Rough Cut Appraisal

There are many things that I believe went well with my roughcut but I have also personally noticed alot of issues as well. I have wrote this rough cut appraisal to show all of the positives and negatives about my rough cut video and all of my opinions on how it went. I have done this so I can compare it to my audience feedback which will then hopefully help me create a succesful product in the end.

Positives:
- I believe that the clips which I have in my rough cut so far flow well together and create a good representation of what the band is like and how they act naturally.
- The colouring of the footage works well with the song. I dont this by using colour corrector and brightness and I think that it creates a much more 'indie' looking video.
- Some of the lipsynching has work very well and is in good time with the lyrics in the song.
- The lighting in the actual footage works well and gives the overall video a nice effect.
- The long shot performance footage looks good and is a good contrast to the close ups and natural acting shots.
- I think that the beginning bit work wells (when each character is introduced one at a time)
- I believe that the overall idea of the video is beginning to work well.

- The footage that I have got it a good repesentation of the influences that I have been using in the process of recording. e.g: Some of the shots that I have included in my video are similar to others shown in other indie music videos, specifically San Cisco's 'Awkward'.

Negatives:
- I think that so far, the music video does get a bit boring at some parts. To improve this I will need to add alot more performance and natural clips which will involve me doing another shoot.
-Although the clips flow well together, I do think that it is a bit boring having the whole video in the same location and it does get a but tedious. (there is only so much you can do in one location)
-The lipsynching at the beginning needs to be improved (it could be alot more in time).
-The beginning can be improved alot so it's not just focused on a room for 15ish seconds. Even though there is effects added in, it could still be more interesting. The start of the video has to be the part to grab the audiences attention and I want it to be as good as possible.
- Some of the clips in the video seem to be abit 'random' and I would like to change this by having clips from different locations.
- I think that the video would overall be alot more powerful if I had transitions and different effects. At the moment there isn't any really interesting noticable effects added.
- When each character is introduced at the beginning the timing could be more on point.
- The close up of the instruments could be done again but this time it could be made to look alot more natural (like it is shown in the performance shots).
- Some of the clips could be made brighter then the others so they stand out more instead of the whole video because the same brightness.
- Things could be made so they run alot more smoothly (not too much because this would be complimenting the genre of the song).
-More camera angles could be added aswell (of the performance etc.).

Overall, I think that for a roughcut it did go well but there are many things that I need to do to improve my video and make it an interesting 'indie' music video. There are many ways I could do this but I think the main focus needs to be getting more footage for the video.

Rough Cut Feedback

This is the feedback sheet that was given out in class which we then filled out for one another after our rough cuts were uploaded. From this feedback I have learnt that I really need to record and add more footage in aswell as making the clips shorter and putting in smooth transistions between footage. Overall, I think that this is quite positive but constructive feedback aswell.

Rough Cut

Editing

The first thing I done when I began editing was logging and transferring all of my footage onto final cut. I then filtered through them and deleted any unnecessary material. I then added the song to the final cut timeline and left abit of space at the beginning for any mistakes. I added the best full length performance footage to the timeline and made it match up with the song (lipsynched). After this I began putting 'in' and 'out' marks on the footage to create shorter clips and I then started to add them to the timeline. At this point I was just trying to see what looked good where.

The next thing I focused on was adding in the clips that was focused on going to the beat or lyrics of the song. The screen shot below shows the point where I was matching up the guitar melody of the chorus to the close up of the guitar. This took a while because I had to play around with speeding up or slowing down the clip so it fit perfectly in time. I done this by pressing 'command J' and choosing the percentage of speed of which the clip moved at.

I done the same thing with the clips which involved the characters singing, this was alot harder then the guitar section because I had to make sure that the singing and lip movement from the footage was excatly in time with eachother and I ended up speeding up the footage by a very small percentage:

Next, I added in the rest of my footage into where I thought it looked the best. After this was done I then had to delete all of the audio from the footage I recorded. I done this by deselcting one of the tools on the right hand side and simply deleted the green audio sections on the timeline. However, I did leave some audio in because I thought that it went well with the section of song and it made it look like more of a homemade indie music video:

After all of the clips had been added I started to play around with the colouring of the clips. I done this by using colour corrector and I chose to turn all of the clips a yellowy/brown colour. After this I decided that the clips also needed to be alot brighter so it looked more like an indie performance video so I applied a 1.36 brightness to all of the clips which is .36 more then what they originally were:

Evaluation of Production

Overall, I believe that my production went well. Even though the first day was not that succesful it stil enabled me to know what I would have had to change anyway. By the first location not working as well as I thought it did it resulted in finding the second location which I feel was a really good location to have. However, I did have some difficulties whilst filming but I think that this is mainly due to me working by myself. Although the actors did help me I think that I would have benefited from having more people there. Another thing I struggled with was getting enough coverage. At the end of the second day production I thought that I had gotten enough coverage but when it came to logging and transfering the footage onto the computer it became apparent that I could have done alot more. I think that is is because I did have a limited amount of time because I could only carry out production in the evening and the office area had to be close by 12oclock.

Production Day 2

Today was my second day of production and I really think that this went alot more smoothly then the first day. As I had a new location there was alot more space to work I didn't feel squeezed into one space and unlike the location yesterday, I was able to move freely when recording instead of having to watch out for cables, instruments etc. The new location also consisted of plain white walls and quite a plain carpet so when the lighting was added it actually made a difference and created some interesting shadows whereas the first location didn't change no matter how much like I tried to add. The main thing though was that I was able to start production alot earlier then the previous day which meant that the amount of time I had to actually record the footage had increased alot and because we didn't feel like we had to rush the process the atmosphere was alot less stressful which ended up resulting in better performances. Because this location wasn't near any houses (when location on day 1 was) we didn't have a specific time to be out of the location by so this also let us take our time with production (it also didn't matter how loud we were).

These are some images from production day two:

 

After day two of production I have decided that I current do not need anymore production time because I feel as if I have enough coverage to edit my music video successfully. However, if I feel at a later time that I need to do some more recording, I have permission from the owners of the office to use it when I like and the actors all live in this area so they are always available at some point to record more footage if neccasary.

Permissions

I created this permissions sheet which was signed by everyone involved in the proccess of my production. It covers: location, equipment and filming permissions.