Me and Beste recently went to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, the very last Harry Potter film. The film shows Harry, Ron and Hermione's search for Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes in their effort to destroy the Dark Lord.

This movie is by far the darkest, and the most intense. The second half of the film was particularly emotional as we say goodbye to some brilliant characters who infact were a big part of my childhood. It was however a happy ending with good defeating evil, which was, after 7 films, a relief. One thing I found slightly disappointing however was how little the characters changed when we were shown them 10 years later with their children, especially Hermione who didn't look a day older, in my opinion quite a let down to the end of the film.

Overall I loved how the story and past events from the previous films all pieced together throughout the film, for example we discover that Snape did in fact have a very close relationship with Harry's mother, and we see Snape in a whole new light.

Here are some sreenshots from the film..

Neville Longbottem finally gets to prove himself as a hero, and stands up to Voldemolt.

At one point in the film Harry dies and we think that Voldemolt has won, however with the help and kind words from Dumbledore he manages to get back and finally defeat the dark lord.

The flames in this shot has connotations of evil, fear and death, showing that Draco's character is shown to be on the dark side, however throughout all the Harry potter films it seems that Draco struggles to know his place, I get the impression he doesn't want to be bad but wants to stick with his family and i also feel that he is a weak character terrified of the dark lord. I really liked the bit in the film where harry goes back to save Draco's life, and for the first time we see the two charactres come together flying around on the same broomstick, I think this was a really nice moment in the film.

The three main characters, best friends since the first day at Hoggwarts.

Research

Genre: Electro-pop
The electro-pop and dance-pop genres are the dominating genres of the year 2010 in the United States so far with artists like Lady Gaga, Kesha, The Black Eyed Peas, Taio Cruz, Usher, and Katy Perry topping the charts. The electro-pop and dance-pop genres have replaced Hip Hop and R&B as the dominating genres in American pop music.

Lady Gaga

Record Label:
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American pop singer-songwriter. After enrolling at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2003 and later performing in the rock music scene of New York City's Lower East Side, she signed with Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records. During her early time at Interscope, she worked as a songwriter for fellow label artists and captured the attention of recording artist Akon who, recognizing her vocal abilities, signed her to his own label, Kon Live Distribution.

Musical History:
Gaga came to prominence following the release of her debut studio album The Fame (2008), which was a critical and commercial success and achieved international popularity with the singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". The album reached number one on the record charts of six countries, topped the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart while simultaneously peaking at number two on the Billboard 200 chart in the United States and accomplished positions within the top ten worldwide.

Achieving similar worldwide success, The Fame Monster (2009), its follow-up, produced a further three global chart-topping singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone" and "Alejandro" and allowed her to embark on her second global concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, just months after having finished her first, The Fame Ball Tour.

Her second studio album Born This Way (2011) topped the charts in all major musical markets after the arrival of its singles "Born This Way", "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory" – the first-mentioned achieved the number-one spot in countries worldwide and was the fastest-selling single in the history of iTunes, selling one million copies in five days.

Inspired by glam rock singers like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, as well as dance-pop artists such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga is well-recognized for her outré and ever-changing sense of style in music, in fashion, in performance and in her music videos. Her contributions to the music industry have accrued her numerous achievements including five Grammy Awards, among twelve nominations; two Guinness World Records; and the estimated sale of 13 million albums and 51 million singles, making her one of the best-selling music artists worldwide. Billboard named her the Artist of the Year in 2010, ranking her as the 73rd Artist of the 2000s decade. Gaga has been included in the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world as well as being listed in a number of Forbes' annual lists.

How Lady Gaga presents herself in the media:

Lady Gaga's meat dress angers animal rights groups

The singer's decision was fiercely criticised by animal rights campaigners. Ingrid Newkirk, the Peta founder, said the outfit – which is thought to have been real meat, although that has not been confirmed – could have a detrimental effect on the artist's record sales.

"In her line of business, Lady Gaga has a hard time being 'over the top', and wearing a dress made from cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to elicit comment, but someone should whisper in her ear that more people are upset by butchery than are impressed by it – and that means a lot of young people will not be buying her records if she keeps it up," she said.

Lady Gaga is known not only for her music but also for her extreme fashion choices. She's become quite a fashion icon having a strong impact on young females who have taken a liking to her unique style.

Above is an example of Gagas fashion influence.

She’s always up for a high-profile evening out, and Lady GaGa had a great time at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards last night (January 31). The “Poker Face” songstress gave the paparazzi plenty to gawk over during her red carpet posedown, in a spiky, silver headdress and matching shimmering gown.

Although Gaga claims that all her outfits are her own original ideas she has been accused of being a copy cat..

Recently we have not only been discussing ideas for our music video but have also been practising using some of the equipment. Me and Joely have had lots of fun testing out the new green screen using a number of different backgrounds in order to see if there was any particular colour which didn't come out well. We found that the white background made me become quite fuzzy and so we know to try and avoid using this colour when making our music video. We also found that the quality on the flip camera wasn't very good and made me become extremely fuzzy and patchy, therefore we had to re film everything with the new HD Panasonic cameras. The quality was a hundred times better, you can probably see the difference in the take out video that we also made.



Here is a little take out video we made, just for fun...

Recently me and Beste have been discussing some creative, fun ideas that we'd like to include in our music video. We researched our ideas on YouTube in order to find examples and to help us work out how we'd put these ideas into action. I came up with the idea of perhaps having a pillow fight and having feathers flying everywhere and Beste really liked the idea of filming underneath sheets which we'd drape around the room. The videos below are examples of these ideas as sometimes it's difficult to picture what we actually mean..

Last night I went to the cinema to watch Bridesmaids a 2011 American comedy written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, directed by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, and Clayton Townsend. The plot centers on Annie (Wiig) and her experiences as maid of honor in Lillian's (Maya Rudolph) wedding. I really enjoyed the film, it just goes to show that not all chick flicks are bad, this one definitely had me in stiches. I loved it and have recommended it to all of my friends!

My favourite character in the film was Megan played by the talented Melissa McCarthy. She was hilarious, the film wouldn't have been the same without her silly, tomboyish character.

I also liked the fact that the cast were not well known actors as sometimes when they are famous it takes the realism and comedy away from the film. I thought they were all really talented actresses, everything seemed natural, it wasn't slapstick humour, it was funny because it was real humour, in the sense that we can all relate to it, it just seemed to come naturally as if it wasn't scripted.

During our free time today me and Beste imported all of our footage from yesturday onto our apple mac computer. We then began editing the clips together speeding them up and trimming them down in order to match the timing from the original music video. Luckily we had plenty of footage which we could split and use in later shots, for example when I filmed Beste eating crisps I filmed her eating them for about 20 seconds. This then meant that when we came to use the shot of her eating we were able to use it a number of times throughout, with the camera positioned in the same place, therefore making it look neater and more professional. We managed to actually finish the editing which we were both really pleased about.

We learnt a lot from making this prelim video, we found that our story board helped us a lot, as it kept us organised and made it clear as to what we needed to film, however at first we didn't film in chronological order as there were shots we needed to do before hand, in this case the shots with Beste's boyfriend, as he needed to leave early. It made us aware that this might happen when filming our real music video and that we in fact wont be able to do everything in order. We are also aware that if we film in one location we will need to do all of our filming on that same day despite whether some of the footage will be used at the beginning of the video and some at the end. This is because of continuity.

Here is the original so that you are able to compare it with our version..



Here is our version of Smile, we have literally just taken the first 32 seconds and copied the original..

Today Beste and I spent our evening filming in order to create our prelim video. We organised our camera equipment, props and costume, managing to do some shopping earlier in the day for the food in the video and also for some jewellery and clothes so that Beste could look as similar to Lily Allen as possible. We also had to make sure that Beste's boyfriend was available as we needed a male character to be in two of our shots. When we eventually got around to filming we found that our story board was very helpful, however we also watched the original version on YouTube over and over, shot by shot in order to make ours as similar as possible. We not only got all the footage we needed but also had lots of fun, especially finishing off all the leftover food!