Screen recording of full rough cut

Today's Lesson

In today's lesson, I did a rough cut up to the bar scene (last scene).  

I am really happy with it so far, although I need to go back and make some clip trimmings/changings/etc. but my aim is to complete a rough cut of the whole music video by the end of today and then to complete a version of the music video that I am happy with by the end of the week.  Once this is completed I will show the rest of the group and then consider their ideas of what to change and what needs improving.

I will spend the rest of this afternoon editing.

Today's lesson

In today's lesson, I edited more of our music video:

I managed to edit the transition from the 1st photoshoot to the cafe and the whole cafe seen (rough cut), which I was really pleased with.

My biggest challenge in todays lesson was the fact that we had no wide shots of Emma singing the song right:  she changed her movements once we started doing closeups and therefore we couldn't sync many shots together.  As a result I used more closeups of the boys than I had planned for but I think it worked quite well.  Once I had done this I showed Chuffy and Mina to see what they thought and they liked it. 

While I did this, Mina continued finalising her designs for the digipak:

Mina and I came up with songs to put on the back of the album also.  

In tomorrow's lesson I will try and get as much editing done as possible as on Wednesday we will start working on our theory in our lessons. 

Focus Group

On Friday, our group presented a rough cut of the beginning of our music video, our website and our digipak so far to a focus group.  This was really interesting for us because the group fit our target audience of teenage girls.  We started by presenting our digipak:

It was decided that this digipak worked really well as it was fun and eye-catching.  We showed our group the digipak before the song/music video to see what they thought about the artist themselves.  Furthermore, we wanted them to see if they could figure out the genre and what the artist was like as our aim is to show this as clearly as possible on the digipak.  

Immediately someone mentioned that the digipak reminded her of Lily Allen.  This was a great comment because as shown on my blog, our group had previously researched Lily Allen and her target audience to see what devices she used to attract them (she had a similar target audience to us).  They thought that the artist looked fun and sexy.  

An improvement we could make to our digipak is the font as the focus group said that it was hard to read the songs on the back of the album.  

We then showed our focus group our website:

The most significant point that came out of their response was that it differed with the digipak too much and made Emma look like a different artist.  In our website she looked a lot more similar to an artist like Lana Del Ray and therefore would attract an older target audience.  This was due to the colours used on the website as they weren't as colourful as the digipak.

Although our website had really positive feedback, our digipak attracts our target audience the most and therefore we will have to make some changes.  This would really only involve changing the main picture on the homepage of our website and the colours.  The picture shows Emma in a more serious light, which differs to our digipak considerably.

We also decided that the font on the website needed to be changed to be it more fun and quirky like the album.  Sarah finally managed how to do this by searching it on google as it was challenging to find it on the wix website:

Chuffy also made some merchandise for our website:

Although, I think the clothes need to be changed as they aren't girly or fashionable enough and our group has agreed that we will have a production meeting about this.

We then showed our focus group a rough cut of our music video.

They really liked it so far and therefore I will carry on working with it.  The first response to the video was that it reminded them of the Dior advert, which was great as that was the look we were going for.  They also said that it was very similar to the digipak and therefore it was evident that we needed to change the website to suit these two more. 

They really like the shots where we filmed through the photographers camera and therefore I am sure I will leave this in both the photoshoots.

 I hope to have completed a rough cut of the whole music video by the end of the week.

Update of editing

This week I aimed to have a rough cut of the beginning of our music group for Friday.  While I worked on this, Mina designed our digipak, Sarah designed our website while Chuffy looked at our merchandise.  On Friday we presented all of this to a focus group.  

I've really enjoyed editing our music video so far and have spent a lot of time this week, including out of lessons working on it.  The way we filmed our music video has made it quite challenging to sync clips together as we didn't concentrate enough on continuity.  An example of this is for our photoshoot:  on some shots Emma had the flower in her left hand and in another her right hand, which meant some shots that are really nice we can't use because they don't sync together.  This is a lesson I have learnt particularly from this shoot.

I managed to get a rough cut of the beginning of our music video up to the first photoshoot. Here it is:






My aim for this week will be to get a rough cut to the end of the track.

Behind the scenes music video

Our group decided to produce a behind the scenes video of our shoot day.  We will also be able to put this on our artist's website.  Here it is:

Today's lesson

Editing

In today's lesson I carried on editing our music video.   What I have found while looking at the clips is that Emma didn't do exactly the same thing and therefore it is very hard at some points to use our best shots as they aren't synced with the music.  So far I have managed to do a rough cut up to when Emma goes to the cafe and then our problems start to occur.

There is a wide shot that we can use for the music video but she is dancing in the wrong places and therefore we will have to only use close ups in the cafe, which hopefully will look good when I put them in.  There is also a problem in the transition from the cafe through the dressing room to the second photoshoot, which is similar.  Next time I edit I will check again to see if there's anything we can do to fix this and I will carry on with the editing.  I hope to have done a rough cut of half our music video by tomorrow as I am very busy Wednesday and Thursday.  Therefore, I can more or less have a rough cut done by the end of the week that we can show an audience.

Brainstorm

As I am mainly in charge of editing, I thought I could brainstorm some ideas for our website and present them to my production group in our next meeting:

1. Images are particularly important for our website, especially considering our target audience.  When looking at Lily Allen's and Avril Lavigne's websites, there were lots of galleries and updates of what they were up to.  I thought it would be really successful if we did a 'behind the scenes' of the making of our music video as this would allow our audience to have a closer connection with our artist.  There are lots of images we will be able to use in this, including images of our production group and cast.  Here are some examples:

         

2.  We could also have a gallery of images from photo shoots of Emma, which we could organise soon.         These images can be used as computer wallpapers/screensavers/etc. also, which would be really effective.

 

Since the shoot day

This week I have been editing our music video while Mina has worked particularly on the Digipak and Chuffy and Sarah on our website.

Editing

I began editing by looking through all our footage, which I was really pleased with.  I then chose my favourite clip for each shot we did and synced it in order.  I did this with all of our establishing shots, which included all the wides and also our super-wides of the three sets.

It wasn't too much of a challenge to sync most of the clips as we began many of our shots with the beginning of the song.  However, some clips I had to sync later on in the track, which was a bit harder. I did this by listening to a certain lyric in the clip and then synced it with the lyric in the track we were using in Final Cut Pro.

In today's lesson, I started to do rough cuts of the wide shots in order.  This was quite challenging because we never filmed one shot of Emma singing the whole song.  So far, I have made a rough cut of the super-wide at the beginning of the music video and Emma in her dressing room.  While I was doing this, Mina and Chuffy were working on the Digipak.  At the end of the lesson, we had a production meeting and they showed me their ideas, which I'm really pleased with.

We all believe that the Digipak should show Emma as quite sexy as this it what will attract our target audience.  Here are some images of Emma that present the look we are going for:

Although, we may want to present her in a bit more of a fun and vibrant way (similar to our music video) as this would attract our more younger teen audience also.  This would include her maybe on her beach set.  As Mina took photographs throughout our shoot day we have a range of images from each set that we could use as well as other images from a photo shoot that we plan to do.  All images that wouldn't be used on the Digipak would be able to be used on our website.

Account of shoot day

On the Friday before our shooting day, (which was on the Monday) our group set up our three sets with the set builders.  This involved putting in the flooring and walls and also choosing if we wanted to paint any walls a different colour.  We decided that we needed to put framed pictures on the walls of the dressing room and cafe/bar, which I brought in on the Monday.  I also emailed our group and all the cast information about the shooting day and the production schedule and contact sheet, which I wrote.  On Sunday, I collected things from my house that I was supposed to bring in and also collected things that I thought would be useful.  I found a fur rug that me and Chuffy decided to put on the stall in the dressing room Monday morning and also a 'home sweet home' sign that we put in the dressing room.  I brought lots of make up and jewellery as well as:  picture frames, jewellery stands, shoes for Emma, a fur coat, etc. 

On the morning of the shoot I was quite excited about filming as we had been preparing for so long. I was also quite nervous as I knew if we did something wrong than our video wouldn't work.  Our group went into the studio about half an hour before our cast were due to turn up and started filling in our sets, which we did quite quickly.  The day before the shoot, the helium balloons that Chuffy had bought for our first photoshoot went down to the ground and therefore, our group had to think of a solution that morning.  We stuck our flowers and fairylights on our background and decided that we would put white balloons on the ground of the photoshoot with the petals, which meant we shouldn't have too much problem with continuity as they were the same colour.  Our cast turned up ontime but as we were running a bit late I thought that Plum could do Emma's makeup, which turned out really well.  We began shooting about 10am (hour and a half later than scheduled) and started with Emma's first scene in her dressing room with Plum.  Our group decided that Emma would lip sync throughout the music video as this presented her the best (linked more with her audience).  A rehearsal that we did with her the week before where she practiced lip syncing had clearly helped as she was more confident, sexier and knew all the lyrics:  this meant that we didn't have to waste any time and we could immediately start filming once we were ready.  I feel we managed to create our concept very well and was very pleased with our set in the studio once we started filming.  The only thing that I thought we could have made better was our first photoshoot but I believe this what partly due to our balloons not turning out the way they should have. 

On the day of the shoot, we divided our roles into:  photographer, sound, director and cameraman.  I believe the main role I played throughout the day was director as I had planned the production schedule, shot list and choreography and therefore, I knew in the most detail about what needed to be filmed, how and when.  Although, I also tried other roles in the day, as well as the rest of the group.  I personally think my role as a director I did particularly well during the shooting day because I had prepared a lot myself beforehand and consequently, I knew exactly what we needed to shoot.  I really enjoyed being the director also and think this role suited me out of all of them.

The first main problem that we had on our shoot was after lunch when we got a text from Jack saying that he had been put in his Math's examination early (this was supposed to be at 4:30, which I was aware of and therefore considered this when writing the production schedule).  As director, I decided that we should film the bar scenes after lunch and then we Jack returned we could go back to the silhouette and beach scene and then the superwide of the three sets.  This turned out to work really well and actually, I think the most successful part of our shoot was the bar scene that we filmed after lunch.  As we decided to film the bar scene after lunch, our group agreed that we would scrap the idea of ending the music video with the set being taken apart and instead finish with a close-up of Emma singing in the bar as this footage was coming out so well.  I think this part of the shoot went really well because the bar looked really good, particularly with the lights coming out the bar and all our actors were working hard and looked really good on camera.  I believe the whole of our shoot was really successful and therefore, the only thing I would change about it was that we should of found some time to film some tracking shots.  As our shoot was so ambitious, it was very hard to find some time to film these tracking shots but I think there was some shots that we could have sacrificed to do the tracking and this should have been organised before we began filming. 

I think we managed our actors quite well.  Our group were really lucky with Emma as she worked really hard throughout without much rest as our schedule was so demanding.  What we could of improved was the fact that at the beginning of our day, Jack had to wait around a bit before we used him but we made sure he wasn't ignored and he seemed to be happy with this.  I enjoyed filming the bar scene the most out of our shooting day because as I mentioned before, this turned out really well and I am looking forward to editing this as I think it has a potential of making a really good new ending for our music video. As well as this, I'm actually looking forward to seeing everything in the edit and yesterday (the day after the shoot) I went up to the edit suite and started to organise all our shots. 

As a production group, I think we worked really well together as a team.  There weren't any arguments and we agreed on most things throughout the day and considered eachothers opinions.  If we could have improved on something, I think maybe that if the others had helped more with the production schedule, shot list and choreography, they might have been able to direct a bit more but this wasn't mentioned as a problem by anyone on the day and everyone directed at some point.  At the moment, I don't think there is any changes that have to be made to the artwork or website as Emma was sexier on the day of the shoot, liked we asked.  Overall, I was very pleased with our set and actors and although we began filming a bit late, as a production group we organised it well and finished on time.

contacting the cast

After I completed the production schedule I emailed this along with props list and contact sheet to the rest of the group and our teacher.  After this, I emailed our cast to tell them what times they would need to come to the shoot, what they needed to wear, e.t.c. Furthermore, Chuffy then texted the cast to make sure they would check their emails.  This allowed them the weekend to go home and collect anything they needed for the music video:

On friday afternoon, our group began organising our set and tomorrow we will come in the studio early to finish anything that hasn't been done before we begin filming!

Final production schedule

Last week, I finished our groups production schedule for our shooting day tomorrow.  This was very difficult as it was the second time I was writing it and our teacher had emailed us with a problem about our cast, which I had to work around:

We decided to replace Toby Baring with Jake Goodbody (who would sit by the bar in both the cafe and bar scene), we moved Greg Fellows to behind the bar and use Matt and Paul (in the Media Department) as our work men.

I began by making a shot list, which Chuffy helped me with.  I used the choreography that I organised to help me with this (shown in previous post).  Here is the shot list:

 

I then rearranged the order of which we would film this.  Here is our production schedule:

Organising the music video

Before half term, our group made a list of all the props everyone was getting:

Therefore, everyone had the chance to get anything over half term.  Over half term I bought the flower heads and flowers and today (the day before our shoot) I collected: make up, clothes, jewellery stands, cards and any games to bring to school tomorrow for the shoot.

Last week, Mina and Sarah were in charge of painting the background of our beach set while Chuffy and I organised everything to make sure everything else was organised and I finished the production schedule.

Here are she recent emails to our theatre department that I sent last week to make sure all our props were organised:

On Friday me and Chuffy collected the bistro set, Clothes rail and stalls and we also chose a different deck chair that we were happy to use.

While we did this, Mina and Sarah finished the painting of our beach set.