Editing: Cutting clips

One thing I have learnt is that it's better to have a clip too long than too short, however this means we are left with a lot of wasted clip that is just deleted.

This shows the length of the clip filmed and the part highlighted within the yellow is the piece we have used

This seems like a long process but to get it perfect we have learnt that this is the way it needs to be done.

Research and Planning

• In today's lesson the three of us started our research by listening to album tracks and looking into them on YouTube and the internet.  
• When we knew we were going to research in this lesson, we thought of some general ideas and one main one was that we would use a female artist/group for our song choice, this is because our group consists of three girls and we felt that this would suit us more. 
• In this lesson we looked at a variety of songs and considered factors such as lip-syncing and also about the origin of the singer. For example when looking at Rihanna's album we thought that a lot of her music consists of rap and would be difficult for us to learn. Also because she is American we thought it would be hard to match the music with the mise-en-scene we would have in our video- which would be British, so this is one that we decided against.
•  Our favourites at the moment are Ellie Goulding, Kate Nash and Lily Allen.

Prezi for second shoot

For our second shoot we decided to create a Prezi of our ideas to follow. This was helpful because we had it in list form so it was simple to read and we also enjoy making them.

Editing process

Today we were editing the clips we had so far into the video. We were also making notes of what clips we still needed to film and what ones we needed to re-film. This was an important process because at the time of filming the majority of the clips looked good, however once they are onto the iMovie software we noticed certian glitches or lighting issues, so now we will know what to change next time we film.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another thing that we noticed was that during the filming we had the camera on a horizontal angle for some of the clips. We thought that it would be fine just the rotate the clip on iMovie, however when we did it, this happened........

 

 

..to...

 

 

The clip rotated however it had a black border on each side where the clip didn't fit into the video properly. This is something we have learnt from so in the future we will keep the camera vertical throughout filming.

Website

Today I signed up to the website www.wix.com to start looking at ideas for my website.

I started by searching through the templates for the bands and musicians to find the type of one that I liked. I came up with 3

I like all of these as there is emphasis on the photos of the artists.

Once I have taken all of the photos for my website I will look further into these designs and start to create my own. This was beneficial to me because I haven't created my own website before so I've now learnt the basics of navigating around the page and how to apply the templates to my own work

Camera angles and poses

Here is a Pixton cartoon of the shots we are planning on taking. One of the angles we plan to use frequently is the close up, this is because we want to focus on our characters expression and also to show her singing. Through practice we have tried to show expressions and singing from other angles such as a long shot to add parts of the setting to create a 'mise-en-scene' but it is very unclear what's going on because we cannot see the face, so we have decided that the close up and extreme close up are the best to show this.

Changes

Originally we had planned to use myself and our extra character Alex as the main characters, however after a few difficulties of time management and arranging when we are all free to do the filming we decided against it. We had a couple of volunteers to use along with myself, but after starting the filming of Natasha the main singer we decided to actually change our idea and have her as the character involved in the story that the song is about, as it seemed to fit better. We trialed having an extra character of Charlie but this didn't work well. We now have Natasha and Cameron as the main characters as well as Natasha being the artist in the song. This is working a lot better and we are happy with the way the filming is going. We understand that this may look a bit confusing and disorganized but as a group we expected to have some hiccups and now we have overcome this problem we are working better as a group and ultimately we are working towards what we feel is a great video!

First photoshoot for digipak

First photoshoot for digipak with analysis

Our first shoot: Locations and mise-en-scene

I've made a GoAnimate video below, however to fully subscribe you have to purchase a package, so I have used the free version and recorded it through my mobile and posted to youtube.



 Here are the photos of our location we've used today.

Taking photos of our location prior to filming was beneficial because it helped us plan our videos and put our ideas into place as we could visualize where they would be filmed.

Planning and research

In today's lesson we started to create a storyboard on www.pixton.com. It is a comic strip creator so we decided that it would be interesting to do and so far it looks good.

This is me using the software

 

 

Storyboard (start of the video)

For our storyboard we decided to experiment with different software and we found a website showing us how to make a comic strip. This was fun to do as we were able to choose every detail down to the facial expressions of the characters. However, it was very time consuming and required a lot of perseverance so we decided to just use this for the start of our video and continue the rest another way. We enjoyed making this because it was fun and interactive, and we learnt how to use new software.

Research into other artists: what I will and wont use

Research into artists: what I will and wont use

Pitch

For our pitch we decided to produce a video. We first noted all of our ideas onto paper then created the video using the camera on the Apple Mac laptops, and from there we added photos, text, graphics, effects and music to show what we are expecting to create for our music video. We learnt the different techniques we can use on the Mac software. Originally we were going to simply record ourselves speaking the whole way through, but we found it to be really boring so decided to go back and turn it into how it is now.

Hope you enjoy!

Analysis 1: Kate Nash - Foundations

For our first analysis of a music video we decided on Kate Nash because she is in the Indie-pop genre like Ellie Goulding. We created a mind map of what we thought about the video and picked out things we liked and disliked. We will use this to help us when creating our video because it can show the guidelines for the genre, and this will also help when looking at our target audience.

 

 

 

 

 

We decided to generate our written work into a digital version of a mind map




If the mind map doesn't show, please follow the link below

http://www.mindmeister.com/345338342/analysis-of-kate-nash-foundations
Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

Planning and research

In today's lesson we continued research into our song and created a mind map of ideas that we all had. This was a good start because now we have these we can develop them into our storyboard. By doing this we've learnt what sort of things each of us likes and how we can combine and adapt them together to put the plans into motion....

Planning and research: Final song choice

This is our final song choice. We chose this because as we were listening we were all imaging what we could do for a video to this song. We like Ellie Goulding's genre of Indie-pop because we feel like we could make it quirky and interesting. Listening to this song we all decided that it should follow a strong narrative and we were all inspired by the lyrics and came up with several ideas that we decided on later in the lesson....

Planning and research: song choices

In today's lesson we continued our research into the songs and this time we were mainly looking for the songs if they already had a music video attached to them. We narrowed down our choices even more and came to a final decision between two. We listened to them both, spoke about pros and cons and about what ideas we were getting and chose Ellie Goulding - Everytime you go, which is from her first album. Although this was not our favourite song we listened to, this is the one we got the most inspiration from. We learnt that this stage of planning was important because if we just chose the song we liked the most and prepared for that we would be stuck for ideas in the future when actually making the video. Now we have started getting real ideas and planning properly we will be ready to make the video.

Evaluation of first task

For our evaluation of our preliminary task we decided to create a running commentary over the video so we could analyse it as we were going. Overall we were happy with it as a first attempt, but for next time we have improvements as a group we would each like to make which are all shown in the video :)

First attempt at a music video: Katy Perry - Hot 'n' Cold

As a preliminary task we were asked to create our own video to a song. My group (Natasha Price and Charlotte Millar) and I decided that Katy Perry's Hot and Cold would be a good choice because we liked her quirky styles and ideas, and we thought it would be good fun as a first task. Researching into other Katy Perry videos we looked at her style and genre and tried to adapt it to our own video, and from there chose our mise-en-scene. As it was just a preliminary task we were limited to completing in during our class time and therefore it had to be filmed within school, but we worked with what we had and as a first attempt I think it was a good start. One thing I learnt was that the length of the shots were too long in quite a lot of scenes and comparing this to real media products it is very noticeable. A good thing about the video was that we tried to get several different outfits and settings as much as we could, which again from looking at other music videos seems to be an important thing. For the real product we will take what we've learnt from creating this video and correct the mistakes we first made.

Lip sync practice

With a different group to what I am with now, we practiced how to lip sync to a song. One thing I learnt was that it is important to properly enunciate the words so that they match with the lyrics.  One thing I would do differently is as a group, to make sure that everyone is at the same pace and the song lyrics are learnt properly. As a first attempt I think this was a good start at lip syncing and it was good practice teaching me how to do it.

Brief

A promotion package for release of an album, to include a music promo video with:

• a digipak for the album's release
• a website homepage for the artist