FINAL MUSIC VIDEO

Audience Feedback

 In Today's lesson we reflected on our music video and asked the teachers and a group of year 10 students to watch the music video and give us some feedback before we would hand it in. The response was very positive according to the feedback sheets. The common consensus was that they believed the camera work and editing technique was great and they loved the Powder Paint scene in particular, however in the critique they said that the beginning was quite confusing and they didn't understand what was going on, this could be down to the lack of concentration or distraction, or the fact that they are on the younger scale of are target audience so they might not get it's correlation to the song. Overall the feedback was great, one teacher stated that "one clip is too long", however after analysing it as a group and with other teachers we agreed that it benefited the feel of the video rather then hindered it.

Name of Artist

Today we decided on the name of our artist, at first we where thinking of keeping the name as Katy Williamson but decided to branch out and research some names that we liked. The theme for the chosen name would be powerful, mystical and unusual. At the beginning we where going to make it an extended name  like the artist 'Florence and the Machine' as it makes it seem fuller however, once we chose the name we felt it was strong enough by itself. 

List of names we liked:

Flora

Esme

Freya

Saffron

Amber 

KT

Katee

Pandora 

Xena

Delilah

Isla

Ariel

Dixie

Luna

CHOSEN NAME:

Meeting 4/3/14

Today we could not add any more film as we are waiting till Friday to film out final scene of the video. So today we decided it was important to do the colourisation of our opening scene, we where unsure on how we will create the transition between the sepia tone in the housewife shoot and the brightness of the London shoot. We decided to experiment with the colourisation by reducing the saturation on the beat of the music and the pace of body movements, however when watching it back we realised that the transition was clumsy and simply looked like the lighting had changed. We have to review this again when we next edit.

openings

After refilming and editing the opening we feel it looks much better and that the reshoot was a success. The opening is longer and so more meaningful and it flows better due to better match on action shots. Also the choice to use bigger cream cakes places more emphasis on the action and therefore helps to make it look more significant and effective than the previous shots.

Editing - 25/02/14

Today we uploaded the footage we reshot of the 1950s housewife opening. We are a lot happier with this footage that we were with the original, it looks more professional as well as the fact that it allowed up to develop the opening a bit more than we had. We made several improvements to the shoot and made sure that we wouldn't have to reshot it again. We now have a great amount of shots to work with.

Improvements

• Change to Katy's outfit - No cardigan 
• Bigger cake to have more of an impact when it hits
• Change to the Radio - More old fashion looking to suit the time period 
• Added dialogue to make the opening easier to understand 
• Change to Taran's outfit - More formal

The only issue is it may make the opening longer than we had anticipate and this could potentially be an issue.

Re-shooting

  

                                                                                                                                                                             

                                         

We decided to re-shoot the opening scene of our music video as we had a few faults that could not be edited through available software, for example we were unsure of what to do with the dialogue, it was not clear or adequate enough to be used, and if we decided to add dialogue in a voice-over, it may have looked amateur. Also, another major problem was the cake throw; the size of the cake was far too small and the aftermath of the throw wasn't shown. In the re-shoot we bought a bigger cake and three of the same so we could re-shoot from different angles to create a dynamic shot. We also wanted to build suspense and mystery of the characters at the beginning of the sequence, so in the re-shoot we filmed below the face for a matter of seconds. Furthermore, we also replaced the previous newspaper with a 'Business' paper as it mimicked the male characters 'formal' and ‘important’ demographic. We decided to incorporate a crossword as a basis for the characters to communicate, however there was not a crossword within the newspaper so we had to lightly cellotape one inn. A problem we faced was that the newspaper we got it from was much smaller than the broadsheet we were now using so it looked unrealistic. A resolution to this was placing it on the right side of the paper so there would be no shadows when shooting and it made it possible for him to fold the newspaper on the table. Another problem we faced was that when we filmed all the cake throwing we assumed that we had done enough, so decided as a treat to ourselves and our helper we would share half of the last cake, however we had realised that we forgot a shot and hate to somehow fix a broken cake; but with lots of icing mix left we managed to retrieve it.

Filming the Powder Paint shoot.

 

A video of some of the footage from yesterday. 

Yesterday we filmed the powder paint shoot, we had been unable to previously due to the weather, and then later mock exams.However, yesterday we organized to do the shoot as the weather reports said it would be sunny. Unfortunately the weather wasn't on our side and it began raining while we were shooting.

It was very cold while we were shooting as we were all in summery and revealing clothes to match the style of song and other music videos that are often voyeuristic. However, I think this worked well in the video. When we come to editing hopefully the fact that people were cold shouldn't have affected their performance.

I think that yesterday went well and hopefully we have some good shots. 

Costume for Powder Paint Shoot

Meeting 14/2/14

In today's lesson we decided to incorporate something that we hadn't seen or attempted to do before, making frames of different stages of a scene and colourising two contrasting colours per frame. We found it difficult to choose two colours that went together and complimented each other without making it look unclear or amateur. What we also found difficult with this technique was measuring the frame so that it they are parallel to one another, the software could not give us a mathematical estimation of where the frames needed to be so we had to branch out and use a ruler, the process was very tricky.

Colourisation

Today we worked on the colouring of certain clips. We want our video to be very bright and vivid. We played around with two colours in one shot and this is the outcome.  It took us quite a while to find colours that complemented each other and didn't lose the focus of the shot. We are very pleased with the way it looks and it had kept the video in the pop genre.

Editing 6/02/13

Video Summary:

• In this video we thought about the colourisation of the sky in London- we wanted to it to be bluer to reflect a summers day.
• I also suggested to the group that we do a multiscreen effect on the video, while I am on the bikes. We liked this and decided to color the individual shots and have them on a black background. This also reflects Goodwin's notion of looking and frames within frames. 
• We then had to decide what colour's we wanted for each frame.
• We then worried that it make look far to "studenty" so Kirsten suggested we add a frame around the boxes as she had seen this in music video. We liked this and went with it.

Editing

Colourisation

Today we started to edit the colours on the clips to make them stand out more and be more visually interesting. We played around with the saturation to make the colours more vivid, however this made the artist skin tone slightly orange. We continued experimenting with the colours using the three-way colour correction tool until we settled upon what we thought looked natural but still bold and bright.
Here is an example of the difference the colourisation has made so far. The first video being the original footage and the second being the edited footage. Overall I am pleased with the difference this has made to the footage however I think we could still work to further enhance the colours, especially in scenes such as the skate park to make the graffiti far more vivid than it already is.

Planning

We often use social networking to arrange and organise plans for filming/editing/planning. It is a good was to create a group chat so we can all get involved easy and clearly.

28/01/14

In today's lesson we continued our editing. So far we have edited up to the first chorus for our song. Editing is going really well, when an issue arises we all talk it through and decide as a group what to do. One of our main issues at the moment is trying to decide where to put the number scenes. We wanted to use them to do a countdown to the paint party, but we weren't sure if they should all go together or separately between different lip-singing shots. We thought that the clips should go together as it would make more sense that way. The next decision was whether these should go building up to the first chorus or the second. We decided that the first one should be used for more London shots and then build up the numbers for the second. If this doesn't look right when we have added in our paint-party shots that we can always move things around.

Pictures of practice shoots

* To set the scene we wanted to ensure that props that would fit the 50's setting; the tea pots, table cloth, the flowers and the cake stand where all elements we saw important in the circumstance.  We bought some cheap cakes to use as props and to keep the cast happy as we know that the filming process can be very tiring.

* We all had a turn with the camera as we all had different views on what we could film and how to film it; this was good as when it came to putting it on the editing software we had a variety of different angles and shots to work with.

* We tried to film a close up of Taran as he played the 'boring conservative husband'. He wore a suit and tie to fit in with the demographic, and we directed him to talk of about something that would appear boring to give the film a comedic feel. Although we will not be including the sound during editing, we believe that by using this technique it would make it appear more natural and realistic.

* We used props such as a mug of tea to give the film to make it seem old fashioned, traditional and dull. We also wanted the representation of the man to seem slightly chauvinistic and for the woman to be a typical 50's domestic housewife; we did this by focusing a lot of the attention on the man.

* When filming Katy throw the cake into Tarans face we had to find a comfortable position for the camera, we decided that having a close up that only displays half of his face would make the event seem more significant as the cake we used was not big, we did not want to make it seem minor or amateur.

Behind the scenes

We decided to travel to South Bank and study places that we could film, we already had a few ideas of where we would like to film, one of these was the Tower Bridge. It was very cold and we didn't want Katy to wear lots of layers as we wanted to convey a feeling of fearlessness and rebellion to match the lyrics and genre. The only problem with filming on the Tower Bridge was that it was very busy, so it meant there was less room to film and public attention was unavoidable.






We used one of the sculptures that are currently scattered around the city as a prop that we can work around in terms of free style movement. The other use we have for it is the progressive countdown that can be used when editing, leading up to some sort of explosion.

* This was one of the sculptures in London that was supposed to on Liverpool Street until May. Unfortunately, when travelling to this location we realised that it was not there, this was extremely disappointing.

* The first lesson back from filming we uploaded all the footage to Adobe Premiere. We are going to edit all of our footage so far in with the lyrics, once done we will begin to film in our next location.

Testing Makeup for Drama Studio.

I drew up some face charts for the possible makeup looks we could use for the Drama Studio. I did this as we all had quite different ideas about costume and makeup and I thought it would be easier to decide if they were visually presented. We can decide which we all like, and then add or takeaway elements. This means we should be well planned for when we come to shoot in terms of costume and makeup. I feel that in the London shoot we weren't sufficiently organized with this aspect. Therefore I think it is crucial that for this shoot we have everything sorted especially as this part of the song is quite conceptual and therefore makeup and costume are very important.

Yellow and Pink Graphic Style Eyeshadow. Pink Blush. Pink Stain Lips.

Multicolored Eyeshadow. Stars.Glitter Lips

A orange eyeshadow base. Black Eyeliner. Red Lips

Ideas for Costume: Drama Studio

Progress

Yesterday we started editing our footage. We started by editing together the opening scene, however there were some issues with this as some of the shots weren't the right frame or lacked continuity so we are considering refilming this scene. But for now we've just edited together what we have in order to get a vague visual representation of out ideas.

Group Meeting: 20th January

Today in our media lesson we uploaded our footage from the London filming. We then watched the footage back to review it. We also uploaded all our footage so far to Premier Pro and organised it all into separate bins, so we can easily find it for example, Opening, Tower Bridge, London Eye, Fillers, Numbers. etc.

We thought our footage was good and we thought about when to film our powder paint scene, and the spacey stuff in the drama studio.

Another thing we thought about was the issues we had during the London filming.  I don't feel that my performance was as strong as it could have been, so once we start editing we want to go do some more pick up shots etc around London. Also during the power scene we want to have a dance routine or something as we have noticed alot of this in our research of pop music video, its also part of Goodwins theory,  that music and visual link. Also we thought it be beneficial to discuss and practice my performance before shooting.

Filming - Issues

We planned to film the powder paint party today. However, due to the majority of people we needed to be involved in the scene being unable to attend, we have postponed filming to the 25th/26th of January in the hopes that more people will be able to make it and that we will therefore end up with a more realistic-looking 'party' (more than 5 people there).

Filming

Today we went up to London to film some shots of our artist lip syncing to the song in front of famous land marks. Unfortunately we lost some time out of the day due to people being late, but we still managed to film the majority of what we needed to get done, only missing out on filming some scenes in Camden due to the light fading. However, these shots can be easily picked up later, so it's not too much of an issue. Further issues included forgetting some of the necessary parts for the tripod, however I don't the we really needed the tripod as handheld shots achieved a better result as we were able to move around the artist and get more interesting shots. We learned throughout the day which way to film the artist achieved the best look, with the first shots having slightly too much movement - to the last shots still being visually interesting but not moving around so much as to disorientate the viewer.

Also during the day we took photos from each location for possible use in our digi-packs. My favorite photos being the ones taken at the skate park by Nicola.

 

Powder paint colouring issues

During the process of making the powder paint we decided to split up the job. To try to make some more vivid colours. This has been a challenge as the cornflour makes the colour more of a pastel colour than a vivid colour, no matter how much food colouring you add. The colour we have had a real problem with is red. As the cornflour dulls the vivid red to a lighter pink. Unfortunately we have not been able to create a vivid red. But we have decided that we can solve this problem by optimising the colour during our editing.

Making Coloured Powder

This week we made the coloured power for our music video. Here is how we did it.

Making the powder paint

Today we started making some batches of the powder paint. We decided to make green, blue, orange, pink and yellow. We also mixed pink and blue to make purple.

We decided to make the powder rather than buy it as it is cheaper to make, and also as we are filming the paint scenes on Sunday it would be quicker to make our own than to order online, therefore we'd definitely have the powder ready in time for filming.

To make the powder we simply used corn flour mixed with diluted food dye.

Afterwards we decided to the make further batches individually at home, as the more powder we have the more shots we can do with it, which will enable us to get a wide range of shots to chose from.

We also decided to additionally make red powder. We initially thought best not to use red as it would be too similar to pink, but seeing how clear the colours came out we didn't think this would be a problem.