DH Editing Music Video (3)

We have very nearly completed the music video, however it has evolved slightly yet again. The main change Tom and I have decided to make to our piece is that we have footage at the end that breaks the fourth wall, and we show some of the production of the video, with the band messing around with one another. We did this in order to make the theatre footage more interesting, since everybody moves around in these shots, and also to show the friendship of the band, as opposed to just the argument and performance. One other thing it was suggested we change was the cutting rate, which has greatly increased especially towards the end.
I personally have been mainly grading the footage, for most shots we have increased the contrast to make it bolder. However to differentiate the performance from the narrative I have been experimenting with the contrast/brightness, colour (hue, lightness, saturation), and tint effects. We have not yet come to an final effect we are happy with though, since bleaching the colour can also reflect a lack of energy in the piece which does not work so well with the tone of the song, meanwhile it still needs to be contrasting with the performance and new footage at the end.

TH Editing Music Video (5)

Today I completed the timeline. This involved some slight additions to the video at the end.

As is evident in this first screenshot, the timeline was full with the exception of a small section towards the end:


The approach I took to filling this was firstly by inserting some more performance that corresponded to the song. But, the gap was about ten seconds long, so filling this just with random clips I found did not seem the strongest way to complete the video.

In the storyboard, there is a ten-second segment near the end that we had planned to include a small summary of the video with a fast cutting rate. Therefore, I thought I could adapt this somehow and incorporate a montage sequence of clips that we did not intend on making the cut - bloopers in some ways.



This worked very well in the end, after applying some effects such as reducing saturation and increasing lightness in the HLS colour balance menu. The clips used include band members breaking the fourth wall. I believe that this has worked very well and powerfully for the end of the video as the audience will feel a connection with the band; the first paradox in Dyer's theory of  the artist being close but far from the consumer.

In conclusion on what may be my last editing post, I believe this addition has improved our video quite a lot.

DH Editing Digipak (3)

Disk

The disk pane has changed quite dramatically from it's previous concepts. Firstly I interlocked individual words from the song lyrics in the album in slightly different shades of red. Towards the centre of the image the words tend to be smaller, this is to draw the eye to the middle. When I was happy with the text positioning I merged the layers into one, duplicated and then inverted one of them. By then changing the blending effect of the inverted layer to overlay and moving it slightly off-centre I was able to create a three dimensional effect on the text.
However I still had to make the disk clear, to do this I created a disk shape, lowered the opacity of the layer and changed the blend effect to colour. Through this I was able to clearly differentiate the disk from the background without keeping it completely separate.

TH Reflection on Rough Cut

The rough cut that we exported from our project was peer reviewed yesterday. We received a lot of feedback from this session and it was quite useful for us.

-People were really enthusiastic to commend us on our lip syncing and instrument syncing. They believed that both of these crucial elements were addressed very well in the editing process.
-The whole performance part was received very well. The performance was very believable according to our peers.
-The contrast between the narrative and the performance lines of action was apparent; they flow very well separately and do not clash.

-One element of the performance that was highlighted by our peers was that perhaps there is a noticeable difference between the lighting in the shoot at the Oast Theatre and the one in the drama studio. This will have to be addressed by either incorporating less clips from one shoot or by altering the contrast and brightness of some shots.
-While the argument scene was well received on the whole, some thought it might be too confusing.
-Some of the earlier shots were too long; the cutting rate was an issue for our teachers in particular as they thought we could include more shots with a faster cutting rate.
-It was suggested we use effects to colour grade the footage, and we agree, because of this we want to experiment with having a lower saturation or tint on the narrative footage in order to show a clear contrast with the performance. If we have time we also want to increase the contrast on the whole video to make it more visually appealing.

We are at the stage where finishing touches are the main priority. With almost all of the footage on the timeline, visuals synced with audio and a linear progression all complete, making the video appear most professional is at the forefront of work in lesson time.

TH Editing Music Video (4)

In today's double period lesson, our video was reviewed by our peers and teachers. From this, Dan and I received some very useful feedback - this will be included in a separate post.
From the feedback, I continued editing and made some alterations to the timeline.

I only added one clip to the video, the first shot of the titles in a puddle. Other than this, nothing has been added or removed. What has been changed is the appearance of the timeline; I have separated the one line of footage into two lines on the timeline. The layer on top is the collection of footage we would like to use/definitely need to include and the layer underneath this is footage that we do not necessarily have to include and may exchange for other clips.

This has been a practical development in the editing process - we can now visualise what needs to be done before the deadline on Friday. Thus, we hope we can now get the video complete even quicker.

TH Reflection on Shoot 3

Initially, we had only planned for two shoots. During the editing of our video, we have been instructed to do one more shoot and capture a number of CUs of the lead and backing singers. We did this yesterday in the drama studio at our school.

First of all, we had to maintain a continuity between the first shoot's performance setting and this one. Costume was not a problem, as I wore the same clothes and Jack did not need to wear the same because we would just be filming his face in BCUs.

Making the lighting in the studio appear identical to that of the first shoot was next. Dan had access to the lighting system in both locations and so he made sure the lighting maintained continuity. The colour and shadow of what we achieved yesterday were both very similar.

Filming went well. We quickly accessed guitars and amps, one mic and stand, a camera and tripod. We filmed the whole song through once or twice, before filming BCUs of myself and Jack in parts we had gaps on the timeline.

My favourite shot is probably a worm's eye view shot of the lead singer, including the guitar, lip syncing and lighting on the rack all in frame.

I believe on improvement that could have been made in this shoot was the use of more equipment, such as the track or the jib. Unfortunately we did not have access to these as yesterday was also a filming day for the year below.

DH Reflection on Shoot 3

On the 18th November we filmed in the drama studio at school, our aim was to get some more close-ups and more dynamic shots. We had found that there were not only very few close-ups in our footage but there were also some gaps where we had moved narrative sections to fit with the music better and make nicer shots more prominent.

Due to the plays on at the Oast Theatre we were unable to use that location again however because of the lighting system in the drama studio it was fairly easy to recreate the lighting style.

My role was camera and lighting again, it was fairly easy to use the lights in the drama studio and our closer proximity meant we had a lot more control, and allowed me to get the lights in frame. However framing was very difficult in some respects since I had to work hard to make sure the background was not fully visible or it would contrast too heavily with our other footage. I filmed both Tom and Jack, Tom throughout most of the song in various close-ups and Jack playing guitar and singing backing vocals, something we had not really included in our first shoot.

One of my favourite shots was an arc shot, I really liked its use in the music video `Someone New` however due to the position of the lights and the shadow created, it did not turn out very well in our first shoot.

I was very happy with how this shoot went and Tom and I are now confident we have all the footage we need to complete our music video.

TH Call Sheet and Risk Assessment for Shoot 3

Shoot three is going to take place tomorrow in the drama studio at school. This is an updated call sheet/risk assessment post for the final shoot.

 

DH Editing Digipak (2)

Original

 I have been experimenting very thoroughly with the digipak in our  lessons, I recently finished the guitar image. In this image I  removed the blemishes such as hair, dust spots and unwanted  reflections using the healing brush tool, I found a large soft brush  worked best for most areas, while a finer but still soft brush worked  well on very small areas. I then tried out two layers with zero  saturation, and used mask effects to decide whether the body should  be in colour or not. In the end I decided it should because it fits  with our red and black theme.

The disk was more awkward to edit in some respects and we have still not decided which we prefer, both feature lyrics from the album however the format is slightly different. In one the text is in a block across the disk, we have also considered other variations but found that we preferred to differentiate between the different songs. 

In the the other I placed four blocks of text, slightly misaligned with one another. This makes the pane appear a little more free form but still gives the impression of large amounts of text off the edge of the image. 

TH Examples of Lighting from Shoot 1

This video is a short section of our project timeline that I have exported to illustrate the type and colour of lighting used in our first performance shoot. We are filming again tomorrow to capture some more CUs of performance.

TH Editing Music Video (3)

More progress has been made in the editing of our music video. We have included most shots that were filmed in 60fps, we have almost filled the timeline too. All that is left to do is incorporate the last footage we will film (shoot taking place on Wednesday), and add some effects/make some adjustments in Adobe AfterEffects.

Today, I made two additions to the video...

Firstly, Dan suggested we could make some of the clips filmed in 60fps slow-motion shots. This was a very good idea, because we then realised that the improved frame rate for these clips would mean that reducing the speed of them would not introduce any reduction in quality or jumps.

To produce a slow-motion effect, Adobe Premiere Elements has a 'time stretch' tool. This allows the cursor to drag the clip in a similar manner to the cutting tool. The further I drag the cursor, the slower the clip becomes (shown in the screenshot below). This has resulted in a number of smooth slow-motion shots that we are very pleased with.

The other adjustment I have made to one or two of the 60fps shots is cropping. As mentioned before, these clips are of better quality in low lighting in comparison to the 25fps shots of our camera.

Therefore, using the crop and movement tools that Elements includes on the preview screen (seen on the left in the screenshot below), I can zoom in on the shot and crop out anything that may make the shot previously unusable.

Here, I have zoomed in on the shot and moved it slightly to the left to make Jack centre of the frame. This tool has been a very important part of the editing process.

TH Editing Music Video (2)

An important update to editing processes is the incorporation of some footage we filmed using a different camera. The camera in question was actually a friend's iPhone. The camera on this has capabilities to film at 60fps, as well as capture film of a good quality, in low-key lighting.
While I do not have lots of footage filmed using this camera, I have enough to place into the performance sections of the video where there are gaps.

There have been advantages and one arguable disadvantage to using this footage.

The most obvious advantage is that the footage is very high quality, crisp, and provides us with very nice mid shots of the band members performing.
Another advantage has been that these clips can be cropped without losing as much quality as other video files in the project. This makes the footage more available to use because if a clip contains a member of the filming crew somewhere in the frame where they are not wanted, the clip can still be used as a result of cropping them out. Therefore, I can use really good pieces of film even if something like this is a problem.

A disadvantage has been the process of rendering these clips. This has not created any major issues, it is more a setback in time consumption as the editing programme requires more time to render so many frames.

Other than this, I have been continuing editing the whole video even more. When reviewing the timeline (the section along the bottom of the screenshot below), it is relatively full of footage. There are unused clips of performance I have still not included. These will be put in place and when we have reviewed what we have altogether, we can make an informed decision as to whether or not there is a need to film more performance in another shoot.

TH Editing Digipak (2)

I worked on this in today's lesson:

A screenshot of the finished piece

This image is a prototype design for the back cover of our album digipak. There is a shot of the band together 'backstage' at the gig. On the right is the track list for McBusted's deluxe debut album.

I first imported the original image (above) and applied a few simple adjustments to it. These included a filter of a red tint. Then, I reduced the contrast in the image but increased highlights ever so slightly. All of this has left a warm colour that should hopefully correspond to the rest of the album's palette - we are intending on making reds and blacks a theme.

After the image looked this way, I had to remove the unfortunate placement of a hand in the bottom left corner (seen in the original image). The image is not a square and so it will be cropped again, but in spite of this I thought that getting rid of this obstruction would be worthwhile nonetheless. I initially tried to use the clone stamp tool to attempt to reproduce the wall behind it. This was not very effective. I therefore decided to just crop the image using the image adjustment tool and zooming in on the picture - making sure to zoom in ratio to the whole thing, rather than distorting it.

Finally, I had to include the song titles because this image was designed to be a contender for the rear pane of our digipak. The font seen in the finished piece is what I first selected; there was no need to search for appropriate font styles as Dan and I have already decided that this font will look good on the digipak. It may not be the one we end up going with but at the current stage in our project, we believe it will conform to the album's metanarrative and band image. I typed up each song name individually and placed them individually but after this I linked each of their separate layers together to form one layer. This means that when using the Photoshop project again, it will be a much simpler job moving them around as one layer. I have not included track lengths, I may do this later on if we decide to go with this image for the digipak.

DH Editing Music Video (2)

Today Tom and I swapped focus again, with him working on the digipak and me on the video editing. It was very interesting for me to get a proper opportunity to run through the film and see how it was looking. I am really pleased with what we have so far, however I agree that some more close-ups would be beneficial. Another problem was that some of the cuts were very long and so at several points I found myself cutting down sections such as the phone call in order to make it more dynamic. I was able to fill in a lot of gaps in our sequence with various sections of footage, as there were plenty of shots that we had not yet used, such as a shot with our bass guitarist silhouetted against the lights. I had to play around with the framing on this one since other people were in the shot, but since it was slightly higher quality than most of our shots this is not noticeable.
Some things I would like to do now or at least experiment with is getting some more footage, possibly using stills for the shots of the song lyrics and trying out some sections in slow-motion.

DH Print Development (2)

TH Editing Digipak (1)

While I have been mainly working on the music video, I have made one image for the digipak so far.

This is the image, depicting the headband worn by Paul, the drummer of our band.

The first thing to do was to make the canvas square, so that any editing I did on the photo would be in the right proportion for the panes. This also got rid of any of the background we did not want in the image, such as other parts of the drum and the floor. I zoomed in on the image and cropped out the unwanted parts.

I removed clutter in the upper right area using the mask effect tool. The tool essentially got rid of the background colour and I made this black. This made it easier to go between layers because I could clearly differentiate between coloured parts and greyscale parts.
I increased the contrast in the black and white layer, as the lighting on the symbol was quite nice. The coloured layer now stands out more too.

On the top of this layer, the whole picture was added again with everything cut out apart from bandana. This is how the two different elements of the image stand out so well without interference between layers.

DH Editing Digipak (1)

Image 1

Image 3

Photo Choice 

Image 2

We took these photos on our second shoot focusing on the artist's reflection in his instrument, these three were the main variations we liked. I decided against the first image because although it had interesting details it focused on the artist making the image look like it had been added post-production. The third image had a bag in the background and even when cropped to square was still seen. My favourite photo and the one I used was the second, since it had the screws at the top stopping it obscuring Tom, as well as this it had nice composition, having the corner of the metal out of shot.

Editing

I tried out two forms of this image, firstly creating a hue/saturation layer and lowering the saturation to 0% to create the black and white image. I then added a mask effect to this allowing me to designate areas of colour.

The first version (left) had colour only in the reflection which was interesting but a little too subtle. Therefore I tried the opposite, making the guitar in colour but the reflection in black and white, I much prefer this effect.

Once I had done this I increased the contrast with a brightness/contrast layer in order to make the image more vibrant. Then I used the healing brush tool on the image to remove any dust and hairs as well as reducing the reflection in the guitar's body.

I have gained a lot of experience in photoshop so far, for example I realised how useful mask effects were. Before, I simply used the eraser with which it is impossible to add any image back in once erased, and does not allow you to invert the effect.

Finished Pane

While I am happy with the piece we will need to review the whole digipak once finished and make sure all the panes share a similar theme, especially since we want a red and black theme for the album.

TH Shot List

As mentioned in our concept development, we have decided to make some alterations to our performance's structure. During the process of storyboarding, we intended on having a lot more long shots than we now think we need.
Therefore, we have made a shot list of things we think we now need to film to replace some clips and incorporate some new distances and angles; primarily CUs of the lead singer.

-CUs of lead singer, low angle/high angle, tracking inwards
-Low angle MS of band tracking shot needs re-doing
-CUs MCUs of band members interacting with each other
-Backing vocals shots where the lead and back-up singers are shown in one frame

We will also take some photos of the band. We have enough photos for the inside panes for the digipak but a shot of the whole band together would be really nice for the front pane.

DH Concept Development (3)

We have spent the last week editing our digipak and music video, however we have come to the conclusion that we do not have a wide enough range of shots for the performance, our footage mainly consists of long shots. Unfortunately due to a play at the Oast Theatre we are unable to film there. Therefore we have decided to try and film in the school's drama studio.

While not as interesting a location, we would have access to lighting in order to recreate that in our first shoot. Since we are primarily focusing on close-ups, we should be able to either black out the background or even if we cannot, should look similar enough not to cause any issues.

We have not decided on dates yet, however we will start filming soon in order to finish off the video.

Until then we will continue editing and working on our digipak.

DH Editing Music Video (1)

Video 

Most of the video editing we have done so far has been fairly standard. At this stage we have transferred all our footage to the computer's D drive. We are using Premiere Elements for editing which is perfectly adequate for our needs. When I edit I prefer to preview the clip and cut it to it's rough size before placing it onto the timeline. If it requires lipsyncing I match up the audio as best I can otherwise I delete the audio immediately since it is not needed. Then it is a simple matter of the finer cuts in order to make sure it all flows. My skills at editing video have definitely improved since my AS piece, mainly because of practice, and I definitely feel more at ease, even with the daunting amounts of footage.

Audio

We decided that we wanted to cut out the one swearword in the song, however there are no radio edits of it available, therefore I had to do it manually. To do this I used the free program Audacity. I identified the section and used the vocal remover effect to try and remove the section, of course as a preset effect it was not completely effective, so I downloaded a bleep sound effect from freesound.org and added it as a new layer over the top. After working out the levels I exported it as our censored version of the song. We then added the song to our project as the base, in order to simply add video over the top.

TH Editing Music Video (1)

I have been predominantly working on the music video, with Dan developing the digipak's various panes.

Editing the video has been a fairly straightforward process. Before anything, I had to set the Premiere Elements project to the correct format setting; with a screen profile of 1920x1080i. The second task was to import all video files and song file from the computer's D Drive. After this, I placed the song on the audio track of the timeline and used this as my underlining constant throughout the timeline's length.

Trimming clips down to appropriate sizes is more difficult than may appear for a music video's performance. As we had filmed numerous, long, locked-down shots, some clips were in excess of three minutes in length. This meant that finding the correct parts to match the parts of the storyboard, and finding parts that were viable to use in the video was a long process. In spite of this, it allowed for any trimming, cutting and extending on the timeline to be done efficiently and accurately.

I have personally found that matching actions on screen with the music is quite easy. Finding elements of clips that correspond to parts of the music is not planned during storyboarding, unlike matching lip-syncing to lyrics. Thus, when finding a match between a flare on screen with a change in key in the music, or a cut at the exact same time as a loud beat from the drums in the song, it is a very rewarding feeling. Music videos feature these similarities between visuals and audio very frequently.

Finally, I have developed my ability in trimming and organising clips this year. During the editing of our AS piece, I remember finishing the film and feeling I had missed out some shots that could have been better than existing ones. I did this because I could not find the right part of the video for some clips, or I could not find parts of clips that we wanted. Experience has meant I now efficiently cut-down clips and have produced a succinct, smooth-flowing music video rough cut in the past week.

A view of the preview section portraying a CU of a guitar, with the timeline full of clips and the constant music file underneath, and a list of video files on the right-hand side.

This screenshot depicts a mini-preview window. It portrays a shot that appears early on in the video. This shot is an example of a shot where an event on-screen corresponds to an element of the song. The bass guitar's tuner flashes with the red light as the drums commence at the end of the intro.

DH Storyboard

The storyboard was a time consuming, but ultimately very useful task. I was responsible for drawing it while Tom took photos and edited the animatic at the same time, although he obviously contributed with ideas. It effectively allowed us to clearly work out framing, shot content and match up events to the music. While we used many of the shots we were able to take some liberties with it for the performance since we decided that much of the shooting may as well be spontaneous as it would give us a wider range of shots to work with, and allowed us to be more fluid with editing. However for our second shoot because continuity was more important we followed the storyboard more closely.

 



DH Print Development (1)

Our album panes focus on each member of the band in turn through something iconic to them. We took a few photos on our first shoot, they utilise the hat used by the main singer and the bandanna of the drummer and are meant to be some of the minor panes. We were planning to experiment with a mixture of black and white, and colour, to create a more visually stimulating image. However we were unhappy with them they use the location in the music video meaning they have no relevance without watching the video.


We were much happier with the photos taken on the second shoot, in this we experimented with reflections in the guitar,
linking the main artist with his instrument. This is our favourite and we have decided to use it as one of our frames. We have therefore decided not to use the first two photos and instead take some more focusing on the instruments of the band members.