Merry Christmas!

I am currently on my christmas holidays and will resume editing once we return to school.

Another location

Today we filmed in another location; we did this in Casey's bedroom. We filmed Casey's shadow while she was singing. I think it is a different shot and it will make our video more interesting. We will upload the shot to our video and start editing it in. This shot was very spontaneous and we do not know if it will fit with the theme of our video.

Need more footage

While editing we realised we do not have a variety of locations; we decided to shoot another scene of Casey singing. This way it insures we have enough locations and shots to make the video interesting so we do not create the same mistake as last time.

We realise the deadline is very soon but we have dedicated our free time to editing this video and I am sure our end result will show our hard work.

New Digi Pak ideas

While editing we found some good shots from our footage that we thought would look good for our digi pak. These shots were:





We also would like to use this image of pointe shoes that we found on google:

Editing- Fade effect

We wanted to have two clips faded in as one so we put the two chosen clips on top of eachother, then we clicked on the ‘pen tool' in the right hand corner:


This then created a black line on all our clips, this enables us to move the black line up or down depending how much we want to fade the clip:



This is a still picture of what the clip looks like after we added the effect:

Filming day 2

Today we filmed the lip synching part of our music video, we did this at our school’s drama room.



We brought in a guitar and Christmas lights to make the scene more interesting, once we put up the lights on the black curtain we began filming:



We tried different angles and shots to ensure we have an interesting video.



We were having 'lighting' difficulties, we did not want the main lights on as they would ruin the look of the christmas lights, so we took advantage of the technology in our drama room and used their lighting programme to put a spotlight on Casey.





We had to work fast as there was a drama class after us so it was difficult to get the shots we wanted, but I think we got enough footage.

Filming day 1

Today was the first day of filming our new music video. Once we got to the dance studio, we had to work quick as we only had 30 minutes. Unfortunately there was a table tennis class after us; this meant that the caretaker had set out the tables before we went in. It took us time to put them away in the cupboard but had to push the rest to the side as they did not fit. We tried to avoid showing the tables on camera but because of the mirror this sometimes was inevitable. Once we was happy with the room, Casey put on her outfit while I set up the camera and we began filming different dance moves from different angles.

Preparing to film

Tomorrow we will go film the ballet scene in a dance studio. We have booked the time and we have 30 minutes, we must work fast to get all the shots we need.

We thought about costume and decided to use this dress:


Also Pointe shoes:





We decided to keep costume to a minimum to maintain the simple style of the video to suit the slow paced song.

New video idea

Our decision to start again took us back a couple of steps which meant we had to think of a new idea for our video. We did more research and decided that instead of having a storyline and a narrative like our old video, we will make a concept video. The concept being dancing (ballet), this is a theme that has been very frequent in videos such as:













We are fortunate as Casey is already a dancer, this is her doing 'Swan Lake' ballet:


This new idea is simple but if done well I think it will look very effective as we hope the video will have an angelic feel.

New ideas

There was too many dislikes that made the video very poor quality. Taking into consideration our feedback we decided to start again with the video idea. We have been researching new ideas and we liked to interpret the following in our new video:

-We liked the video of Eminem - Love The Way You Lie ft. Rihanna. The close-up shot when Rihanna is singing to the camera and the flames in the background are not in focus. We would like to create a similar shot like this:


-Another video we liked was Rihanna - Only Girl (In The World) we liked the idea of very fast shots to go with the beat of the song, also the repeating or rewinding of a shot.
The video is below:


-We also liked the video of Rock Mafia - The Big Bang Featuring Miley Cyrus, this video is interesting and thought provoking at the end and makes you ask yourself ‘did the event in the video really happen?’ or ‘did he imagine it all?’ We would like to make a video that gets our audience to also wonder.


-We also watched Cheryl Cole- The Flood video and liked the idea of the lighting of the match.

Email

We emailed Maxine and told her we are no longer doing the new idea and struggling for a new idea, she replied with:

Feedback

The most frequent answers were:

Positive:
• Very good lip synching
• Interesting decorations
• Writing of the lyrics

Negative:
• Have more variety of shots
• That star lights sometimes block Casey’s face
• The handheld shots do not work
• Confused about the storyline
• Have more locations

Rough cut

We produced a very basic rough cut of our video so we could collect some feedback from our target audience. Once we have their opinions we will try to apply it to our video so we make it more suitable for our audience.

We will post this on facebook and ask fellow students to watch it and give one positive and one negative comment on the video.
Below is the video:



Brief description:

The video has a hint of the Cinderella theme as when it gets to 12'o clock things turn horrible. The dinner party bit is the 'ball' with the prince and instead of having a happy ending, the prince has left without 'Cinderella' hence the lyrics 'you went away, too fast to say, goodbye and hold my hand'.

Complex effects

During the editing process we came up with the idea to add a "sin city" effect to the shot of the balloons around Casey and Dean. We wanted to show the balloons in colour but Casey and Dean in black and white. We found out how to achieve this look by watching a tutorial on YouTube. Below is the video we found:



This became complex as there was so many different colour balloons, for each different colour balloon we had to add another clip ontop of the one we had. This is how we applied it to our shot:



This is what we had to do when picking out the balloon we wanted to be in colour:

Some problems we had when doing this was; when we wanted the blue balloons to be in colour it would make the sky in colour which did not make the shot effective, so we chose not to have the blue balloons in colour. This is our end result:

We are not sure if we will use this effect, but we still learnt how to do this and allowed us to experiment with complex effects.

More Editing

This is what our music video looks so far in the editing process:

Digi pak ideas

We have been thinking about what our digi pak will look like, we researched "digi paks" in google and amazon and these are some we like:


We then thought about adding photos of the artist; Maxine.


While we was editing today we thought the following still images would look good in our digi pack:









However, we also liked the idea of using the lights image as a continuous shot for a more simple take on the digipak:



I did this on paint to show a simple example of what our final digipak might look like.

Editing

Today we looked at our footage and began editing the first 12 seconds of our music video. The first thing we did was import the song and locked the layer so we do not have any problems in the future. We then edited the 4 shots of the shoe changes, this took us one hour and a half to do as we wanted each shoe change to start and end at the same time. We then added a dissolve effect between every shoe change to make it look smoother. We realise that it took us too long to do 12 seconds but it showed us how long the process of editing is. In the future as we become more familiar with final cut express this will mean we will be able to work faster and get more done.



This is what we achieved by the end of this lesson:

Filming

The following pictures show us filming on location:

This shot is of me filming the shoe change, this was Casey walking and for every step we would have the camera move along and the shoes will change. Each time I moved the camera I kept it the same distance away from the feet.

This shot is in the garage location, this was a great place to film as it created the quirky atmosphere. We did many shots in this location, including point of view, over the shoulder, close up and extreme close up.

Time was against us, and it got dark quicker than expected, this meant we needed to hurry up filming which was a disadvantage as we did not get as many angles as we would have hoped for. In this shot we are trying to get Casey to throw the ballons at the camera.

We filmed this shot at night so the lights look brighter.

This is the last shot we filmed, we had Casey's hair and make-up a mess and the lights on the floor to show everything has fallen apart. We tried many different shots in this area.

First day of filming!

We decided to take a photo of our location to show how it looked like before we added props.

First location: Garden


Second location: Garage


Originally, we had planned to use the trampoline as a table and cover it with material but on the day we decided it was too big and would take up most of the garden which limited our filming space. To resolve this issue we decided to put two garden tables together to create one perfect size table.

Another issue we had was we took too much time deciding the costume; this took up more time than expected. This effected us as when we started filming we were an hour off schedule which meant it got darker quicker and we did not get as much footage as we would have liked.

Also we decided to close the shed as it would have taken us to long to clear it out and put up the lights, instead we set up the lights outside the front of the shed which we think turned out better.

Unfortunately, as the time was against us we did not get as many shots as we would have hoped. We will look back at the footage on Monday and organise another day to film to capture what we didn't manage today.

Setting up

These pictures show us setting up our props to get ready to film:

This is me doing Casey's eye makeup:


Making sure our lights were working:


Casey blowing up the balloons:


Setting up the table with accessories:


Putting up the lights on the shed:


Finishing touches: