To use or not use final cut pro.

At first we wanted to use final cut pro to dissolve our black and white faces together as it wasn't working on imovie. However, after this was done we realised the dissolve was too quick and wouldn't go in time with the music, therefore we decided to not use it as it was becoming over complicated and we really want to keep our music video simple to keep a link with the simple album cover.

We found final cut pro rather difficult to understand so had help in learning how to use it. This shows that even though we are digital natives that doesn't mean we know how to use everything and that we still needed to learn how to use complex editing soptware to make our music video look more professional. However, this became too time consuming for us as we needed a large amount of help and thought that we wouldn't have enough time to finish editing.

Letterboxing

We decided to letterbox our music video to add a certain rustic effect and suits the purpose of the song very well. Furthermore, with this effect it suggests a different aspect of music videos as most videos do not letterbox, therefore by not sticking to the general conventions of a music video we are hoping this different effect will work.

Livetye problems.

An issue we came across with livetype was when we compressed the clip we wanted to edit, the exposure was darker than the other clips. Therefore, we decided to alter the exposure when we put the clip back onto imovie and asked other students to watch our video without telling them the difference in the clips. At first they didn't realise the exposure change until we told them afterwards, therefore we knew that this wasn't a major problem as techincal difficulties can not be fixed.

Editing part 1

We decided to do our editing on Parmiss' laptop as she would have more free time to do it at home and whenever we could we would go to her house and help. Parmiss found it easier in doing most of the editing on her own as she knew exactly what she needed to do and could do it quickly so we left most of it to her. She edited the whole thing together and then transferred it onto the school mac computers, however a problem arose. The problem was that it was difficult to transfer the file from her laptop onto the school mac computers and when she tried the quality decreased. Luckily she found out where she went wrong when exporting the file, as there were different choices in levels of quality to chose from, therefore we were able to transfer it onto the computer and continue the rest of our editing.

When Parmiss first began editing she found it quite difficult in chosing which shots she wanted to include as there were so many similar ones yet they needed to be perfect. After accomplishing the first 20 seconds of the video she realised how time consuming this was becoming and had to manage her time efficiently with her other subjects. Therefore, she decided in doing large amounts of editing at a time every week. After the first 40 seconds of the video Parmiss was beginning to find editing quite fun and interesting which helped her speed up the proccess. When the first minute of the video was done she was able to complete the next minute in the next week. After spending her longest time editing, which was for a day on the weekend she was finally done and transferred the video the day after. From this Parmiss learnt how to use imovie efficiently on her laptop as the imovie was different to the ones on the school mac computers. She learnt from watching a few video tutorials on youtube and thoroughly paid attention. This made it easier for her to undertand the concept of how the imovie on her laptop works and got straight to work.

Parmiss decided on changing the colour scheme to link in with the genre of the song. This is because it's quite emotional, therefore by lowering the exposure and increasing the contrast, the background would look washed out and the actors and actressess' features would stand out.

Close ups

Music videos usually contain large amounts of close up shots focusing on the singer. In ours we made sure we filmed many shots in this way, as we wanted to follow the music video conventions. By filming in this style we were able to sell our artist through our music video. We needed a large amount of these, however some actresses did not like the camera that close and struggled to keep focused. We found that doing a couple of practise shots before recording kept our actresses in focus. This made it a lot easier to film them for the real thing.

Typical day on location

We began by booking out all equipment needed for that days shoot. We then checked that our actor and actresses were in correct costume and had natural makeup. We wanted them to look as natural as possible as our music video has a very natural raw feel to it as we wanted that to be shown through our actor and actresses. Once we were happy with the actor and actresses atire and weather conditions. We would block the scene according to the storyboards.
Once everything was in place we would do a practise run with everything in postion. We did this to check that the actor and actresses were in the right postion and knew the words, to check the setting was correct, check the lighting and shadows and the camera postion. After everything was checked and all three of us were happy with it we would record two or three times so we had a backup if one was not up to our standards.

Problems during filming

We came about a few problems during our filming period. Getting actresses to learn a part of the song took a while, as they were miming out of time and we found that many people were camera shy. To overcome this we decided to help by singing along and not dircetly looking at them whilst they were singing. When we wanted to re-film, the natural mise en scene had changed drastically within a few days. This was due to the change in season and therefore we had to re-think where we wanted to film our actresses. As we chose locations local to us we had to ensure that everyone was available and willing to come and film with us. The fact that we had a whole change of idea, last minute we decided to film our actresses in different scenaries so as to create a more interesting visual piece to watch and highlight Ali's role as the singer. During our research, we had to re-think all the music videos we had analysed as they weren't as key anymore. However, we found out that they held different characteristics within the video that we didn't spot until the change in our idea. For example, we looked at Keane 'Somewhere only we know' and were inspired by the editing and have tried to replicate the same style in our music video.