Production: Draft Edit

Below is a completed draft of my music video. I am going to work on my ancillary tasks for the next week now whilst I seek audience feedback from my target audience.

Production: Green Screen

Today I filmed the green screen part of my music video - the final piece to my first draft jigsaw! Max was the person I filmed but I couldn't have done it without the help of Molly and Joe, who held the green screen for me!

We had to pick a location with good light shining towards the screen, so we chose a rather large cupboard with a window. We also used the artificial fluorescent lights to light up the screen and Max a bit from above as well. We had no frame so Molly and Joe had to hold it very still ... luckily, we managed to do it in one take! 

This is what the footage looked like when I imported it into Final Cut.

I then applied a 'keyer' effect to the foreground clip, once I had layered it on top of the background time lapse clip that I downloaded from YouTube, and this was the final product. 

Production: Update 25/11

Today, I completed piecing together my music video! I did leave a blank bit where I am intending on doing green screen .. but that will be filmed next week. 

I did use a lot of different editing techniques, mostly consisting of different ways to use keyframes, but the most exciting addition to my music video is the end part, where lots of different people sing together on different screens. It was easy to edit the frames, but I did have to be very precise when positioning them to make sure it looks neat and consistent. I then altered the colours of each frame to make it look as beautiful as possible - another way of making the multicolour theme run throughout my video.

Additionally, I used a really pretty sun. Again, the sun was a PNG image that I only partially positioned on the frame. Then, I used keyframes again to change the angle of the sun after a set amount of time. This made the sun move at a consistent speed. I also flipped the clip around so that the sunlight was on the side the sun was facing and at one point, Max even looks up at the sun and it lights up his whole face. I am really happy with it. It is one of the prettiest shots in the video in my opinion!

I also made a few more basic changes. For example, all of the new clips have been manipulated to be in line with the rest of the video, all with a gorgeous blue sky and lovely green grass. 

In order to follow my audience feedback, and trying not to use the same shot too many times, I decided to use some outtakes in my video. During the "where did we go wrong" at two different parts in my video, I have used outtakes of Jak stuck in the swing and Max stuck on the slide. I used a basic camcorder effect as well to make it look like more of an outtake, but it still fits with the video. It think it looks really great!

 

The final shot in the video is of Max and Jak skipping off into the distance. I altered the speed of the clip to 40% so that it is in slow motion. I changed the colour of the sky and the grass. The final part of the video uses the original ending that I edited in earlier today on GarageBand. 

Here is an update of what my video is looking like so far. For some reason it exported with a bad sound quality but you get the idea!

Production: Editing My Track

I decided to use the 2012 version of Mr. Blue Sky for my video because it is a lot better quality, the music is a bit funkier and it is a lot shorter than the original. However, one thing missing from the 2012 version that I loved is the beautiful ending where it plays one long note and you hear "Mr Blue Sky". For me, this part feels like the end of a show, it feels like a much softer conclusion than the slightly abrupt 2012 version. 

Therefore, I decided to use GarageBand in order to edit the song and merge the 2012 version (used for almost the entire video) with the ending from the original. 

I had never used GarageBand before, but it was a fairly simple operation. Once I discovered the 'Track Volume' drop-down tab underneath the track, I was able to alter the 2012 track to fade out. Then, I split the original (Track 3) clip and deleted the part of the song I didn't want. Once I aligned the two clips, and altered the track volume of Track 3, they now fade nicely into each other. It was kind of like using Final Cut Pro but with audio! It is obvious that the song transitions, but I don't think it matters too much since it essentially acts as a nice conclusion to the music video. I will have credits at this point, thanking all of the people who have given up their time to contribute to my music video, and then I will have the shot of Jak and Max skipping off into the sunset. I hope it is going to be a really lovely ending! 

Production: Update 24/11

Today I filmed and edited the next 15 seconds of my music video. I had a vision for how I wanted it to come out, looking like "Just Dance" characters, so they don't look too human and I wanted it to be bright and colourful.

I had 3 people in it - myself, Molly and Jono - and we each took turns to sing and dance in front of the camera. Originally, we came out looking a bit like this...

But after editing the clips, we looked more like this!

I edited all of the colours in the video. I also added a 'focus' filter to focus on our faces so that the rest of our bodies and the background looked a bit blurry. Finally, I added cross fade transitions between the first and the last one but decided to just have it cut between the different dancers as I think it looks a bit better than having a dramatic transition! 

I think it looks pretty cool. I'm not entirely convinced its perfect but I can't put my finger on why! I am going to wait until I next get some audience feedback in order to see what they think of it. 

Production: Adding Motion

Because I am not able to edit the next part of my video until the footage is filmed on Tuesday, a lot of my time has been spent on improving and perfecting the first part of my video. This has included responding to my audience feedback and also trying out different animations to see what works. 

I am still trying to overcome the issue of GIFs not being compatible with Final Cut Pro X. I have been using PNG images but these can prove difficult to make it look effective because they don't move! For example...

I added a seriously cute hedgehog to the bench scene yesterday. It is probably my favourite image yet! But it was so difficult to essentially 'embed' it into the scene. Although it is obviously a cartoon I wanted to make it part of the frame and unlike previous animations, I couldn't make it walk around or anything because it was sitting on the bench. 

Firstly I tried making it bounce up and down but it didn't look right at all. Although I asked my friend what they thought of it and they said they liked it, it looked messy and out of place. I decided to keep it in there for the meantime until I came up with a good alternative way to make it work. 

And then it came to me! I used the flip effect to make the hedgehog look left and right to the beat of the music. It worked out really well. There are 4 main beats to the frame and so I used the 'Flipped' effect to make the hedgehog change the way it was looking. 

I also mentioned my squirrel yesterday. I am beginning to add slightly more complex motions to my video now I have fully grasped the technique and so this squirrel runs onto the screen, sees an acorn, runs over and eats the acorn and then runs off of the screen. 

I found two images of squirrels. One was standing and the other was eating. I made sure they were a very similar colour and style of cartoon! Then the squirrel ran over to the acorn, the acorn disappeared (as did the squirrel), the eating squirrel appeared and bobbed up and down very quickly and then the original squirrel appeared again, but this time with the 'Flipped' effect on it, and ran off in the direction it came from. 

I am still continuing to add effects as I really want my film to be very animation-heavy. Over the next few days, whilst I have some spare time before filming my next bits of footage, I am going to continue researching my ancillary tasks so that I can begin them once I have completed the full first draft of my music video. 

Below is an updated version of my music video. 

Responding to Audience Feedback

I have been getting a lot of audience feedback over the past few days for my current music video to see how I can improve it. I have responded to a lot of the feedback my target audience gave me to make it as good as possible. 

When Alex watched my video and I recorded her response, she said that the teeth look a little creepy. A few other people also told me this, including Molly, who tweeted me feedback. Therefore, I have removed the colour alteration from the teeth to make them look slightly less scary!

Also, Gary gave me some feedback about the guitar instrumental. A lot of people said that it looked a little boring because not much happened during it. Gary suggested that I spiced it up a bit by adding cartoon blue notes coming out of the guitar. 

I gave this a go and it did work very nicely. However, some others said that the CUs of the mouths were a bit out of place, such as Cristina. 

This feedback certainly got me thinking about how I could make the mouths fit in nicely. And then I decided, why not spread the multicolour effect throughout the video? Consequently, I decided to make the musical notes coming out of the guitar multi-coloured. It looks great! The guitar solo looks more memorable and the teeth look slightly less out of place. Along with the rainbow I am beginning to integrate it in a bit better. 

Ellie and Molly loved the 'comical parts' and thought I should add more. Additionally, Cristina also suggested that I added more of the animation elements because she thought they looked good. 

I have therefore begun adding in more animations to the video to make it even more comical. My personal favourite new addition so far is the squirrel running up to an acorn and eating it!

I am still getting audience feedback whilst I make some changes and so I hope my video will keep on evolving!