The Verve BitterSweet

Symphony
Shot for shot remake

The Task

Our task for the second half of the summer term was to recreate a famous music video
shot for shot. Our class chose to recreate the famous music video for Bitter sweet
symphony by The Verve.
Above is the final product, as well as the original

The video Background Information

The famous music video for The Verves Bittersweet symphony involves Richard
Ashcroft walking along a busy London street bumping into pedestrians (A), narrowly
avoiding traffic (B) and even hopping over cars (C).
Throughout all this, Ashcroft continues to sing and is unfazed by the commotion he's
causing around him.
At the end of the video, the singer is joined by the other members of the band (D) and
it finishes with them walking off into the distance. This became the start of another
music video by The Verve These Drugs dont Work (E).
The director, Walter A.Stern, uses very little cuts and the video features many long,
continuous shots.

(A)

(C)

(B)

(D)

(E)

Location

This music video takes place on a busy, urban street in London (F). In our first
production meeting, we discussed possible shooting locations in Norwich and decided
that the most similar and best street to film on would be St. Benedicts Street (G).
There are many similarities between the streets and we knew that St Benedicts would
always be busy whenever we organized a shoot, enabling our production to have some
authenticity as well as making it closer to the original video.
The similarity between the appearance of St Benedicts and the expected busyness, we
believed would be the best for a close recreation of this video.

(F) Hoxton Street, London

St.Benedicts Street, Norwich (G)

Character/ Actor
During our second production meeting, there was much debate over who would act in
our music video creation
This video features really only one character so we knew the actor would need to be
confident performer in front of the camera and in public.
The person we cast shared a similar appearance to the singer as well as having some
acting experience. They also had a costume at home that would be appropriate to
use during our production. (H)
Apart from the singer, we just needed some extras to walk past/ bump into the singer.
These people didnt need any real acting ability so we agreed that all those available
for the shoot would have a turn being an extra. The natural busyness of the street
would add authenticity and background members of the public.

(H)

Strategies to ensure synchronicity

between music and visuals
For the majority of the shots, at least three people were needed at all time.
1) The main actor
2) The camera operator
3) A guide for the camera operator
The role of the camera operator was simply to start and stop the recording as well as making sure everything was
framed correctly and accurately in comparison to the original.
The guide stood behind the camera man and they had a number of roles. One was to ensure the cameraman didnt
bump into anyone, as they were walking backward. This person had a copy of the music video on a phone and so they
choreographed when certain things need to happen and when people needd to walk into shot. On top of that, playing
the music video on a phone acted as a guide for the actor to lip sync along with the track .
If the action was out of sync with the song and visuals of the original music video, the guide would shout cut, we
would go back to our original places and try again.
However, we didnt always get it perfect and when it came to editing, we noticed much of the action was out of sync
with the original. For instance, there were several cases when people came into frame too early, for example at 1:33 (I).
To fix this, we often had to slow down some clips in order to keep everything in time. An example of this can be seen at
0:55 and 0:57 (J).

(I)

Already left the frame.

In the original, shes now coming in

(J)

Challenges of this music video

This music video, like previously mentioned, uses many long and continuous shots.
For example, the first shot lasts for 45 seconds. When shooting on a busy public street with complex
choreography. Achieving an accurate shot thats this long was very problematic. Every person had to come
into shot at the right time or the whole take would be ruined. All the time this had to be in sync with the
original music video.
Also, many extras walked into frame, often bumping into the singer. To achieve this in time, we had to find
the lyric at the point where someone would bump into our actor. However, when several people had different
entry points, it was hard to all get right.
Furthermore, the busyness of the street was useful in achieving a natural feel to the video. At the same time,
this created major issues. As I've just mentioned, many shots were 30+ seconds long so having to repeat a
shot over and over was very time consuming. We would have to wait for a clear pavement and a gap in the
pedestrian traffic to avoid bumping into members of the public or them staring at the camera as they walk
past: ruining the genuine feel of the shot.
Lining up accurate lip syncing, framing, timing and choreography during the lunch rush hour in the city Centre
was a frustrating, challenging shoot.

Differences between a music video

production and shooting a thriller:
When shooting our thriller, the emphasis, in my opinion, was on post production and editing. With a
thriller, you can easily create a sense of pace, or a certain tone or build tension, just through editing
alone; no matter what you shot. For example, you could create suspense with someone walking by
slowing it down, adding music or introducing quick cuts between locations/ characters etc. (something
we included in our thriller Runaway.)
With this music video, the emphasis lied heavily on production. As you're shooting to a track, you have a
guide to match, and the shots are subsequently filmed in close reference to this guide. With this task
and this music video, editing was very simple. Once we had managed to shoot the complicated shots it
was just a matter of placing the footage in chronological order and lining it up with the original video,
unlike the thriller, which was weeks of editing. As there were very few shots, once we had achieved
them, little needed to be done to them, just added to the timeline and synced with the track/video
In other words, for a thriller what you shoot is very different to the shots included in the final product
compared to a music video, especially this one, which is just a sequence of shots synced up with a track.
In our experience, thrillers focus more on post production and music videos focus more on production.