Mark Reeves A2 Media: October 2012

In evaluation I think our group worked well together as we all had clear roles on what to do these were that myself and Kate would be in charge of the camera, Harriet was the producer, Dave was the director and we picked Charlotte to be in the video as she knew the song and fitted the style of our chosen genre, the only issues came because we didn’t plan in enough detail beforehand, for example when getting Charlotte to lip-synch to the song we only got her to sing the first part of the song as the same verse is repeated but we didn’t realise that the second time the verse is sung it is faster and in a higher key so it was impossible to match our version of the real scene from the video without her lips being out of synch, this is something I will learn from when I’m making my own music video. Harriet storyboarded the song as all of our groups already storyboarded songs where set in locations which would be too hard to recreate, while myself and Dave chose the filming locations, we tried to get them as close to the locations in the video but obviously we could not get them exact, I am reasonably happy at our selections, if you look at the shot by shot comparison I have made you can see that all of the shots have a similar background and are framed near identical, The shot I am most pleased with is probably the shot in which Charlotte sings in front of a window, This type of shot is hard to do as it is very difficult to film in front of a window and not just get a black silhouette, me managed to get a good shot using two studio lights, one on either side of Charlotte to illuminate her face against the window, we also shut certain blinds in the room and changed the lighting levels we also used masking tape to recreate the paned window in the actual video. A shot I would like to have another attempt at is the bike shot, this was the last shot we needed to complete and as the deadline was fast approaching it could be said that we rushed it, The camerawork in our bike shot is pretty poor as we didn’t really plan it, when we filmed it we got Charlotte to ride the bike while I ran backwards with the camera and Kate ran alongside to play Charlotte the song, this was quite hectic and as a result the camera is very shaky, I think we could of easily done better if I had used a better technique to film or we simply had the camera static and we rode the bike towards it, once again I think all of our group will learn from this and have better timekeeping when we make our own video. When filming the shot which features Lucy Rose on the roof of a building with trees in the background we chose to film on a balcony at college which looked quite good although we only shot it once as it started to rain, we then found that when we got on the editing suite that a rain drop had landed on the lens and made part of the shot blurry we didn’t realise when filming as Myself, Harriet and Dave had our backs to the camera once we had set it up as Charlotte wasn’t comfortable at us watching her perform has we were making her laugh, we didn’t have time to film this scene again so used it anyway although it’s not that noticeable unless pointed out as we edited it in such a way that it was only used for a short amount of time. When it came to editing we all pitched in and had ago at editing the segments together, Me and Harriet started the editing off and firstly named all of our clips and discarded the ones which weren’t needed, we trimmed and put in place the first 3 shots and once receiving a second opinion from Dave, Kate and Charlotte we rendered that piece, then Kate and Dave edited the second part of the video. We rushed the ending of the video as we thought we had less time left then what we actually had, when watching the video as a group we decided we could improve the ending as well as some of the lip synching and inserting a good shot we hadn’t used in the first take, So me, Dave and Charlotte went back on the editing suite while Kate and Harriet updated the blogs and uploaded the video to YouTube, On the editing suite we made several adjustments which we believe have improved the video (Both versions are on our blogs). Finally I think that our video is a very good effort and when watching the actual video alongside it you can tell what we’ve tried to do and how similar our shots are to those of the real video, also usually in a large group one person will have to do all the work while everyone else sits back but in ours I feel there was an equal workload but we also helped each other on the tasks showing excellent teamwork considering a couple of members of the group didn’t know each other before the task. We have all learned from this task and I’m sure we will all be able to create our individual videos better because of the lessons we learned while filming/editing etc.