Post-Production: Digital Technology

Having gathered experience of Adobe Premier Pro when I undertook my preliminary task, I now had sufficient knowledge to begin editing my Busted video relatively easily.

Uploading the clips onto the side-bar, I began simply dragging and dropping them onto the timeline, detaching their audios and then taking care to align them correctly with the audio, getting timings and durations from both the original storyboard and referring back to the actual music video. Once they were correct, I cut them to the right length and deleted the excess footage. I found in this process that having more than one timeline layered one on top of the other really helped in this process, as I was able to import and edit shots without disrupting the rest of my already cut and placed material.

One of the initial problems I encountered was missing footage which had been lost during upload and also clips that were too long or short in duration. To overcome this, I discovered a way to change the lighting on a shot and, for example, where a shot of the teacher in the dark was missing, I simply used a similar shot from earlier on, this time darkened. In rectifying the timings on some of the clips, I found a "duration" option when right clicking a clip which then allowed me to alter the speed of the clip. In this way I was able to extend the clips of the animals mating shot from the real music video, and also was able to apply the slow-motion technique to the dropping pencil shot near the end of the video.

Completed Video - Busted - What I Go to School For

Production

The actual production process was entirely new to me. Choosing to be a director rather than starring in the video, I helped in organising those who were being filmed. I feel that I had to quickly adapt my organisation skills to fit this task - due to the waiting around as attention was paid to particular people, the group was initially slow to respond when needed. However, this was combated by the way we grouped the shoots - group/class shots being on one day, whilst outdoor shots and specific person shots were on other individual days.

I found that the storyboard we had made was extremely useful in helping us direct the shots, although lacked some detail, which meant we had to refer back to the original video for extra information, something I would rectify if the exercise was repeated. However, it generally gave us a good idea of durations and actions.

We managed to successfully lip-sync by playing the track back using an MP3 player and speakers, having made sure our main characters had learned the lyrics. We ran the song through with them during the shoot but before actual filming to ensure they were certain of the lyrics. This meant that we had the timings and the lip-movement exactly right so they were easily paired with the original track in the editing process.

We encountered a couple of problems during the shoot: the video depicts an old film projector being used, which then in turn showed various clips of mating animals. As we were unable to obtain such equipment, we had to improvise, using an overhead projector instead. We then had to combat the issue of the mating animal clips. Originally we attempted to find similar clips on Youtube, but they weren't to the likeness or quality we wanted. We resolved the problem by playing the actual music video, projecting it onto the board with the classroom's video projector (maintaining the idea the image is being projected). We then filmed the video as the clips of the animals were played.

Production: Digital Technology

During this task, my knowledge of digital technology was largely added to. I had never previously been confident in using a camera, but I managed to gain a better understanding of camera control whilst having a go at operating it in the preliminary task, using zoom functions and experimenting with the controls on the tripod which when proved helpful in getting smooth shots in the production of our final Busted video.

I had no experience with the editing program, Adobe Premier Pro, so I had to pick things up as I went along. Though initially it was hard to cope with managing multiple clips, accurate cutting and audio matching, the knowledge I gained from preparing my preliminary Lip-Sync task piece then helped me greatly in the production of the main Busted video, as now I had a basic grounding of the programme, I could further explore, adding slow motion or speeding clips up where appropriate.

I found posting the edited video to Youtube much easier this time, having previously forgotten in the Lip-Syncing task to correctly cut the length of the film, which resulted in a much longer upload. This time, however, was much simpler due to the much shorter length of the piece.

Over the course of A2, I want to further my knowledge of editing techniques in order to find interesting and quirky ways to compose my final music video.

Research and Planning

For my A2 summer project, we were required to remake approximately 40 seconds of the music video "What I Go to School For" by Busted.

For initial research, we undertook a lip-syncing task. Working in a group of 3, we chose to lip-sync the first part of "Livin' On a Prayer" by Bon Jovi. It was more time consuming than I'd expected, as we had to properly learn the lyrics and the timings, as well as actually singing it to make the performance look convincing when the real audio track was added.
We took turns filming the performance so we each had the opportunity to experiment with filming and lip-syncing, learning basic camera control. In order to keep ourselves in time, we used an iPod and speakers to play back the real audio to sing along to.
Having done this, we then used Adobe Premier Pro to cut between our different versions we shot. Never having used this program before, it was initially confusing having more than one video clip to deal with at the same time, and attempting to line up the soundtrack with the visuals was time consuming and tricky. We learned how to make title frames, though, and how to achieve basic cutting between shots.

Lip-Syncing Test:


Following this, we then began to look more closely at Busted's music video, watching both the real video for "What I Go to School For", and other successful remakes. After this, we broke off into groups and began compiling screenshots, shot durations and details into a coherent storyboard.



Using the storyboard, we then grouped the shot types, splitting our workload into our 3-Day shooting script, assigning roles and deciding upon props, suitable rooms and spaces and attaining video clips of the animals similar to those in the video.