The Beginnings of Editing

In the last week we have began editing, we uploaded our music into final cut, and then began to trail through the masses of footage of amelia dancing in our white room scene and some of our performance shots. We began selecting specific clips we wanted at specific points in the music, and evaluating if they fitted to the music. So far we have quite a few specific parts we have created edited footage for, however there is still many gaps to fill with footage.

So far we have not been able to get the rest of our filming done, for example the footage in london. This has been due to awkward timing and our other commitments, and it seems likely that me and amelia might slip of our schedule for the project.  However me and amelia have decided if worst comes to worst and we do not get london filmed before end of term, we have numerous days in which we can spend a full day in london, instead of rushing the filming and neglecting other commitments. This will allow us to get the best footage we can, and in some ways benefit our video.

Difficulties found with draft footage of band

Recently we have uploaded our draft band footage and tried to fit it onto our searching for the sun in the dark time line. However when doing so we came across numerous problems!

- Lip synchronisation was all wrong
- Lyrics didn't match the lip movements
- Holding the notes
- Trying to create dark background with A1 boards and dimmed lighting, looked bad, and the lighting made the footage's quality decrease.
- Actor was not confident with the song and motions he had to perform in order to look like a lead singer of he band.
However these problems increased my editing skills. As i tried my hardest to match the lyrics to the mouth movements, i used fast cuts to hide the bits where the mouth movements were dubious, also i cut out bits of the mouth holding the note for too long, or copied and pasted a mouth movement if the actor hadn't held the note for long enough.


After this experience, we have set out numerous and vital checks and preparation for us to avoid when doing the real/official band filming.

- Get actor to listen to the song many times before actually needs to mine/sing it
- Count timing and how long to hold certain lyrics
- Practice the mouth shapes that need to be form in order to suggest exact pronouceation of lyrics
- Find a better suited backdrop

Draft Filming for Band/Performance Shots and Research

We began to think about our band and performance shots within our video. We realise they were very important parts of our footage, and realised we might need to do some draft filming in order to make sure we get in right in the official filming.

Also before we started filming, we were not through a few brief preparations before filming, for example i selected an appropriate costume that might be worn by the lead singer of a band. Similarly also selected an actor with long hair and  made it scruffy, as from my research this was the hair style and costume style band members of the same pop rock genre wore in their videos. Influence below

I similarly applied this research to my own draft filming and actor..

Also in preparation for the filming i purchased black A1 boards to blue tac to the walls, so it created the black backdrop we wanted.

Overall, Evaluation/Treatment of Research and Planning

We filmed our process so far, specifically focusing on how we met the criteria objectives in terms of research and planning.




We ran out of time to explain how we had met each criteria, so heres a written summary of the remaining criterias:

Criteria three: Work on shortlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.

• Together we listened to the song repeatedly on our iPods’, and came out with many draft notes and short lists of what we wanted to include in our video and how it would be structured.
• We made a storyboard of the scenes, shots, locations and characters positions we want to include in our film, in a structured.
• Also in terms of drafting before we filmed our white room scene, we did practice runs of dressing up in the outfits at home, drafting what it would look like on the actual day.

Basic


Criteria four: Time Management

• We set out a planner of when we planned to do what in the process of making our music video, so this helps us keep to a schedule and nothing gets delayed.
• We also give ourselves mini deadlines within our group, for example, get the story board done over the weekend, film the white room seen within this week. Mini deadlines helps our work get done in manageable deadlines.

Minimal


Criteria Five: Care in the presentation of research and planning.

• We take care of presenting our research in planning by using our blogs regularly, updating new research and planning measures.
• We also include videos, print screens and pictures, to try and keep our blogs as visual as possible so our blogs are ascetically pleasing, nice to look at, and will show our planning and research to its best.
• We also make sure we take a camera to every valuable session we have to produce lots of photos, and to help improve the presentation of our blogs, having personal evidence of our research and planning.
• We also keep a plastic wallet of paper notes, lyrics and images we want to include in our blog, so that we do not loose them, and remind our self of what we want to present in our blogs in terms of the research and planning.

Proficient


Criteria Six: Communication skills

• We exchanged phone numbers immediately, and immediately started texting numerous random thoughts we had on ideas for the music video content. This helped us dramatically with coming up with such a variety of ideas to include.
• When choosing the props and costumes for the first filming, we sent pictures of what we had found via email constantly through the evening.
• When we encounted a problem of charging our camera for filming after half term, we emailed each other trying to help each other and also our teachers to try and look for a possible solution.
• We very conveniently have the same free period as each other, within these we regularly meet up, update our blogs together, do further planning and research, such as looking for outfits in charity shops.
• Also at lunch time we meet up in the editing suit, evaluate our process so far, and what further planning or research needs to be done.
• We also send each other photos that we have taken to record our process, so we can put them on our blogs, we also email work and research we come across, as a way of communicating with each other.

Excellent

Uploading the Footage!

Since filming we have uploaded our footage into the editing suite and began to edit it!
We have decided to Edit alongside filming, to make our time more progressive, i produced a new media schedule to adapt to our new arrangements. We especially did this to keep our time management on track.

Below is example of us keeping to our schedule in lesson times, as we continue to edit our footage of the white room scene.  Also we have been experimenting with potential effects and edits we could potentially use within our footage:

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Filming Part One

Filming day was a lot of fun. We began by setting up, this included; placing props down for example the white sheets to cover the grey flooring and getting the model (Amelia) ready with her outfit and make up.





















Once set up we then got the filming on the way, here are some photos from the event!

Preperation For Filming

Now we had permission to film, we had to set about finding props and materials to make the whole thing happen. Both me and my partner Amelia spent the evening, going through our wardrobes trying to find a suitable outfit, these are images of our costume attempts:

We sent each other the images and then came to a compromise and decided to put my black leather jacket with Amelia holey leggings as the final outfit.

Moving on to Hair and Make up:

We wanted to create a fierce, messy, rock chick affect with the hair and with the make up we wanted dark heavy eye make up. Inspiration we found for this was images such as;