Tuesday 10 May 2011

Editing - Music Video

As producer of the group, I decided to look at the music video during one of my frees and noticed that the video was by far unfinished and there were large syncing issues. The band representative came in to school to view the rough edit however there was very little to show him, he mentioned there should be improvements made in terms of the guitar solo and said that there is a kind of musical conversation between the guitar and the keyboard and so more shots of the keyboard should be used. Following this feedback I decided to look through all of the footage and it became clear that better shots could have been used for the existing guitar shots and so I substituted them accordingly and added shots of the keyboard player as requested.
The significant syncing issues were difficult to solve and I had to get Mr Sheppard to help, once he synced one layer of the video, it would be easy to sync other layers to that specific clip and over lay the layers when we want the shot to cut. He mentioned after he was finished helping that the syncing issues are largely because of the lead singers inability to keep in time with the song and is not something we can help as there are no other suitable shots. This was obviously frustrating and very time consuming to get the rest in sync.
As the video was not finished, there were large portions of shots yet to be added together, so a large portion of time was taken to try and sift through all footage to find the best shots.
Max had his story board and shot list to hand as he sat with me in many of our frees whilst I was editing which we referred to for ideas but did could not stick to it completely due to some footage not being suitable enough.
The video was also shown to the media class in order to gain more feedback, they said that the shot stays too long on a close up of the lead singers, we were already aware of this as we were still in the process of correcting what another member of the group had done, but noted it and made it the main priority for when I edited again. They also mentioned that some of the shots are too dark and so to correct this I edited the exposure of the clips, this was another time consuming process as each shot had to be individually corrected.
Before we showed it to the class we decided to change the opening shots to a medium long three shot of the singers as opposed to starting with the extreme close up of the lead who misses the start every time. The media class they liked this shot but there was perhaps too much head room in the framing of it, I agreed adjusted the size of the clip when I next edited. They said that they got the Motown feel of the video which indicates which we have been correct in Mise-en-Scene and reputation, they also mentioned there is a good variation in shots however the main issue is the syncing.
The long process was eventually finished although not completely satisfied with how it looked due to the out of time lead singer, it would have to suffice and Mr Sheppard agreed that it had been a significant improvement.
We discussed what level the video was worth now we had finished it and he mentioned that as it is now it would probably be a level 3, and he also mentioned that Miss Smith (our other media teacher) said that it lacked that bit extra to push it into level 4. We asked what we needed to do to push our video into a level 4 and she said that a narrative would significantly boost our grade.
As a group we had previously mentioned creating a narrative but the band representative said they wanted a pure performance video which stopped the process of any narrative development. Max and I wanted to boost the grade and so we decided to start planning a narrative and only had a short time to do it. We benefited from our previous research as we had good knowledge of Motown conventions.

No comments:

Post a Comment