Feedback from the rough cut

After hearing the audience feedback, we are confident to go forward with the green screening, and to experiment with the animations. We hope to clean up the overall edit sharpening our cuts, and switching specific shots.

Finished rough cut - tutorial with Matt and Matt

EDIT DAY: 10

Its come to the stage where we are now filling in the last 45 seconds of the song, however we were fining it hard to find footage from the roof top scene where we could find good lip syncs from the singers. After searching we found a few that weren't perfect but could be used if they were synced perfectly and looked good where we put it in the video. Then it was time to introduce our best Shooper Jacky Li

He was at the back of the sofa and we decided out of the boys he was going to be our main focus as he looked the best with the shapes he was cutting. So we pieced pieces of footage including him and then the whole sofa scene and the girls together, which ended up looking quite good within the video

sneaky picture of Jacky in action, with Ollie coming in today with a new haircut and a new attitude

After reviewing our video and what we've done so far, watching it the whole way through. The group would say that we are pleased with the progress that we have made throughout the past few weeks, and feel as if we are slowly getting there. The footage we got on our shoot day has deemed itself to be sufficient in order for us to make the music video that we will want to be our final product. It is going to be a long process with all the things such as after effects that we want to add as well, but we need to finish the actually video itself first. The good thing is that we all still seem to be enjoying this whole process and luckily are not yet bored of listening to the same song on repeat for the last few months. We are hoping the have fully completed our full first rough cut by the latest at the end of next week. Then when its done we will export it as a Quicktime file and then upload it to YouTube.

EDIT DAY: 9

On Thursday, we were looking through our video with James and found that we had introduced both the rooftop scene and the silhouettes to early on in the video. So as we went through we decided to take those bits out and save them for later on in the video, so we had to find other footage to put in to fill the gaps that taking this footage out created. So we put the silhouettes and the rooftop scenes towards the end, and we need to put them in at the very end of the song, which we are not onto editing yet. So we found other footage to put into the gaps that we had created and this gave the video a smooth and much less random bit. Again we found some cuts that looked a bit jumpy, so we went through the process of finding them on the timeline and ensuring that the cuts were as smooth as they could be.

EDIT DAY 8:

Today our good friend Gabe came and gave us a quick tutorial on how to use adobe lightroom for the pictures we wanted to use on our website and within our digipak. It was fairly simple, he just showed us how to edit things such as exposure, contrast and how to get rid of imperfections such as spots and shadows.

Gabriel was very helpful and made our job a lot easier as we didn't have to learn how to do all of it by ourselves, and hopefully well get some good pictures out of it, which will be uploaded to the blog at a later stage. We also continued to edit our rough version. We've now decided to add the coloured walls, where we realised we struggled to find a bit of lip sync for one of our main girls as she had difficulty with some of the lyrics.

Slowly getting closer to our first final edit of our first rough cut, we had adopted a new editing styler suggested to us by a few of the teachers and realised that it was a quicker and faster way of editing.

EDIT DAY: 7

Today after a few days of not editing, we went up to the editing suite at the end of the day and used our enigma time to carry on with the editing process.

We decided to make the video more structured so it looked less random. So we started editing each of the sets bit by bit so it looked more visually pleasing. The main focus of today was making sure every clip that we were using or may use was well synced and looked sleek and professional

The face of a concentrated editor. Ollie hard at work. In the process of matching everything up, working like a pro.
We were looking for a close up of Kemi in the club as we thought it would be effective in establishing her as the main character. However we couldn't find one so we had to use one in which she was the centre of the camera, which gave a similar effect but not exactly what we wanted.

EDIT DAY: 6

Once again we went up to the editing suite to carry on with our music video. We watched through what we had done and then realised that we were actually fairly close to finishing our first rough cut which was good to know. However whilst looking through the footage we realised that some of the cuts were quite jumpy and looked a bit weird. So then we went and looked at the timeline and realised that some of the shots were not exactly in line with each other which was causing the weird effect on these cuts, so we moved the shots and then it ran smoothly all the way through. The James came to watch our video and reminded us that we wanted the main focus of our video to be our boombox, however when you watched our video it was quite hard to tell if it was meant to be the focus or what. So we decided to play on the original idea of having words coming out the boombox and maximise it by picking certain words from the lyrics to come out of the speakers of the boombox to create effect. Then we realised that it may look a bit weird if this didn't happen through out the whole video, so we decided with other bits of the lyrics as well we'd use this idea of words coming out, so we are in the process of choosing the lyrics we want to use this for.

EDIT DAY: 5

12th November

Today we had lost Grace to a music video shoot, but she had given us some advice on what to do, but as a team of three we needed to step up and carry on editing. Again we were questioning whether we wanted to use the 3 extra girls who were dancing or not, as when we went through the shots of them just dancing on their own, we thought it could be a bit boring and they didn't really fit in. However we thought that we could incorporate each of them dancing with the boombox as it is the focus of our video. Matt then came over and showed us some VHS effects we could use, and we decided that we will use them at a later stage in order to give our music video more of an 80's effect. We started to incorporate the green screen scene with the sofa.

EDIT DAY: 4

11th November

It was our fourth day of editing, and we all re-grouped up in the edit suite. We decided to see if you could work on some lyric specific shots, with the idea being that what was in the lyrics would match what we were seeing of screen. It took a while to get it completely in time or even find the shot that we actually wanted to use but after a while we found two shots that matched very well with two sets of lyrics so we used that. We also tried to move forward within certain aspects of the video, going onto another verse and trying to incorporate the three girls that we got into dance, which is seeming to be difficult because we are finding it hard to decide where to place them within the video. Also as we watched the video back we realised that there are a few shots that we have chosen that don't actually work as well as we though they did when we watched it the first time through, so we are in the process of again, looking through all of our shots and trying to find something that may fit the lyrics and the video better. Finally we realised that we didn't have a video of someone singing the first bit of the video in our footage that we had edited into the video. Which held us back a bit as it took a while to find a piece of footage that incorporated the first part of the song, but eventually in one of our last pieces of footage we found a shot of Kemi doing and it fit perfectly so we have decided to use it. This lesson was really productive as it showed us that we did have a few mistakes, but that also they can be easily fixed, and it also feels like we are making a lot of progress within our first cut which is promising in order to get our successful video

EDIT DAY: 3

10th November

On the third day editing, some of the group decided to take one for the team and missed their free in order to carry on with the editing to get us a few steps ahead. In our lesson, we carried on editing the rest of the song, using the chosen shots. We started shuffling the shots around to get them into an order, which we thought would fit the video best. Then we edited the first minute to what we thought we would want it to be, however, we then looked through them again and thought we could shuffle them into a better order. Luke and James came up and had a look at what we had done so far, and they thought it was good but thought we could make the editing a bit smoother. We received some advice on including a few more shots and syncing every shot up to the video just incase we don't need to use them. In short we got told that we were doing well on our editing and that we should keep up the hard work, as it has the potential to be a good music video. We were informed that usually you don't stay in one location for just one shot, so if we structure it so that there are more shots in the same location it would be a lot more effective, otherwise we will run out of footage. We want different shots on each screen.

EDIT DAY: 2

9th November

On our second day of editing we went up to the edit suite and tried to cut more of the video in, we looked at our shots in further detail deciding if the ones that we had chosen would actually work for our video, after we reviewed the ones we had chosen we carried on trying to piece it together and match the visuals to the music. We dragged multiple pieces of footage onto the timeline so that we could sync them all up with the music, then the idea is that from here we cut it where we want and then start piecing it together, to become our final music video.  However after a lot of group thought we decided to cut the footage of the extra girls dancing on their own, and decided that them as a group worked better for our video as they were all in time and it gave a nice little touch for the video.

EDIT DAY: 1

6th November

We started editing our footage the day after we shot the music video, and we were using the software adobe premiere pro, which we are familiar with from last year.

Our editing process started by logging onto the computer, and finding our footage located in a specific folder. From here we watched through all of the shots that we recorded and slowly started picking the ones that we wanted to use for the video. We came up with a list of all the shots we wanted to use, and then we started creating a performance bed, for which we had to match the footage up to the sound so the lip synced actually worked. For the bed we used the colour screen background with all the girls.

ALL THE SHOOPERZ

 Tyler

Grace

Elisa

Ollie

Evaluation of Shoot Day

Helen doing Kemi's makeup

They day of the shoot, Thursday 5th November, went really smoothly and was a positive experience for everyone involved. We finalised all casting choices and final wardrobe and set adjustments the day before, making sure it was clear what time everyone was meant to be at the shoot to ensure a smooth run of filming. 

Makeup

We began with an underground club set, Tyler and    Ollie began putting up posters and arranging the                                decks and keyboard. Lit with coloured disco lights . While Elisa and I picked up our actor, Kemi. Jacky, Rob and Henry then began performing on the decks, while we shot and shot in wide and handheld held, getting canted angles and other interesting shots. With Henry and Jacky on the decks and Rob with the boom box on his shoulder, paired with the lights and set I feel we achieved the perfect 80's look. 

Make-up

Jacky

As we began shooting this, we shot the whole sequence twice in wide, as well as a canted angle looking up at the boys from a canted angle on either side, followed by hand held, allowing us to get close ups of the boys and the decks.

We then introduced the girls into the scene and encouraged them to dance round the boys, interacting with them whilst also engaging with the camera. We shot this again in wide and then achieved more intimate shots using a hand held camera.








We rapped this set and let the actors take a break whilst we took down this set and, built the next one. We took down the flats and added new ones, as well as adjusted the lights and swept the floor. Once our new set was ready to go we bring in our three dancers, and let them begin rehearsing. We realised as they rehearsed that the light was spilling around the sides of the coloured background, and we were very limited in what we could film as anything either side of the flat wouldn't look good on camera. To address this we used the black curtains surrounding the studio in addition to a black flat either side of the coloured wall to make the rest of the farm black, coincidently sharpening the coloured background. This allowed us more variation to shoot and the girls could move more freely.

We began to shoot the girls, starting from a wide shot with no light on them apart from that which was coming through the backdrop, creating sillhouettes, then repeated it all with the girls lit. Which we will hopefully be able to create a strobe lighting-esque effect hen we edit the video. 

We then moved onto individual shots of the girls each holding the boom box in different and interesting ways. Loa held it on her shoulder, Molly carrying it in front of her, by her knees, and Steph swinging it at her side.

We shot the girls once more, this time from the floor, with the boom box in the foreground and the girls in the background, out of focus. We then broke for lunch before getting the three main girls back in to touch up they hair and makeup and shoot them on this set. 

We repeated similar shots, starting off in a wide and then used a handheld camera, to capture some 80's looking angles and different close up shots. After having the girls lip-sync to the song in this set, we then shot the same shot as before with the boom box in the foreground and girls in the background switching the focus between the two. We even experimented with Kemi sliding right down to the front of the lens as she lip-synced several lines. 

The final set we used, was our rooftop with a green screen background. We had a the dj boys, swell as to extra boys. The green screen will eventually be edited as a London skyline at night. Everyone on the sofa looked like they were having a great time, which looked great on camera, an made the scene really come to life. Once again we began in a wide and then additionally shot close ups of each of the girls and some of the boys. The boom box was placed on Kemi's lap and we shot a close up of this swell. 

I felt the shoot day went really well, and am extremely happy with the way we communicated as a team and towards the actors, with some outstanding footage which we can't wait to begin editing.

Set and Digipak Design

Website design- by Grace

Rooftop design- Grace and I

Brick Wall design- by myself

Album cover design- Myself

Coloured wall design- by Grace and I

Group logo- by me

Research for Ancilliary tasks

The first groups album artwork we will show is from TLC- another R&B group from the 90's with similar music to Salt N Pepa.

Both of these covers show us a good use of colours that work will for the cover, and is similar to something that we may want to use for our album covers.

Then we have a screenshot of their official website-

None of us particularly like this website design, however we believe that the colour schemes work well to fit in with 90's theme that is trying to be achieved.

The next album work we looked at was from Kid N play:

 We liked this as it portrayed the cartoon like 80's look that we have considered, also even though it is a fairly old album cover you get a feeling of modernity from it. And again the colours compliment each other well in creating the 90's feeling.

Then their websites, both Chris Browns and Tygas:

Both of these websites dont fit in to our criteria because they are both to modern to get a 90's vibe from.

Next there is De La Soul, and here are some examples of their album artwork:

Again these are great examples to relate to the album artwork that we want to create. Both of these have colour schemes that conform to the 90's idea, it seems that the use of red green and pink seem to work well together aswell.

And then for their website:

Again this website doesnt seem to fit in with our theme of the 90's so wouldnt really be able to relate to their website, however their album artwork is perfect in relation to what we are looking to create ourselves.

Album artwork from boyz II Mean is show here:

Their album covers does not link to the rest that we have shown, but these two show quite a nice white and black theme, which can be seen within a fair few R&B groups album artwork. It shows as a nice alternative for the coloured themes.

Then their website also correlates with this theme:

Again this them does work well and if we cant achieve the coloured theming succesfully we may resort to using black and white to give it a simple yet effective digipak

and finally we looked at the digipak for Mika, firstly the covers

We especially liked all of these as we feel they had the best use of coulors and a cartoonish feeling that we feel works really well. We would like to achieve something similar to one of these for our final album artwork. The colours and images in all of these work really well together and help to entice and audience.

Then their website:

Again this website is not we would like to use due to the dark colours which do not correlate with our ideas and the site is also quite boring and doesnt have much on it.

Overall we believe that we would like to recreate something similar to the colourful cartoon like album covers that have been shown here. This is cause we feel like this will work well with the song that we are doing and it also will fit into our 90's theme that we are trying to achieve. Also we want our website to be vibrantly coloured and something that grabs the audiences attention. As a group we feel that it would be good if there was some sort of link between the album cover and the website, whether its through colours or images, just something that links them together, as we feel that would look professional.

Thank you to Tyler for the blogpost