Our 3rd Draft of our Music video:
Targets for improvement:
Things we are doing well:
During one of our lessons we had two professional editors come in to give us feedback and tips on our editing.
Lenny taught us all about adjustment layers, these are like effects you can make but instead of having it on a single clip you can drag across your timeline and apply the effect to everything. For example, we are doing our music video in black and white and in our draft 1 we were individually applying the black and white effects to each clip. But now we apply the effect to the adjustment layer, just once, then we can stretch this out and it will apply to every clip. This is a massive time saver.
Lenny also taught us how to use solids and keyframes, in our music video we use effects to make the backgrounds around our star darker because in the original clip there was a bit of light that we didn’t want. And from this, Lenny showed us how to make a black solid to just cover up the light we didn’t like but this also led to him showing us how we can mask these solids around our star to give off a spotlight kind of effect. Then with keyframes you can move these solids at certain times. For example, if your star is moving around in a clip but you still want to use one of these effects and want it to track on him, you can use these keyframes to individually move around the star at specific times, this led to me and Tyler finding a setting that will do this for you and make loads of keyframes at once so the transition is very smooth.
What we need to improve:
Risk Assessment:
Our Narrative Development sheet:
This is our narrative development sheet, this sheet basically shows what are narrative is, what we need for it and all of the features and components of it.
During our shoot we played around with the lighting a lot that being with the actual lights but also with all the different settings on the camera, we kept on trying different settings (ISO, f stop, etc) until we found what we felt was right for our shoot.
In Premiere we decided we were going to make our music video black and white, so we used the lumetri colour settings to change the saturation, contrast etc of our video. This took a bit of time to add to every clip but we have since found a quicker and more efficient way to apply the setting to every clip in the video.
This is our first draft of our music video, we only have performance in this draft.
I like the black and white theme/filter that we used in the lumetri colour settings, I think it looks a lot better than what the colour version does, the black and white fits our mafia/gangster theme much better than the colour version does.
I think lots of quick cuts is definitely the way to go with our music video instead of doing longer dragged out clips, the quick cuts fit very well with the pace of our song.
Shoot 1 Reflection:
In the first lesson/half of our shoot we shot in the dark drama room, we weren’t entirely sure if this room would be available for us to use but we went to try anyway and we could use it for only the first half of our shoot. This room was especially useful for our shoot as we wanted as little natural light as possible and this room has blackout blinds and these big studio lights, so we had full control over our lighting. There was also several things in the room to use such as tables and chairs. What we could’ve done better in the drama room was we left a little bit of light at the back from one of the windows which could’ve saved us time in editing and we also could’ve focused the lights on the model a bit more as some light shines onto the background.
In the second lesson/half of our shoot we moved over to the black studio room, we used this time in the smaller room to do more close up shots as in the drama room there’s a lot of space to do wider angles and longer shots. This room is particularly good for our close ups, having access to the studio lights, I think we split our time between close-ups and further out shots in the two studios well. This studio like the drama room can be completely blacked out with no light at all, I feel as if we picked the best environments for performance shoot. We did spend quite a bit of our time in the black studio setting up, maybe some more time or if we had setup earlier we could’ve got some more shots and maybe some better shots although I’m very happy with how this shoot went and think this is my best shoot we’ve done so far.
We used our shot list to try and achieve as many different types of shots as we could, however some of the shots didn’t come out as we wanted in our test such as our dolly zoom, so we didn’t try them in our actual shoot because our time was valuable in there. We are very happy with the range of shots we achieved, and feel like these well represent the image we wanted to give off.