Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Feedback on the Final Video

Performances-

They thought the acting was well done, creating “possessed and broken” characters. It was noted that although the zombie performances were good, sometimes they just looked like tired people.

One viewer “didn’t understand the storyline and what the characters link was to each other”. But did think we “gave it a good shot”

Cinematography-

The variety of the shots was brought up by two people, and it was highlighted that we filmed in various locations. However they also thought that the all the locations had the same “vibe” which made it a bit boring.

The shots were thought to be “nice and blurry and unstable” and, “Stylistic” which reflects the zombie genre well.

Editing-

Someone liked “the yellow gloomy tone edited onto the video.”and the handheld shot of the two zombies fighting over the guitar was enjoyed because, “The camera was shaking like we were looking from someone else’s eyes.”

One person thought it was fairly basic, with “no lip syncing, which made it less interesting.”

Someone simply said, “Good editing overall.”

Mise en Scene-

The make-up was thought to be “effective and realistic’ by one person, and this appears to be an opinion shared across all the veiwers. However one person suggests it “would’ve been nice to have a good costume instead of just your cloths.” They think ripped, dirty, and maybe bloody cloths would have been more effective.

One person thought the props were used well, especially the old teddy which ‘added to the gloomy effect.” However another viewer thought the props “didn’t link” and, “had no meaning.”

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Potential moral, ethical, and legal issues

Potential Issues:

– Permission to film on the locations, The chalk pit, the cemetery, the street, and the car park. Track down who owns the locations, probably the council or a nature reserve or some such, and get written permission to use the locations in a video.

– Copyright on our clothing. I’m wearing a T-shirt with the cartoon character snoopy on it, and some of Aaron’s cloths bear the “No Fear” brand, his shoes and jumper. One solution could be to blur out the logos or re frame shots to hide them. However this wouldn’t really work for my snoopy t-shirt.

– The stickers on the guitar prop are from the video game ‘Guitar Hero’ and could be copyrighted.

– The Nuclear plant image could be and issue, although when the image came up in the search engine it did say it was copyright free. Take a screen shot of the page saying the image is free to use maybe? And if i got something wrong and it isn’t free, the answer would be to replace it with a new image that is free and screenshot that notice.

– Gory, bloody imagery. The use of blood in the video could be an issue, however the briefness of it, and the fact that you don’t actually see any wounds, might lessen it’s impact. I warning might be a good idea, text just before the video or down in the description, stating the video “contains imagery some could find disturbing.” Something along those lines.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – After Effects Establishing Shot

I’ve been working on this shot in After Effects for quite a few days, and have finished it and rendered it out. This is the open shot of the video, the establishing shot for the whole video, so I felt strongly that it was the effect we should fight to complete, as it sets up the tone and zombie genre brilliantly.

I intended this to be a really simple shot, just placing a static image of the nuclear plant into the sky. I tried to prepare for this when filming the shot as well, using a tripod for the shot rather then going handheld, to try and make it easier to drop in the picture. However, on reviewing the footage in After Effects I saw it actually wobbled quite a bit. I’m unsure how this happened, my best guess would be strong wind blowing the camera.

So this meant the first thing I did was stabilize the shot a bit, with the effect ‘Warp Stabilizer’. Whilst this didn’t get rid of the shake, it smoothed it out into a sort of glide, making ti much easier to motion track. Next was the very tricky and fiddly job of tracking the movement of the object. This was a lot of trial and error, seeing what worked and didn’t, before I felt I had something usable. Once I was fairly happy, I dropped in the nuclear plant image and parented it to the tracking object. The next stage was to place it in the background, so that the Aaron zombie and all the plants and the hill would appear to go over the image.

I duplicated the footage and named on “front”, and one “Back”. On this front layer I applied a ‘Color Key’ effect and picked out the color of the sky for keying. This worked very well due to the simplicity of the sky, and the contrast being sharp enough to pick out the shapes and figures from it.

With the sky transparent on the front layer, I placed the nuclear plant image behind it, and and the back layer behind that for the sky. I also applied some subtle ‘Fast Blur’ to the nuclear plant, giving the impression of it being out of focus.

On top of all this is i added a little colour correction, just to blend it all together, and then rendered it out. Once in the premier pro file for the video I did some further colour correction, so that the shot matched the others in the video.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Editing Colour Correction

Today we put together pretty much the final cut, filling in all the blank spaces and getting the timing to a place we both like. With this done we feel ready to try and figure out the colour correction. We’ve been leaving colour correction up till now, working on the idea of doing this in order of importance, so; 1) Final Edit 2) Colour Correction 3) Effects

The goal with the colour correction is to add an extra layer of mood and tone, as well as really help get across the Zombie genre and atmosphere to the audience. It should hopefully give the video an added look of professionalism.

We begun on the first half of the video, all set in the chalk pits. Aaron has been working on colour correction as I’ve been editing, testing out a few techniques on different shots, so I just applied one of his ‘RGB Curves’ settings to all the clips in this first half. However this was not the end of the process. When we watched it all back we saw that the colour correction was effecting some clips differently then others (due to the lighting changing on some shots, as noticed a few days ago). This shifting colour through out made the video look disconnected and sloppy, so the bulk of our session was us going through every shot and adjusting the grading effects to try and match it to one master shot, the reference on which all the other shots would be based.

It’s important to have one master shot that your trying to match everything to, so that you have a better chance of getting all the shots to be the same colour. We managed to get to a place where we are pretty pleased with the opening half, and will next move onto the second half.

So close to the end of this project and the deadline, we also discussed how we should be wrapping up to finish. We’ve been going through our production folder to see what’s missing and we’re both taking a few pieces of paper work home to do over the weekend. We also talked about the video it’s self, and what needs to happen for it to be finished.

Basically we have two things to complete: Colour Correction and Effects. We both agree that our main concern should be colour correction, as we feel the video will survive without the few planned effects, but will really benefit from some nice colour grading.

In terms of effects we only had a few shots planned; adding a nuclear plant into the distance on the first establishing shot, and adding a nuclear explosion into the background on the final shot. We’re currently talking about how important these effects are. I’ve already begun experimenting in After Effects to see what we can do, and whilst I think we can do a decent establishing shot, I’m less confident about the ending explosion. I’d rather not ruin the shot by adding a badly done effect to it, so it might be best to leave that effect less.

But we both agree it’s worth pursuing that establishing shot, as we think we can do it well and it would really set the mood for the video. I’ll continue to experiment over the weekend.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Editing Day 3

Today we pretty much got all the footage from the chalk pits that we wanted, into the video.

We also had a go at colour correction

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Shooting Day 3 (Small Pick-Up Shot)

Today I did a tiny little shoot, only getting one shot. The shot was of the zombie hitting a keyboard with a bloody hand, giving the effect that this creates the synthy sound in the track, and is a shot from both my nine key frames and storyboard.

Whilst editing we’ve definitely seen a need for this shot to be used, as there are a few blank spaces to fill in the video that are so brief, they only need a really short and snappy shot. Going back to our initial ideas and storyboards, this shot seemed perfect to fill all those little spaces, the shot being cut into shorter shots, each a single slam on the keyboard.

I did this quickly on my own in my garden, taking out my keyboard and filming me hitting it with a hand covered by fake blood. It was a really simple shot to set up, just placing my camera on the tripod and angling it straight down so it recorded the keys of the keyboard. The reason I did it on my own was that the shot really was exceptionally simple, and I had all the equipment and elements needed to create it.

After the filming I reviewed the footage and wanted to make some colour changes using After Effects to improve it. I had to main issues with the shot’s colour; first, that my hand looked very warm and vibrant and not very zombie like. Second, was that I didn’t think the red of the blood stood out enough.

So in After Effects I first dealt with the hand, using the ‘Change to Colour’ effect to pick out the pink of my hand and change it to a grey. I played with the transparency of the effect a bit, making it less obvious so it didn’t look like some stylized mix of black and white and colour.

The next effect was ‘Selective Colour’ which lets you select a colour in the footage and tinker with its properties. For example I picked the red, since the goal was to make the blood a bolder red, and then played with the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black levels of the red in the image.

This did the job really well and the blood stands out much better now. After all this colour correction the final touch was to add a ‘Brightness and Contrast’ effect, and just up the contrast a bit, making the whole image just a bit starker and sharper.

Before Colour Correction

After Colour Correction

Happy with the bleak and bold colour corrected shot I rendered it out, ready to be inserted into the edit tomorrow morning. This final shot will fill out the gaps in our video, making this the last filming session.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Peer feedback on the rough cut

The feedback we got was largely positive. They enjoyed the the use of locations and the zombie effects. There was also a good reaction to the comical aspect of our video, especially the relationship between the two zombies.

The only real criticism that came up in a lot of the comments was that the video’s narrative was confusing. Now from the beginning we planned this as a less narrative driven video and more abstract. At this point we’re unsure exactly what to do about this. It would be pretty difficult to add more logic and a stronger story to the video, so it might be better to just embrace the confusion.

The comments sort of support this theory, as all the viewers enjoyed the video based on the camera angles, editing, and comical characters, despite sometimes being confused. So basically from the feedback we gather that the confusion doesn’t spoil the video.

We did have two comments bringing up confusion about the inclusion of the teddy bear. This has alerted us to how much we got a bit carried away with the bear prop, including it much more then we’d originally planned. As we improvised more and more scenes with it, and then included them in the edit, it sort of begun to be more a character then a prop. it’s become a focus point, and I can see how this could be confusion and possibly distracting in a zombie music video. The answer definitely isn’t to get rid of the bear, as this would take a lot of re-shoots, and we have had comments that enjoyed the comic effect of the bears presence. So what we’ll try to do is just take out a few of the shots, keeping the bear in as a joke but trying to stop it from becoming a focus.

The only other criticism was about the empty spaces in our video, where it just cuts out to black a few times. This is something we’re going to address, and they’re only in there whilst we work out what footage we want to use to fill the gaps.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Rough Cut

Here is the current rough cut of the video. We haven’t edited all our footage in yet, so there are a few blank spaces where the screen goes to black. There is also practically no colour correction yet and no effects have been added.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Shooting Day 2

We arrive at the location: the Cherry Hinton chalk pits

For our second shoot we went to only one location; the chalk pits. We dedicated a whole shooting day to this one location as we knew we had the most shots here, and had to film it carefully as it’s really the narrative core of the video. While the shots from the first day are really quite random and to be scattered around the video, these shots had to tell the simple story that would intro the video.

This filming block is a few days later than scheduled. We initially planned to record on the 11^th of October, but all day rain made this impossible. So we bumped the filming back to the next available day; Tuesday the 15^th.

The preparation was pretty much the same as the last recording day; taking two cameras in case battery ran out, taking the make-up supplies so touch ups could be applied, and taking the storyboards and shot lists to work from.

We followed the shot lists and Storyboards much more closely this time, and whilst I did enjoy the improvisation of the first shoot, this way as much more efficient and easier to manage. My method in future would be to combine the two styles. This would mean picking locations and going out to them before filming or even planning, and just thinking up shots in the space. Then we could come back and shot list those “improvised” ideas.

Being on just the one location helped as well I think, so we could concentrate and think through what we were doing without having to think about where we were going next and what we would have to set up.

I believe with the completion of this shoot we’ve filmed all the footage for the video.  We’ll upload and review the footage on Wednesday, and see if there’s anything we need to add in pickups. We have just about enough time to shoot a couple more shots if need be.

Unit 18 AO2 Music Video Production – Filming Delay

We had planned to film the shots at the chalk pit today, however it’s started heavily raining and will apparently continue throughout the day and go on the whole weekend. This has unfortunately set the shooting back so we’ll have to to it next week. Tuesday the 15th is our new planed filming day as it’s the next day we’re both available for all day recording (and we’ve check the forecast; so far it says that day will be cloudy but not rain).

We’ll use this extra time before filming to further prepare and also edit the footage we already have. We’re confident this won’t set us back to badly, as we already have half the video shot, and if we manage to shoot on Tuesday we’ll still have plenty of time to edit the footage in.