Screenshot of Final Cut

Feedback on Final Version

Performance/lip-syncing
performed really well
good emotion

Relationships between music and visuals
Went really well, clear to see what's going on
Text in some shots, really good
Didn't understand fancy dress
Strong connection between music and lyrics

Camera work
Wide range of shots
Interesting
Shaky shots
Record player, sky etc was good
Good range of shots

Editing

Special Effects

Mise-en-scene, costumes, locations, props

MUSIC PRODUCTION CRITICAL EVALUATION


Part 1 should be about 1500 words in length and should consider the planning, shooting and editing to rough cut stage. You should make use of your blog as a reference point throughout! Where you refer to real examples for comparison, give web references and as much detail as possible e.g. artist/song and video director.


Introduction


In Januaury 2008 we planned, filmed and edited a thriller opening sequence for AS media studies. To edit, we used a tricky combination of both iMovie and Final Cut, as iMovie had certain features we needed in our titles, resulting in some often awkward exports into the other program. Since then we’ve had a lot more practice on both programs, especially lip synching on Final Cut. By using multiple layers in practice for our music videos and adding key frames, it is much easier to see where to place visual to audio on the timeline.

We began our music video project with some basic research into the typical conventions used and found in a music video, focusing on Andrew Goodwin’s ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992). Using his six steps as guidelines we watched music videos by professionals and examples by previous years and analysed them.

We then used Final Cut to edit a short section of a music video which we filmed as a class. The help this practice gave us has proved invaluable, especially with aligning music to lip-synching.

The range of songs we were given was quite broad, with a selection of about twenty to choose from.

Our group decided to choose ‘I Don’t Want to See You’ by Camera Obscura due to the soft vocals and instruments. We decided to set ourselves a challenge with this as such songs are harder to lip-synch to and gain points through performance. The band itself is ‘artsy’ which inspired us to create a similar video.


We wish the music video to have a loose and not entirely self evident narrative, which might require more than one viewing to understand (thus ensuring a greater number of times the song and video is played.) As yet we have one main character, a girl. She spends much of her time playing alone, making things, drawing and doing other childlike activities, such as net fishing and hopscotch. There may be vague evidence of a former playmate having been around a while ago, but no longer. At some point she dresses very carefully in fancy dress too large for her (as a child might put on her mother's clothes to look glamorous) and meets a boy (whether or not this meeting is arranged is not explained) who offers her flowers. She walks off, leaving him alone with his rejected gift. This fits with the song title, "I Don't Want to See You".

Our idea was to make a music video in a similar style to that used in Amelie in colour and filters. Amelie has this lovely green filter throughout most of the film, giving it an aged feel. Innocence is a key theme to our video and Amelie is very similar in that way, particularly in the opening sequence about the main character’s childhood. Another film we felt inspired by was The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson - a director who focuses primarily on slow motion shots and symmetry. It was the symmetry in particular which captured our attention as we really liked the idea of slightly-off symmetry.

In the research and planning phase we each had an individual role within the group. Kirsty wrote the shot list, Nikki drew the storyboard and I edited the storyboard into our animatic. This worked well as we planned everything beforehand to confirm that everyone was happy with any decision made. Locations and props were decided as a group, with suggestions added as they came. Roles among the group are fairly strong with Kirsty in charge of visual aesthetic, Nikki in charge of the camera and I’m in charge of props and organisation.

From the test shots we discovered that yo-yo’s are a lot harder to film than one would expect. Also we realised that filming in the rain is a waste of time as the rain doesn’t show on camera. Because of this we have refilmed the scene at the bridge with the girl playing ‘Poo Sticks’.