Editing to the beat

We also noticed as a group that the start of the chorus all of the editing was a bit miss matched and was not edited to the beat at all and we though this would stop us from gaining as many marks as we can in receiving the highest grade possible.

Although our song choice is slow and hard to edit to the beat, we sat as a group and listened to the song over a couple and times and tried to highlight the key points of the song as to where a more "upbeat" was. We noticed that at the start of the chorus where Pixie sings "and your, sitting in the front row, wanna be first in line..." was where the beat was most evident throughout the whole song.

So in order to edit this to the beat correctly, we as a group looked at what footage we have placed to his part of the song. At the start of the chorus, Elle and Alex jumps on the bed in IKEA, imitating (500) Days of Summer that we had used for our product research earlier on in the year which inspired us to film in IKEA. We as a group made sure that Elle lands when the first symbol sound is played. On the next symbol sound we made sure that her face was shown and then quickly on the next one his face was shown. After that a two shot of the couple together was next shown on the fourth symbol noise and finally on the fifth symbol noise he kisses her.

So, now looking at our "media checklist" we can tick off the "successfully editing the footage in time with the beat" as we have completed this task successfully!

Editing Techniques

This is a video of a song called "Together" by a group named Herve. The reason why I have uploaded this to my blog is simply because of the editing used in this video. Regardless of the genre of the song, I simply love this video as because of how creative it is. The fact that the whole music video was based simple on images which had been photo shopped in order to create the images to "move" in their own way. Now that we are moving on to final cut pro to produce out final editing, I thought this video may help, only in perfecting ours top motion, not the whole music video as we have moving images and not just still photographs like this video.

Digi pack ideas...

I downloaded "paint pro plus" and was able to expand on my editing skills. The first photo I uplaoded is a balck and white shot of Elle. I changed the focus usign the "spot" tool. I hand drew (quite badly) a red pouted kiss shape and then in a swirly text I wrote "Pixie Mix - Broken Arrow". This was in a small black font so it was visible, but Elle was still the main focus.

The second photo is my favourite. It's shot of Elle standing against the big gate with a beautiful house in the background. I used the "spot" tool once again and this time I changed the focus so that Elle stood out much more then the background. I think this looks really effective and will make a great album cover. I hand drew "pixie mix" with the airbrush tool and used black as this stood out against the background. I used a baby pink and did "hearts" for the dots on the eyes as this gave it the little girly edge that Pixi lott would have. I then used a swirly font and wrote broken arrow in a smaller font.

The last photo I uploaded it the same as the first one but this times it's in colour. I then used the airbrush tool and hand drew pixie mixx as I did on the second photo.

These are all very basic ideas but I hope to put my final piece together over the weekend!

Digi pack attempt...

This is very VERY basic, but having not used photo shop before, I am struggling a lot! I uploaded a pohot of Elle which was a print screen from our music video. I then converted it to black and white, adjusted the contrasted and also added the album name and artist in a girly font. This is just a rough idea and over the weekend once I have got to grips with photshop I will look fowards to being able to producing all 4 sides to my digipack!

editing

In today's lesson our whole group was in so myself and Elle were finally able to show the rest of our group what we had completed in the lesson they had missed. They really liked what we had done and they were also able to come up with some new ideas.

Where we have inserted the "stop motion" clip into our music video where the cupid emotion is firing an arrow, Emma said to use the Imovie tool of "picture within a picture" and so that underneath the stop motion we could put a clip of Elle and Alex so the two clips blend into one. We tried it and it looks good, but we still don't know whether we are going to include it in our final version.

Also looking at the music video, Elle who had come to the media room in her free periods the other day had made some further changes that I hadn't yet seen. She had added some clips of herself and Alex towards the end of the music video to give the video more narrative as we have already got a lot of performance clips of Elle singing. When the clips had been added, she "reversed" them to add to the whole "flashback" idea so it looked like they were looking back on the memories. She also ended the music video with 2 happy clips as the piano music that ends the song is quite happy, so she put in a clip of Alex giving her a "piggy back" and ending with a kiss by a tree with a pan up to the sky and then fading to black. I really like the changes that Elle made and I'm hoping now that all we need to do is finishes touches!

Editing

Again, in my free periods, myself and Elle went to the media room to continuing editing as we want to get it finished as soon as possible so we can concentrate on the theory side to our exam. So, we edited again for another two hours and managed to produce this:



It's not completely finished yet and there are still some bits that myself and Elle are going to hopefully put into it in our free periods at school tomorrow.

We also showed what we have produced so far to our teacher and she really enjoyed it, she did give us a few feedback pointers to work on:

- to make sure we covered every shot that the exam board wants to get top marks (so we perhaps need a better variety of shots as we have a lot of close ups)
- to include some hints of colour as it will make the video look more interesting (we may use colour match tool on final cut bro to just keep the shot black and white but highlight certain things in colour)
- add more clips of Elle and her boyfriend to break up the performance shots

Editing

Last week, the music video wasn't really in order and all the clips were jumbled up. So, on Monday in my free periods, myself and Elle stayed in school to try and sort this problem out.

We managed to get all the clips we wanted in our film ll in one place together to avoid confusion when putting the clips together, so this really helped! We also had a look at what we had already edited and realised that because some of our music video was filmed on the flip camera which is in HD and some on the normal camera which isn't, the contrast in different locations didn't match and looked very unprofessional. So, after much debate and discussion, myself and Elle decided to put all the clips in black and white as this made the music video look a lot more professional.

So, after a 2 hour editing session, myself and Elle are pleased with the work we have done and can't wait to start getting a move on with the rest of it!

Further Research

I was on the main blog the other day having a browse at every body's blogs and seeing if there was anything from any lesson I had missed and I came across Oyinda's blog. I saw that she had recently uploaded an example of an A2 music video that had been awarded a grade 'A'. I remember a while ago when my group had finished and edited our as film project to perfection so we had a bit of spare time left over at the end and just for fun, we were looking at what music videos had been made on other media courses across the country. Funnily enough, this video that Oyinda has put on her blog, is a favourite that I liked watching back then.




I feel that this music video is relevant to our in the fact that many of our shots are edited in to black and white and adjusted with the contrast and saturation controls. Most of this video id edited to black and white, apart from the odd shot where certain bits of colour are depicted. I think we will hopefully be able to achieve this small amount of colour from the editing technique on final cut pro called "colour pass".

Also, on this video they have also used the Polaroid pictures effect where they begin to move inside from what started as a still image. I believe that this girl achieved this by using the "green screen" affect on final cut pro, so hopefully we can get ours looking as good as this groups does!