Research & Planning - Video/Audio Post Production

Most post production tasks came under editing, remaining tasks were for uploading to you tube. During the editing sessions the razor and movement tool were the most important, these allowed me to cut clips and move them to sequence them into a smooth flowing scene. I also went on to use other tools such as opacity key frames, volume level markers, contrast filters and speed/duration modifiers in order to maximise the quality of my final scene. Speed/duration and the movement tool were extremely important when editing the lip syncing aspects, because if the mime was a fraction of a second off, it would be clearly fake. All editing took place within the Adobe Premiere 2.0 suite, this is specialised software for video editing. During the post production editing for recreating the “What I go to School For” music video (originally by Busted) I found that many people cut clips too short, and they became like flash scenes, rather than clear cuts, I found to overcome this problem very careful editing had to be done to achieve a professional outcome.
Most of my problems arrived when uploading to you tube. For the lip syncing project you tube informed me the audio track for my video was copyright protected and removed my video. Other than this aspect, the uploading process was easy and unproblematic.

Research & Planning - Digital Technology

During this music video task my knowledge of production technology strengthened because of practice and further experimentation. This development of technology skill will help increase my future projects quality level leading to a professional result. This increased technology knowledge covers the video cameras I used, the editing suites and uploading to you tube.

During this production task I leant little new, but it did help me improve on what I already knew concerning production technology. One of the problems I encountered was how the camera had a fade setting on, I overcame this though by searching through all relevant settings until I found the fade option. This experimentation with the camera helped me learn a lot about it, this will help me in the future for any other issues. Within the production I also found research to be very important, me and my group relied heavily on the official busted video on you tube as a guide to our video.

For my A2 exam production I feel I should carry on developing my camera skills and also look at sound quality if required, as the video camera microphones are not of a brilliant quality.

Research and Planning

For the research and planning of my Busted task, I found the video playback most useful in terms of both planning shots and research to locations/props. Although print screening a storyboard was useful, this wasn’t easy to display exact camera movement, camera angles, durations or character movement. Other than that we did little planning as we weren’t sure what we could do. Looking back it might have been useful to plan out costumes more and plan what scenes we would shoot on certain days, to ensure continuity in character costumes and lighting. Embedded below is the official music video, we researched and planned out video by repeatedly watching this. Our storyboard simply consisted of print screens from this video.

In my A2 exam project I will make sure I am more thorough with my research, this will reduce continuity errors and result in a highly professional outcome. The planning will include aspects such as; A script, props, costumes, actors/actresses, locations, shot types, order of filming and probably more.

Music Video Recreation Task

In my next short task, me and my group had to recreate the first few scenes of the Busted video “What I Go to School For”. the following posts will be analysing my research aspects, the digital technology and the post production aspects. Here is the video me and my group created.

Preliminary Camera Work; Lip Syncing

To help us get used to the cameras, a task was set to lip sync a given song, my group chose Motorhead’s Ace of Spades. Even though this was a short task, I edited it with cut shots to air guitaring. This was to fill dull space, maintaining momentum and action within the video. For the lip syncing parts I got my team member to sing in front of a projected image of the Motorhead logo, this I felt would give a slightly more professional finish to the video, rather than an empty classroom, a wall or trees and cars. All lip syncing shots were taken mid close up and at a relatively level angle to try and keep focus on the mouth movements. The air guitar shots though were taken at a low angle to make my team member seem dominating and strong, as well as swung left with his head just out of frame to give an edgy and interesting feel to the shot.
I feel this task went well and produced a successful video. Also, as this was one of the first times I had tried editing on the software, I feel I did well and resulted with a worthwhile sequence. One of the problems I faced with this task though was, when uploaded to you tube, the audio track was recognised as copyrighted and blocked, luckily if I went into my account and viewed my videos I could still watch it.