Reflecting back on the AS year... first task for A2!

We were going into practice. “Filming for base track editing” was our first assignment.

“Film for up to 2 minutes of the song – have at least 6 base tracks” This was mainly just a practice, and a taste for the new skills we will be developing in this year’s coursework. We chose groups and were given a song to create a video to. This activity was meant to be great practice for lip syncing, which would have been the case if we hadn’t failed to complete the task correctly. We as a team filmed a variety of shots none of which contained lip syncing… our plans were soon put to a stop as we went to re-shoot the video. This was no big deal, we completed the task as we were asked and also managed to include some creativity from the previous shots that we have done.
This task is also great in terms of an introduction to popular camera angles when making a music video. Here is a list of effective shots:

·         Hand held tracking close-up

·         Hand held tracking long shot

·         Mid shot with camera on tripod

·         Long shot with camera on tripod

Of course, this isn’t the complete list, but a good start for any music video. So anyhow, we have officially filmed and edited. Have a look at our finished piece…

The filming of this video was great fun! We tried to be creative and unique in our work. Having interpreted the lyrics of the song we decided to do a 'cheesy' video, it suits the pop theme. This task got us to experiment with different types of shots, be enthusiastic and I think the best part was getting others involved. I hope this becomes a re-occurring theme for this years project. The editing then had to be re-arranged to have a variation of shots in time with the music. The main thing we've learnt about music videos is that they need to keep the viewer interested. This is normally done by editing to the beat and making the audience feel engaged in the video. 

I'm not going to lie. This is hard. It was hard lip syncing to a song we didn't know the words to, I see why this was a great exercise to prepare us for our real video, make note: TRY TO LEARN WORDS ASAP! Otherwise.. it looks WEIRD. It's also important to pronounce words clearly, because when it comes down to the editing, if you can't match the lip syncing to the song lyrics whilst it's playing, you're in trouble and it's likely that a re-shoot is in the cards. 

Here is a short 'story board' of how we edited our video... 

First, we imported all of our footage into Final Cut Pro, as well as the sound track. We placed all the footage we wanted to use one underneath the other and matched them to a point where all three videos are lip syncing at the same pace and also inserted our additional footage just in case we decided to bring it into use. We then listened to the song and every four beats marked a red point along the footage, this mark later indicated to us where all videos need to be cut. 

Once we cut up all the base tracks we matched different videos to see what worked and created a variation of shots by deleting the cuts the we felt were not strong enough to use in the video. Here is a closer look of our final efforts:

The final edit... could have been better, if we weren't in such a rush to finish and took the time to make this perfection my view would be different. Overall, we worked hard and it was our first try, I'm happy with the finished product but I hope to have more experience and vision for the 'real' project.