Finishing music video

Since I completed the full rough cut of our music video, I have continued to edit everyday in my free time to edit anything that could be improved:

1. I was able to improve the cafe scene, which I felt I was able to do once I had more experience editing as the first time I looked at it I was very worried. I concentrated more on Emma spinning around and her picking Theo up from his seat as these were our two best shots.
2. I put more shots of the photographers camera in the photo shoot scene in between flashes, which made this scenes more upbeat and interesting.
3. What I had most trouble with since the full rough cut is the final scene in the bar as I needed to edit it a lot more differently to the other scenes.  This scene was our performance element and therefore, I had to edit it a lot more like a music video.  I learnt that what was most successful was to use shots of instruments and the boys when in between Emma's lyrics and then when she started singing I would cut to a mid shot / close up / super wide.  This took a lot of time to do but in the end I was very pleased with the outcome.
4. I also used more shots of Plum for cut aways, which made the music video a lot more upbeat and fun to watch.

Overall, I am really pleased with my music video  and even though it took a lot of time and effort to edit  I really enjoyed it.  Here is a link to the video, which is now up on Youtube:

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: