Andy giving ideas to sam whilst he edits the green screen footage. You can see the succsesful blanket we used gave the illusion of floating heads.

Here is Sam hard at work editing and putting effects on the video. These are the Mac Pros we use. The Keyboard is special for editing.

27/09/2009.

Today we began planning our video. we decided to go for a You Me At Six song called If i were In Your Shoes. We went out to look for some abandonned buildings on the second part of the lesson with a still camera. We went out to old trafford where Andy knew the locations of some abandonned building. When we got there we thought it was way too dark, there was no power supply anywhere and no room to fit a car in because we thought we could use the headlights from the car as an alternative.

29/09/2009

We failed to make progress on the previous lesson. We then decided to have a chat about scrapping the song and choosing a more retro-like song because everyone was doing the same modern genre. After a few intense minutes, we decided to change the song and do Crosstown Traffic by Jimi Hendrix. We all came up with really good ideas as we listened to the song more often. One of our first ideas was to go out and get close shots, medium shots and zoom shots of traffic around Manchester city center. For this we needed a sunny day. However, the day we planned it on was dark, cloudy so we continued to plan and organize a plan for shooting the next time we had Media Studies.

29/09/2009

Today was a perfect sunny day as we had hoped for. we took out the cameras and tripod and all equipment nessecary for shooting. We walked to town to make sure we didnt miss anything intersting like going over the Loreto bridge which allows you to shoot some great shots of fast moving traffic from the bridge. We didn't wait till we got to town before we began filming. Instead, we filmed as we went along. There is this great view from a bar looking all the way down on Oxford road which has a slope and gives a perfect view of all the traffic giong to and from Manchester. We collected atleast 30 minutes worth of footage.

01/10/2009

Today, we handed the raw footage over to Sam. He put it up on the Mac and onto Final Cut Pro. Our plan with the footage was to keep it in sync with the intro of the song which is really fast paced. We got the first ten second edited but the cuts didnt really seem as upbeat as we hoped them to be. Then sam suggested we should make the cuts twice as fast to give it that upbeat feel to it. we did that and we giot exactly what we wanted. But then we all thought it looked too modern and decided to set the contras up and give it sepia tone to give the illusion that it was filmed in the late sixties and early seventies. It was perfect...

06/10/2009

Our lesson today began in the afternoon straight after lunch. We got together at lunch to set up the drum kit, guitar and bass to begin filming band shots. We filmed it in the theatre which is equipped with lights and sound. A dark light was set to give it a mise on scene of a gig. The shots we needed were collected. we got still shots and some hand held shots too. especially on the drum kit to emphasise the power and loudness of the instrument.

13/10/2009

Editing in the previous lesson took alot of time as we could not produce a sloppy piece of work. Whilst Sam continued editing, me and Andy went back to the drwaing board. We came up with the fantastic idea to make the video really phsycadelic by having a funky background on the green screen whilst we dance around as if we were on acid. The plan is now set for the next lesson.

15/10/2009

Sam edited all the way throught the lesson today and we helped him out by telling him what to do and giving him ideas. We were not allowed to use the green screen during lesson time as this got in the way of people who were constantly waling in and out of the room. We stayed behind to film with the green screen. As we were setting up, we saw a green blanket which had a slightly darker tinge to the green screen itself so we had our doubts. we thought that if we wrapped ourselves around it it would give the illusion that our heads were floating. As the song played, we sang along to it to make lip sinking easier for Sam. filming went succsesful.

Media Technologies

in our media production we used a variety of different technologies. we used a video camera, greenscreen, and mainly the final cut pro editing software on the Mac computers. the green screen was used in our video to create the floating head effect used in the first verse of the video and in the chorus where the lyric "cross town traffic" was played, we also used them at random intervals in the video to keep the viewer interested. final cut pro was the editing software we used to create our video. it had various effects, shot transitions and various other features helping to make our music video more professional. we used various effects on our music video to make it look more interesting to the eye of the viewer and to give it the style that we wanted to give it which was retro 60s style with a modernised touch.

CD and Music Video comparison

the CD and video have very different styles because they have different purposes. the video is very retro with a modern feel to it and it's very bright and colourful. where as the CD cover is all black and white, it's got a very sophisticated look about it and it has all of us looking very serious where as on the video at some points it's very "jokey" with our heads floating around the screen. the reason we've decided to have a very sophisticated look about the CD because we felt that it was able to be aimed at a wider amount of people if it looked professional standard and was very modernised with the band on the front. also we felt that we wouldn't be able to get the comedy affect on a print based piece of work. the CD cover shows the band and represents us as being very serious about music however when you watch the music video it shows that we are just willing to have a laugh and be creative to attract the audience. this contrast would help to appeal to more customers and help to sell our product on a wider scale of the market.

in the edit suite

below are pictures of our group using the editing softwar final cut pro to edit our music video and create our piece of A2 media studies work.

Audience feedback

we obtained audience feed back as we went along with the process of the film and people were saying things such as "the lip syncing is out" or "use a transition there to make it flow better" this was all constructive criticism and we took it in our stride. we looked at the video after the feedback we received and changed it if we agreed with what they were telling us. we also got some audience feedback after the video was finished on what they thought about the video and what their favourite parts were. the feedback was very positive from the three students we filmed.

initial idea

our initial ideas fro the music video was that we should use up to date and recent music so that we can relate to the video. many of our first ideas included pop punk bands such as You Me At Six. however we then saw that lots of the other A2 students were choosing to do music videos based on recent music. this is why we decided to do a more old styled song such as jimi hendrix because it has a futuristic feel to the beat and was entertaining and could still relate to the audience in todays culture. we first watched the jimi hendrix video crosstown traffic and saw that it was a classic jimi hendrix video where there is the band and they're just playing in what looks like an underground studio and there are various shots of jimi and the whole band. we decided that we would be able to do this video in the same style with lots of band shots and close-ups however we would be able to put a modernised look onto it to make it appeal to the audiences of 2009. we wanted our music video to follow the codes and conventions of recent music videos with quick cut shots and lots of variety in the shots to keep the viewer interested in the music video. this is why we used shots such as a close up of the symbol crashing or a shot down the frets on the guitars. this we felt followed the conventions of music videos of today because it has lots of shots all packed into a short amount of time, this kept the viewer interested.