FINALLY FINISHED !!

So today we officially finished our music video; perfected the last few shots and had it checked over by Rebecca, and we were allowed to check off our video as finished on the 'Finished music videos' list, this was a very exiting moment as now we can relax and watch everyone else stress over last minute details, lol jk.

Although we were the first group finished, just sayin.




But although we (Valeza and Jess) checked off our music video on the list, we thought we should wait for the rest of our groups approval before we officially put the final video up on blogger, so we will do that sooon.

Producing our Music Video- Hidden Messages!

While we were in the final stages of editing, adding in new reflective shots of the hands, Erika noticed that sometimes Jess' dancing hands made the shape of a wolf, since she was so exited about this fact, I thought it only right to upload the evidence on our blog. Also I think it the (unplanned) wolf shape adds a new element to our minor theme of using             animals to represent the artist's emotional state.

Producing our Music Video- Sixth Day of Editing

This is our last day of editing :)

There was one shot that we thought remained on the screen for too long, which was the shot of Valeza's face reflected in the water. Also it wasn't completely clear that this was Valeza's face so we thought the audience may be slightly confused. We decided to shorten this shot and repeat one where Valeza puts her hands through her hair, it resembles the lyrics "i'm going crazy." It's a shot that conveys a lot of emotion and even though it is a repeated shot we still think that it looks effective.

This was the last thing we changed and now our video is finished :D

We saved it correctly and highlighted it in yellow on our video drive, so that they'll play the correct one in the cinema.

We got to tick our group of for our finished video, and we were the first out of all the classes..

So it took six long fun days, but hey even God rested on the 7th :P

Original shot

Modified shot

Finished and Saved :)

Producing our Music Video- Fifth Day of Editing

After we received the feedback from our rough cut we began to make changes in order to make our final piece better.

We started by removing the rabbits and finding other footage that we have to replace it. Also we took out the fast moving walking shots and began to work more closely with our ending because we needed to focus more on the artists' identity rather than being on the dancers.

To replace the bunny rabbits we decided to add three more different shots. We admired our use of the mirror work and decided to repeat this again, because it would look better. So we slowed down the shots I (Jessica) did with the shadows of my hands. Also we used the mirror shots of Valeza's eyes and we repeated the pigeons flying shot. Together they went really well and fitted more with our song. However as we are all keen English students we took the extended metaphor of the bunny too far, comparing it to Alice and Wonderland and letting the bunny go.

(OK, we tried to justify it but hey we knew we had to take it out.)

Also in order to fix the speeded shots we decided to slow it down a lot and to kill two birds with one stone we decided to cut it up and edit it between the dancers. So we are then showing the artist more, and her movements and where she is walking somewhat reflects the lyrics too.

Before the second verse starts, there is a shot where Valeza is opening her eyes before she starts to lip sync, we cropped this clip and reversed it so it shows her closing her eyes and this is the last shot before the bird is released so it is an effective ending.

Micky also helped out by allowing us to fade the song at the end which goes well with the bird flying away.

Producing our Music Video- Fourth Day of Editing

On our fourth day we mainly tried to fill in all of the gaps so that we did not have any blank spaces in our video. This is why we added the unconventional 'bunny rabbit shot' and the 'speedy gonzales' shots as what Dan liked to call it. We knew that perhaps these had to change for our actual completed video.

Also we imported the clip of us releasing the bird. We obtained this shot by filming against the portable green screen at Erika's house. We slowed the clip down massively and this in turn made the bird look bigger more like a dove (which is what we wanted.) And then we were going to transfer the bird onto a prettier still image of the church in St.Pancras.

We asked Marissa to show us how to do this, but she could not eliminate all the green because the bird was moving too quickly and her wings were still green. Therefore we just had to change the brightness and contrast so that the backround was simply in black and make the bird look whiter. However it still looks really effective anyway.

rough cut: audience feedback

So we all uploaded the rough cut onto our facebook pages (after getting the artist's permission ofcourse) so that we could get some extra feedback on how to improve our video and make the final as good as it could possibly get. Here are some screenshots i took of my fb page showing some suggestions from my friends, i've also discovered we have not one, but 2 'number1 fans' (nora and shannon) which is really exiting! i enjoyed watching them argue over who loved our video more (always a good thing).

Producing Our Music Video- Third day of Editing

On this day we'd managed to finish the whole of our introduction and our first verse. We were really proud of the way that it was turning out so far. So we wanted to replicate this in our second verse.

Also we used continuity editing. This is because we didn't want our video to look too random and we wanted to use the symbolism as a story. Our second verse is really effective because we have used elements of illustration and amplification and it works really well with the lyrics.

eg: In the first verse we have a shot of the artist writing the word love and crossing it out on the paper. So in the second verse we have the shot backwards so the word is being erased, because it cannot leave her mind.

Just before the chorus there's a shot of the artist putting her hand closer to the water so that we can see her reflection, then in the second verse we see the reflection of her face in the water to show that she is going crazy over the heartbreak.

We also began to put the dancers into our music video, this is because we have both a male and female so we could contrast the two. Also the male is dancing heavily to the beat and the female to the lyrics she looks very expressive. They add a good dimension to our video.

our shadow shot was more frequent and this was before we used image and wireframe to change the positioning and before brightness and contrast was altered to make it look more like a shilouette 

this is our first shot with the candles 

The word being erased, goes with lyrics "and i cant erase it"