Directors commentary editing lesson 3

Today we finished Inserting all the clips we had into the commentary. We couldn't put all of the in clips in because some of them disappeared. Also we had to put in our images  of the dolly and the camera in again cos they had been deleted.
We had even more problems with our time to edit because the rendering for it took TOO LONG!
We also made the green screen bits see through and edited the music so the viewer can listen to it during the bits where there is no commentary.
We didn't have time to edit the music in so we just uploaded it without the music.

Directors commentary editing lesson 2

We continued editing our commentary with a few new ideas in mind. One of ideas was to put in some key frames to create moving images and make the commentary more interesting to watch. Also we decided to import some images of our ancillary to remind the audience what it looked like while it is being commented about. Other images we imported into the commentary of the video included: A picture of the HD camera and a camera dolly. TO make the clips of us not look like they appear out of nowhere we made sure they faded in.

While editing we encountered many problems for example all our clips moved around :( This gave us less time to finish our commentary :(. We also lost a couple of clips that we were going to use to comment on the video. Also we spent half the lesson watching our clips render.

Directors commentary editing lesson 1

We started off by copying our final project file and then we imported all the commentary clips into it. Once we had done this we started to overlay the commentary clips onto the music video -as we have the green screen background we have a number of option as to how we position and use our commentary. We could either simply overlay the clips onto the music video without cropping them or re-positioning them and getting rid of the green screen so that the video is playing in the background. Or we could alternatively overlay the commentary clips over the video and resize them, reposition them, and crop them so that they only take up a small proportion of the screen as well as changing the green screen so that it is invisible for the music video to be able to play in the background.

We have decided that we will either get rid of the music video audio completely or just have it quite quiet so that the commentary is the audiences main focus.

As we all only have fairly limited skills in FinalCut so working out the approach we are going to take to create our director's commentary took us a while.

Directors commentary example: Chris Phillips video for Lady Sovereign - A Little Bt of Shh

Director's Commentary: 

Evaluation Questions

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenege forms and conventions of real media products?

·         Conventions: cutting on the beat (especially in the rap scene)

·         Fast editing, on the beat for the rap scenes

·         Slow editing, plans, overlays for the Adele scenes

·         Inspiration came from Kanye 'All of the Lights' and Adele 'Someone Like You' as they are both in part or all in black and white

·         These also gave us the idea for the walking whilst singing the song - almost as if the artist is telling the story to the audience

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

·         The combination creates an overall look for the package that is complete, relateable to Adele's previous products and to each other

·         They are simple and easy on the eye

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

·         Our idea was well liked

·         Following Adele's stereotypical conventions

·         We could have used better lighting

·         The acting for the Adele part could have been improved

·         Better costumes could have been used

·         The locations were well chosen

·         We could have had more varied camera angles

·         The actor for Kanye could have done better lip syncing

·         The performance from the Kanye actor was well recieved

4. How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

·         Blogger for research and planning

·         Youtube - for uploading videos and to be able to include them on our blog

·         FinalCut - for editing our footage

·         Photoshop - for editing our digipack

·         HD Camera - Gave us good quality footage

Stacey's Evaluation Notes

• Adele's video style - good connection with artist's previous videos
• Lip syncing is good and done promptly, esecially on the first few seconds when the vocals start straight away.
• First split screen could be smoother
• Overlays at the beginning are good and create an interesting effect
• Some editing is slightly off the best and could have been finer so that it is on the beat
• Some of the camera work is shakey where we have cropped the frame and zoomed in on the footage
• Zooming in/ cropping has made some of the footage pixelated in some sections (this can't really be helped by us)
• Black and white is effective and emotive
• Fade on violin section is good
• Slightly shakey footage on last Kanye shot
• Costumes are popular and relateable for the audience
• Black and white creates a mellow atmosphere and uses features from 'Someone like you'
• The split screens and overlays makes the footage more interesting, upto date and modern
• Rappers location is conventional
• Some cutting is on the beat and emphasises the cuts

Today's Lesson [Friday 2nd December]

In our lesson today we will be filming our directors commentary from our script, but we can't read directly from it as it ruins the flow of the footage. We are filming in the green room which gives us the opportunity to edit the music video into the background of our directors commentary, even though we haven't planned to and will be experimental. This is an advantage as the other groups are filming in white and black rooms which doesn't give the opportunity as white and black colours are more common than green.

In our script we divided it up equally between all 3 speakers by going through each one as:
Jake: ...........
Stacey: ............
Ruri: ............

Jake: ............

This allows the audience to not be bored and stay engaged with the directors commentary.

Tuesday's Lesson

During our lesson we worked on our directors commentary and made notes that will help us prepare the final script.