Rough Cut 8: Throne

This is the rough cut 8 in, which I focused on getting the final beat drop done with editing, by crosscutting it to 4 milliseconds with 4 different shots and then adding in the drums color powder scene in between. A challenge was to get it completely synced to the song and also sync the moment the drummer hits the drum to the beat. 

Audience Feedback 6: Throne Rough Cut 6

This is some audience feedback that I got from 2 year 12 students. One of them was Emilie who is the female protagonist, which was very interesting since I wanted to hear what she thought of the result of all of the hours spent on filming.

KO: Reflection on Narrative 2

I filmed some more narrative with the 2 main character. When I was filming I took a few things into consideration one of them being where the sun was shining. I didn't want the sun to be facing the camera as this would create a few problem such as their faces would be dark as the sun would blind the camera. I also wanted to film in the sun rather then in the shade as this is supposed to be a happy memory and filming in the shade would give the opposite effect.

I also deliberately filmed hand held shots as this is not only common in narrative filming but this would also create verisimilitude at is feels more personal. But I had to be careful not to have to much camera shack as this would break verisimilitude by looking unprofessional and in some cases could make the viewer fell nauseous.

We also decided to film a diegetic ending where the main actor is sitting on the bus listening to the music, looking out the window and the female protagonist from the narrative walks past the bus window. This gives the audience a bit of narrative enigma as it makes the audience wonder if he was dreaming the the whole thing or if he actually is in the band and its a fragmented narrative as the beginning of their relationship starts at the end of the video.

Rough Cut 7: Throne

This is our rough cut 7 in, which I put in the new footage that Kristian filmed on narrative and moving the other narrative part where the couple fights towards the end of the video. Also, I have tried to play a bit around with editing for the last beat drop and will evidence to full result in draft 4. 

Rough Cut 6: Throne

WHAT WE DID: CHALLENGING THE CONVENTION OF THE ROCK GENRE BY USING MORE COLORS 

In this rough cut 6, I have changed a lot of things, which I will go through below.

Some of the audience feedback we got from our teacher was that there should be more narrative in the video, such as happy couple scenes. Another suggestion that was discussed was a diegetic outtro, because it is a good way to denote that the music video is over and is a good way to end it rather than just fading to black screen. Furthermore, our teacher mentioned that there should be some more fast paced editing towards the ending, which is what Kristian aims at doing after I have added all of the effects and layered onto the green screen etc. The other elements, such as the diegetic outtro we intend to film this week and cut and edit this week.

Some basic things I have changed include: better lip-syncing, more shots and changing the narrative so that there would be more scenes. However, my main focus of this draft has really been the green screen. After having used elements from Footage Crate, I realised that I had to sign up and pay monthly to get the very good color powder/ink videos. Therefore I decided to go for VFX videos from YouTube. You can read a detailed post about on my blog. 

I quickly discovered that it would be best to layer the leadsinger behind the color powder/ink but then changing the opacity of the ink because it would simply look better than if the leadsinger had been in front of the ink. I decided to make the green screen shots a bit longer than the usual ones, because the ink has such a nice effect and in my opinion it would be a shame for it to be on screen for less than a second. However, depending on the audience feedback I get from rough cut 2 draft 2, I might just clip the shots and split them by putting other shots in between, or I will make them shorter since fast-paced editing is also part of the genre specific convention of a metal core genre music video.

Due to the fact that it is a rock genre and not a pop genre music video, there shouldn't be too many different colors since that is a key element of the pop genre. However, in our music video we have challenged the convention by adding some different bright colors such as red, pink, purple and as you can see above a mixture of colors including green and blue also. 

Website: More Changes!

Today I wanted to work more on the texts of the website and add some things after we had gotten feedback from our teacher. 

I added to the band biography and wrote about all of their albums right from 2004 up until 2015 and their tour, which they are doing 2016/2017.

Another thing I decided to add was quotes from the individual band members. One of the reasons was because the page of the links list of "The Band" looked so bare, with just the 5 pictures and the band members names. Another reason for putting quotes was that, our individual actor's came up with them. link to our website.

Therefore, we felt that it was a nice touch for them because they got to put their quote on an official website and actually come up with something that meant something to them personally rather than us going out on the internet to find a quote that people already know. This is the

Production Schedule UPDATE 7

This is the 7th update of the production schedule I created. It includes the tasks that we have completed so far, and the ones which are still to be completed. I always like to use color coding since it gives me a great overview of what still needs to be done. 

After last time it has changed quite a bit, since Kristian managed to edit the 2nd rough cut draft 1, but then his PC didn't work and so I kept on working on rough cut 2 draft 2 and will also do draft 3 and 4. Kristian will film some more narrative scenes on the 2nd of March, where he will film some more happy couple scenes, after we discovered our narrative wasn't clear enough and we needed more narrative footage in the video. Unfortunately Bronwen has been ill, and hasn't been able to edit anything yet, but will therefore instead work on the digipack, since the video should nearly be done once she comes back. 

Production schedule UPDATE 7 from Sophie2401

KO: Rough Cut 5: Throne

This is the 5th rough cut that I edited, in this cut I added on to the missing seconds at the end of the video and also tried to sync some footage that was of. In the next cut we will add on some more shots until the video is complete, we will also be filming some more narrative that we will add on and to finish it of add any special effects needed, mostly the green screen footage.

TECHNOLOGY: Green Screen

In January we got the opportunity to go visit a green screen room here in Luxembourg. It was a good opportunity because it allowed us to get some more footage and re-shoot some scenes with our black balloons, which we felt we had missed the opportunity on when filming our initial music video Follow You at the beginning of the year. We tried to film the black balloons from as many angles as possible, however the low angle long shot and the medium long shot on the left turned out to be the best ones and so we will be using them. 
Now after having filmed all of our green screen footage, we have been trying to work on what to layer it with etc. This was my first time in working with green screen and so I had to find out all the basic tools from tutorials on YouTube and also learned a lot from my teacher and a fellow classmate. 

From the beginning onwards, we had the idea that we wanted a lot of smoke, fire and color powder in our music video. These should be the main elements. When trying to work with the first green screen footage of our leadsinger Wayne, I tried to use a fire effect from YouTube, since Final Cut Pro X does not have one. I found an effect of fire and a burning car in the background, which I then tried to use.

First step before doing anything, is to remove the actual green screen by giving it a black background. This is done by using the special effect called "Keyer" in Final Cut Pro X. After that, I put the  footage of the burning car and fire over that footage and it looked like the footage above. What I then did was changing the opacity of the shot, which is possible under the word "Compositing".

However, the shot didn't look the way we wanted it to and therefore, I watched a YouTube Tutorial about how to layer fire onto green screen. From that YouTuber, I got the link to a page called Footage Crate, that allows you to green screen. Here is the link.
It allowed me to register and download many different special effects that I can use to layer onto the green screen. It especially had loads of fire and explosion effects.

We will however also be using some special effects that we found on YouTube. 

BV: DIGIPACK: Ideas

To start with I came up with some ideas for 3 different versions of the digipack.