now had a better idea of how we could put this into our own music video. We also came up with the idea of using both a news desk and a news anchor scene giving us a range of different locations to use in our music video.

Meeting Three

We decided to scrap the Daft Punk 'Technologic' idea as we felt the lyrics and repetitive beat of the song meant we could do limited things with the song which may lead to our video coming across as boring. After this change in idea we came up with two other songs that we were interested in developing into our music video, these were 'St. Jimmy' by Green Day and 'Nine 2 Five' by The Ordinary Boys and Lady Sovereign.

We were interested in using either of these two songs as it meant we could develop and idea which involved intertextuality. Firstly with the song St. Jimmy we had the idea of involving a Jeremy Kyle style show and with Nine to Five we realised the lyrics may match the job of a news reporter, we had seen this job involved in a few videos beforehand.

Below are the two songs we are interested in using for our music video: