Evaluation question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

In my preliminary task, we used one shot and our own audio so therefore it was a very easy task. This made me get back into using the MAC’s so I was getting used to using all the effects again and reminded myself how to do things! Looking at the final product there was so much room for improvement but the lipsyncing was one of the main things and we got that right!

The internet played a bit part in my research! Allowing me access too things about making music videos and editing which really helped me! Also information about digi packs! It helped me understand more into the analytical side of medias.  For example seeing how MTV developed and how music videos have changed. Wikepedia has had much help in my research but it is not fully reliable because anyone can add information in!

Youtube was one of the most important parts of my research! I got to watch a lot of music videos and get lots of inspiration from it so I could build up ideas. Watching different, inventive videos made me really think what I could do that was more distinctive!

Planning- Planning was very all over the place, the problem with us, is that we had about 4 different ideas but kept changing them around. We would film and then decide we did not like it! So we met up as a group countless times to talk about it! In the end we sat down and just said we need too choose our final idea and no going back even though it was a risk with the green screen!

Fiming- Our lip singer learnt the songer to remember all of the lip syncing, she sang the song at different angles and also doing things as such as lying down, countless times and that is why we had so many shots. Also we got many angles of Alice, even though we only had two characters we still had many shots.

We used the Ipad to play music out of whilst Louise was lip syncing, Alice was dancing and even when Ellie was dancing too, so they were in time and Louise went along with the lyrics well! So it gave them a lot of support for the feel of the song also.

The cannon 500D, we used to film helped us get clear footage of everything, including Ellie’s dancing, we could do focus and use lots of different effects on it! And for the filming of Alice and Louise it captured the lip syncing in exact and clear image of them both! We also used it for our digi back and used shutter speed to catch Me and Alice jumping and it would of been a lot harder to do this on a normal, simple camera.

The green screen was also used as the main technology in our music video. Everyshot of Louise and Alice involved the green screen which shows it’s importantance to our music video. Without this we would of never got the space effect on our music video therefore not being able to really relate it to our album cover! Our video would of not have been half as fun, interesting and different if it was not for the green screen! It would of probably been more boring and would not of been good to promote a music video.

Loations was not much of a problem because the green screen we done at my friends house as well as doing it in school just because you do not see anything other than the green screen’s use! Also, the filming for Ellie was not too complicated either because we have a modern dance studio in the school. We also used a white screen to do the photography of our Digi pack which we again did in school.

Editing using Final cut pro was the most useful thing we had, our music video was not so much on different locations and getting in lots and lots of filming, we based our video around being in the editing suite a lot, editing different things and playing with the things we can do with the green screen. It was simple and easy to use, and using it last year helped learn more to use it this year, so I was using short cuts to do things quicker and had knowledge on each effect.

Experimenting with effects, included the layering of clips, cropping and fitting clips together, mirroring, changing colours, timing to make sure the video went with the music for example when it was slow we tried to do more Louise with the lyrics and when the beat was fast we would use Alice dancing!

Problems that occurred whilst we were editing with the MAC’s was it kept freezing so we would have to force quit, one time when we did this it deleted all our work we had done in that day. It was solved because we had done many screen shots so we were able to  make it look like how we edited before but it was a bit of a pain because it made it more time consuming. 

 

Because a lot of the time we also had to wait for it to render, we had to wait around for this which was another time consuming thing before we could watch through our video in proper sync.

There was a new final cut when we used the MAC’s but I still understood the main functions, By using a more industry used hardware productivity was high. Understanding shortcuts was essential because it makes it less time consuming. An important feature was the SD card because it made the uploading much easier and quicker.

POST PRODUCTION, we used Fireworks for our poster and also Digipack. We needed layering, text and contrasts. We had to make our work look professional so this was reasonably time consuming when we had to go round the outline of each person jumping because it did not go on the space as well as we thought it would, it was very blocky so therefore did not look professional before we edited around each girl. It reinforced the video and what it’s about, I thought it ended very well looking and interesting to look at.

Evluatiuon- Youtube came a massive help again, for audience feedback it allowed people to view it, including my friends instead of going to the MAC’s to look at it. The skill we had to create an evaluation and talk about what we had learnt and made it seem like a very realistic situaton. It made me think about what we could improve on if we were do to it again.

And now I look back on the music video, I realise that I do agree and think we could of used more people and more shots because it is rather repetitive and maybe add a bit of narrative in there because that is what we had originally. But on a whole I really enjoy the video we created, I think it is fun and goes so well with the lyrics as well as the song and digi pack! I would use the green screen again and now I have experience and confidence with using it.

Permission to use the song

 

I needed to write a letter to Avicii’s producers so I was allowed to use the song in my low-budget music video, I got confirmation as to using this so I could go ahead with it!

Evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

I did do a filming of this question but it would not allow me to upload it on here! Both products were made to suggest a fun and happy vibe which I think was successful! Rebranding the digipack and also idea for the video was very important so therefore our development needed to be a strong selling point.

Our video is very colourful throughout with lots of different space backgrounds, Avicii has never particularly used space, it is something we chose ourselves but he has always used bright colors! I looked at Avicii’s album covers and I think ours is better just because his are quite plain but they never seem to revolve around girls so we also changed that, for example here is the most exciting one and this is bright

And I guess this is quite spacey but it has not got a lot going on and I think even though it is bright, it is pretty plane and boring so we wanted to add excitment and interest to Avicii’s covers! I

In our music video we used bright colours because of Avicii, when he performs he has very bright lights and things, which I guess could represent and reflect space, as the beaming! Also the bubbles going round in our video makes it visually attractive and more as if you were in a club, even the lip syncing looks like that too!

The different space backgrounds are so interesting to look at. The triangle is also a big theme we have in the video as well as on the digi pack, along with Alice being in the video, she is also on the digi pack. We focus on one person which is pretty much Alice, although we use Louise for Lip syncing, it would of been good to have Alice Lip syncing because you cannot really seeher face but in the end, it all comes together! We had looked at many dance videos, and it is always consistent and merges together as well as all of the other dance videos you see on MTV! If we used the footage without a greenscreen it would of looked so wrong just becasue our whole music video is so techniqual and revolved around editing with the green screen and lyrics with space!

Editing day 3

 

Here you can see where Alice is dancing at the same time as the triangle, so they’re running both at the same time of the song.

 

This is the earthquake setting which I found towards the end of the editing, and I wanted to test it to see what it was like. Turns out it matched the music video perfectly! Because it is a dance video It added to the motion and the songs beat very well!

 

 

Here is another mix of the lips of Louise’s face. with the planet, we had not done this before but I thought it again looked so professional and what you would see in a profession video on MTV!

We were very indecissive about this background because it was hard to get Louise in the right position! We really liked the background but it just didnt seem to blend, but as we feathered it and things it seemed to go better with it!

 

 

As it reached it’s climax, we wanted again the 3 way dancing but not the same clip of dancing! So we did the same thing but used the clip of Alice in little shorts and a jumper! With another very bright background.

 

To end this video, we decided to take some lyrics from earlier in the song and put it as the last thing you see along with the name of the band ” Acivii” which I think was very clever and left it on remembering the lyrics of the song.

Editing day 2

Here started adding the dancing of Alice in a green Jumper and little shorts in which was filmed from the side, we did different angles of Alice dancing and did the same Tweeking to the things such as space like we did before!

Here you see Louise lip syncing from another angle also, we cropped and feathered it as usual, I liked the idea that we were using different angles of shots of each girls so it was not boring and repetitive throughout!

This is an iphone light being filmed which we did in the dance studio right infront of the camera! We thought it could come in handy for example if we wanted to put it into a Kaleidoscope, which we did here! And it does flashes of it throughout! Which was a great little extra that added effect to our music video!

Above, we chose another background for what we were replacing the green screen with! This was probably one of my favourite backgrounds, I really liked the idea of this purple part in the middle and the fact Alice looked as if she was in this purple hole dancing! This was a very climaxed part of the song so we made such the movement went well with it! Which it did! As you can see we also added Bokeh Random again which added to the disco/party effect we were trying to give out at this climax part!

On this particular clip of Louise lip syncing, we found it hard to blend her hair in to the green screen! It seemed a bit blocked so we added the feather affect more! And also changed the background once again!

Here we used the mirror effect and had to crop and change it around so it was more central and looked like she was looking at her own twin! And singing together! I really liked this idea and we took it a step further by adding lyrics in!

We added another fun background and added the text effect which was “glow” and kind of looked like the stars were making each lyric come forwards and glow which I thought combined with the clip so very well! Also, the choice in white I thought was a good idea because again it went with the stars!

We wanted to do something very distintive at this part! So we began to edit it as normal and choose a very bright background! Even brighter than before!

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This was probably one of the brightest video with all the pink on there! We put it in slow motion but Alice did not seem to look right just on the left side, on her own dancing and we wanted this clip to stick out so we each shared our thoughts on what we could do!

At first we zoomed in on Alice to see how far we wanted her to be before we showed a really clever clip!

And this is when we got 3 of the same clip and put them one after another! So Alice was as a 3, starting one by one and this is probably my favourite bit of the music video! I thought it made it look so professional and something you would actually see in a dance music video, if not better!

We also put Louise in to the same effect we put Alice in, but in my personal opinion I did not think that using this setting for this particular clip matched it as well! But I think it still looks good but it does not look like is actually part of the purple hole!

This clip would be simple and just lyrics! Although we still had Bokeh random on and the lyrics were put quite big so it is easy to read. And we also used the glow text to make it look like the stars are sending out the words again!

At this point, the song is at it’s climax so we wanted the dancing to be very wild and fast! Along with being bright with the backgrounds used! Alice is in her strapless dress here again and the space affect looks like, lights beaming on her! We also put Bokeh random on a high amount so there was more little disco bubbles around!

Again we wanted to use lyrics! We had not had many lyrics in our video and I think it kind of completes it in a sense! We used the background which we had used before where Alice is coming out of it and it did not look as effective this time when she was not in the hole but it still looked great to me!

We had Louise and Alice over lap at some point which I thought was another one of the best parts of our music video! Because it would make sense to blend them because one is dancing and the other lip syncing which made a good mix!!

 

Unfortunately the MAC’s at school kept freezing, we would then have to quit and it lost our work, so we had to re-do the work we had done that day, which was quite a lot so it was a small setback we managed to overcome!

 

 

Here we were adding a triangle into our music video because our album cover has a lot of the triangles so we had to include it in to our music video, the space and the triangle relate a lot to the cover which is always good to relate back too! We had to keep playing around with the triangle because it did not always look right!

 

We used this logo on a flash effect at the start which I think looked incredibly good and professional, as if it was actually AVICII’s official video!

Editing day 1

We decided to start with the footage of Ellie in the dance studio, we knew the majority of making our music video what it was and how effective it was to our audience would be how we edited it to bring the feeling of the song into the actual music video, so fun and makes people want to dance!

Here we had a shot of Ellie warming up, from a Long shot and the focus is on a Ballet bar, but you are still in sight of Ellie warming up.

Here you see Ellie on the Laptop putting the Avicii song on, you get close ups of her choosing the song out, we had to re-time this clup so it went faster and did not take too much time up of showing her going onto the laptop.

This shows the song which goes along the bottom of Final Cut Pro so we know where to place each clip to go with out song perfectly and also how long our song will take.

Here we took the shot of Louise singing(the not faded image) but because it was obviously a green background we had to press the Luma Keyer effect which made it so we could add the imaging to the background, we decided we were going to base the green screen affect on space, because then it matched with our album cover but at the same time we could use really bright, fun backgrounds.

We had to fiddle about with the feather so the image did not look like it did not belong there. We decided the best look was so it was faded on to it, so it made it look like she was actually in space. We had to crop the image too and then transform the space image to then widen it on the screen!

By this time, we realized that we did not think this space idea we had would relate atall to the story of Ellie going into a dance studio, putting on the music and training because the dancing we got of Alice was completely different to the dancing Ellie was doing.  And then to flick between Louise lip sinking in space, Alice dancing in space and then Elle dancing in a dance studio did not make any sense and the two stories were two completely different things. We were going to try get Ellie in to dance infront of the green screen so then we had more shots but unfortunately she was very busy and we had to get the filming out of the way and done so we could not film Ellie and had to forget about the filming we did before, because we did not use the green screen we could not change the background in which Ellie was performing in.

We had to make sure we had the lip lying exact when Louise was lip syncing so that mean listening to the song very carefully and then we would cut the clip to where she sang those lyrics, we used Bokeh Random to do this disco ball effect which we would use in and out of the video throughout, it added to the fact this song would be used in a club and it was exciting, also added more movement to our video, which it was full of! We could change the settings so there could be a few in one clip and then a lot more in the next clip.

We then changed the setting to Teal and Orange and messed around with things such as the shadows to make it look quite glamorous in my opinion. And gave a bit of a glow to her face! As you can see in the left corner are the clips of Louise we were choosing from and which clip would fit in best at each point!

We also used cold steel on that clip, this is normally used to dim the lighting, to make it more low-key lights which sometimes suggests bad things and negative but in this sense, we are using it as nightclubs are kind of dark, then we have the disco ball and dancing! So it seems to all fit!

 

 

Here we were playing about with the picture, cropping it and making it zoomed, to see how near we thought it looked best! We also added the “dazzle” effect, which made it more fluorescent.

We had to speed up this clip, so therefore the lyrics would match up more.

 

Here we had two very similar clips of Louise lip syncing, in the first one she did fine lip syncing but as the clip continues it looses the exactness so we had to get another clip and edit it precisely to where she starts to go a bit wrong on the lip syncing.

 

Above you can see we used a different space background for this clip. Which again we feathered, zoomed and cropped to what we thought looked best!

 

Filming day 3

We then got a green screen delivered to the school! And we decided we really wanted to give this a try, but we did not know whether it would match in with our previous footage but we thought to go ahead with filming with the green screen anyway and if the dancing and lip syncing does not match up with the previous footage, we will decide which footage we think is the best but when using the green screen we will still use the idea of a girl dancing! 

So, we met up with our friends Alice and Louise after school and used the green screen that had been delivered to school that looked a lot like this 

The green screen is a new technique has been used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video – particularly the newscasting, motion picture and videogame industries. A colour range in the top layer is made transparent, revealing another image behind. The chroma keying technique is commonly used in video production and post-production.

So by using this, we could make our music video reflect more to our Album cover, by adding things such as space as the background which could a lot more interesting and distinctive rather than a simple dance studio background! 

So, we got Alice to dance in front of the green screen, she did the kind of dancing you would probably see in a night club, so it went more with the music so therefore not the same kind of dancing we did in previous filming which was more choreographed, this was more laid back.

She wore a velvet strapless dress which again you would see in a club.

Another outfit was small shorts and a nice jumper, which was very girly and still something you could wear to a party where this song is most likely to be played!

Secondly for Louise, you would only see her head in the filming because she was more Lip syncing rather than dancing. Her makeup was done and for her lips we used a very Pink, Barry M type which would be what a girl would wear out to a party, and it made her lips more defined, which is where the lip syncing would come from. 

We filmed Her doing the song at different angles, we got her to lie down and sing the song and also standing up. Lying down looked great because her hair was above her head, which was quite fun looking. With Alice, we just got her to dance standing up next to the green screen, we took many shots so we had a big choice when we came to editing. 

We then used an Iphone light, infront of the camera which is a very strange idea! But we thought if we wanted to edit in it could be good for effects such as the Kaleidoscope. 

Filming day 2

We looked at the flour footage and we decided we did not like it because it was not something we could make the whole video out of, there was not a story to why she was dancing around with flour in a dance studio, if we had a green screen at this point it could of made more sense but we did not. Therefore we made our way back to the Dance studio the next day.

This time, we would make more of a story about Ellie and her dancing. So we would use the song as to what she was dancing too in the studio practicing.

Here is Alesha Dixon’s music video, where she is dancing in a dance studio, similar to the one we have filmed in.

We filmed Ellie at first on her Macbook, as if she was putting on the song and then going to dance. We were going to use all of this dancing with advanced affects to make it look interesting and worth watching! Too see what would happen next.  She did all sorts of things such as big, defined moves! It looked so  good and we knew we could edit it to look even better!

 

Filming day 1

So, we decided to give the powder/flour affect a try! We all met after school and  we knew we needed a good dancer so we were going to get our friend Ellie to dance! And we went to the school dance studio.

 

The dance studio provided us with lots of space, so Ellie could dance, run and jump a lot, there was also mirror reflections, this showed that it was a proper dance studio. Ellie wore all black so therefore the flour would be more obviously seen, we decided not to use powder because it was a lot more expensive and we would have to order lots of different colours online, so we stuck with simple flour from Sainsbury’s which would work just as well!

So we started filming with Susannah’s Canon camera ‘650D’ which is very high quality, 18 megapixel and full HD. We decided to use this camera over the school camera due to the better quality which would make our music video look more professional.

We also used a Tripod:

We used the tripod because then everything would be a lot more steady, and not have shaky shots, this could make our footage look very unprofessional and completely ruin the affect it has. You can go up, down and to the side using the tripod without a shaky motion which is really helpful!

So, we began to put flower all over Ellie, including her hair, shoulders, knees, legs, arms and everywhere possible!

So, we began to film Ellie doing different dance movements with flour whipping off her! It looked so great but then we had difficulties with the camera, it started to break so therefore we could not film Ellie. We spent about an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with the camera and how we can fix it. After we finally fixed it and allowed it to also have more memory, we considered doing stop-motion again, so we tried it out but like we predicted it was far too many photos which would be so time consuming. We stuck with filming Ellie but we didn’t get enough footage for a whole music video. Looking back on the footage we did, it was really good but there wasn’t much else we could do, to fit in with the flour in the dance studio to make it much more exciting. The plan we had just did not seem to be working as planned.

Risk Assessment

For the Dance studio, there are not many risks but because we were using flour, it could be Easy for Ellie to slip on the flour which we needed to consider, so we decided when we do film we will sweep it up after every shot we get so then in the next shot we film she will not slip. The floor is also wood in the dance studio which could be painful if Ellie was too slip so we needed to make sure in her dance routine was not too much her in too much danger if she was too fall. 

The MAC will be connected to different things in the dance studio so we needed to make sure she was not to trip over any of the wires that could be about, so before we would check around and make sure she was far away from dancing into them! And finally, we had a lot of media equipment so we needed to make sure we kept it safe at all times, when we were not use it we would put it in a case and when we were using it, the camera would be wrapped around our neck’s! 

Because Ellie will be in bare feet, there could be something sharp such as glass on the floor so we need to be certain to check around the studio to see if there is anything she could step on which could cause something to go into her feet or hand when dancing.