Production - Editing the Music Video iii

On Wednesday I had some free time out of lessons, so I decided to to get some more editing done, especially since we missed Tuesday's lesson as college was closed for students on this day. During the short session, I edited the slow motion sequence that shows Poppy running in the woods, intercutting it with some other shots as I felt that it stood out too much on its own. I also experimented with switching back and forth between a few particular base tracks in the climax. However, upon feedback from our teacher, Annabel, we planned to change this and mix it up with other shots, as it doesn't look consistent with the rest of the video.



Today, Poppy was away as she was too ill to come into college, so it was just me, Charon, and Mustafa. In the lesson, we continued perfecting the timing of our shots, and started correcting the lighting in a few others. This is because we filmed in the evening so a small percentage of our footage ended up a bit too dark. However, once we adjusted the colour levels it looked much clearer, particularly the strobe light scene which I think now looks even more effective. Above you can see a screen recording showing how we did this, including a before and after of one of the particular shots.



In addition, we experimented with effects, although we aren't planing on using these very often, if at all. Above you can see a video we recorded explaining this and showing one of the effects we chose to use.

We definitely won't be using an effect like this, but we thought it would be a good idea to briefly look at the kind of effects we have at our disposal.

Production - Editing.

Here is a video of our most recent group editing time. We are slowly coming to the end of the editing for our  music video and this video briefly shows a few of the effects we have tried out and which ones went wrong!

 

A few of our shots are also quite dark, so below you can see us correcting the colour in one example:

Production - AS/A2 Planning Approaches

Approaching the planning process of our A2 video production was, in my opinion, considerably different to that of last year. For one, I think the difference in the type of video production that we planned to create (AS - thrilller opening, A2 - music video)  played a significant role in this stage. This is because as teenagers we consume a lot of music videos, and thus I feel that the prospect of creating our own is appealing. Thrillers aren't normally targeted towards our demographic, so coming into the AS year and looking at different aspects of thrillers was much more 'new' and admittedly less exciting. Therefore, I feel this translated into our planning and ultimately the outcome of our production.

In my group last year we didn't really bring a lot of ideas to the table, whereas I feel that choosing a song to produce a video for was much more inspiring as we were able to freely brainstorm the kind of imagery that the song evoked for us. In addition, my group this year was much more organized. For example, everyone that needed to bring props did so, everyone met up when we needed to to film, etc. I think this is owed in part to our great communication skills, with particular emphasis on our use of social networking to keep each other updated. This was after Poppy suggested early on that we could set up a Facebook group where we could share ideas, music video examples, etc with each other, which I was really enthusiastic about. In the screenshot below you can see examples of this in action.

Production - Rough Cut

This is the rough cut of our music video that we exported last week. Since then, we have been following our teacher's advice in thinking more about our number of cuts, as sometimes there are too many, too fast. We have also been more careful in keeping in time with the beat and/or piano riff throughout. We will be adding a strobe warning at the beginning and experimenting with adding effects, although we probably won't need many (if any at all).