Final Cut- Music video!

Untitled from Sophie on Vimeo.

Music channel?

Previously I have researched into music channels however have not discussed what channel we shall use for our promotional package.

Our genre comes under indie rock and is targetted at 16-25 year old girls and boys therefore the music channel we chose needs to be the correct channel in order to make our promotional package a success.



Here are the possibilities: MTV, MTV HITS, Q, NME AND VH1!!

However before making a decision, I will go onto each one of their websites to see where Bloc Party is most popular. Then I will spend half an hour watching these music channels and find out the videos they air and see if they will attract our target audience.

This first study I looked at was MTV, I have reguarly seen Bloc Party's videos on this channel however still thought it was a good idea to research into their channel.

All I did was type Bloc Party into their search engine and their MTV channel came up. Showing all their videos at the right hand side. I could also view exclusive MTV live videos from festivals such as Oxygen and Reading.

Taking this into account, we placed MTV's logo into final cut to see how it looked this is what we found:

Editing our Final Cut

Editing

Editing is a fundamental part of our coursework and learning from our rough cut problem areas we were determined to make sure we used the appropriate tools in Final cut pro!

In many parts of our video we zoomed in as shown below. This meant we could cut out an background we did not want in our video. As you can see in the right hand clip we didnt want people wandering around the screen therefore simply used the zoom in tool to adjust this.

Split screen

As a group we very much wanted to show the clip of both emily and jake singing with an extreme close up. However, this would mean 2 clips becoming one and were unsure if we were going to be able to achieve this look.
Luckily, we came across a brilliant tutorial that helped us greatly. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y4FIfRnbvc

This tutorial taught us exactly how to create the split screen in final cut pro.Firstly we had to place the two images we wanted to appear in the same window. We then had to resize the images so they would fit on the same screen- After we did this we then had to render(which will be discussed below).

This is Emily and Vicky working towards our final cut deadline.. busy editing..

When it came to editing it was very important that we used the correct effects and transitions, we didn't want to use loads of different effects because this simply wouldn't go with our lyrics or visuals. However from our research we discovered the use of overlays and cross dissolves and were keen to use them in our editing. As you can see below there are a wide range of effects you can use in final cut pro. We mainly used the Dissolve tool in our project.

When editing we had to remember many different parts to ensure we were using final cut pro properly. One of these aspects was to turn down the audios behind of footage. From where we had filmed there was going to be background noise therefore we needed to make sure we turned down the volume and increase the music.

The most fundamental part of the editing process was in my opinion, remembering to render our footage! Everytime we made an adjustment in final cut we had to render the video and audio to allow it to work and show what we wanted. If we did not render then the video would simply not work. This was very time consuming and sometimes a bit tedious however was the fundamental part of editing.

Editing with colour

Correcting the colour balance became a very important part of our editing process. It could be argued that the video camera we used, the quality was not brilliant. However, this was not a problem because we could change the colour, brightness, contrast and exposure in final cut pro. As you can see above, we were correctly the close up of Emily. We wanted to make the shot less bright and more of a contrast, we found changing the effect very useful so that all our footage looked the same (even though we filmed at different times of the day).

Finishing touches to our final cut

Last adjustments until our final cut...

Although we have now completed our music video and finalized the editing we noticed one thing we needed to add. Due to the repetitive use of flashing images, lights ansd strobe light in our music video it was necessary for us to include a warning sign at the start, ensuring the saftey of our viewers.

This has also been done in exisitng media therefore even more of a reason to follow the conventional expectations.

As you can see below, this is our music video stating that this visdeo contains flashing lights- noticing the red coloured warning. Similarily, in Kayne West's music video the red writing is also shown and more of a description explain that this video may trigger epilepsy and therefore viewers need to take caution.

DAY 4 FILMING

Due to half term we had an opportunity to film especially because our deadline for our final cut is fast approaching.Therefore we thought it was a good idea to film on Monday 14th February because this was the day everyone could do therefore the most convenient. We all met at 12:00 at Emily's house and using our storyboard started from the beginning and re-filmed the majority of the scenes, and assured we did this more than once to help us when it came to editing.
We also went to different locations because we found that Camden took a while to get to and also became expensive. Therefore we decided to film at Emily's in Dartford and for the rest of the scenes to be filmed in Dartford, however we still want to use some of the good scenes from our rough cut as we believe there are elements in this that were successful.


Here is a image of us setting up at Emily's house:



Before the first verse filming:



http://pixlr.com/editor/

DAY 3 FILMING

LOCATION: SIDCUP

Vicky, Emily, Voke and Jake went filming on tuesday night to redo the first verse and set up the narrative differently.

They went to Sidcup high street, partly because it was convenient for everyone but also because we needed to do the cafe scene.

They found that this went well because we made some changes before filming after our rough cut.

We used a different video camera this time and found it much easier to use because it had easier buttons and zoom-ins.

We placed this into final cut to see if it worked well and if it didn't we were going to change it again. However, it worked very well in final cut after we changed the opacity.

We placed it into final cut to see what it looked like, and as a group we definitely thought it looked more professional and looked better with the overall beat of the song.

Changes

Our rough cut and feedback really made us realize that a lot has to be done to achieve our final cut.

We all sat together and discussed the positives and negatives, although we were really passionate about our narrative and thought it was a great idea it didn't come across well to our audience- and we realized this is VERY IMPORTANT seeing as their our target audience therefore the people that would buy the music and watch the video. Due to this reason we thought we needed to change a few things (reasons as followed)

• Narrative change
• Link lyrics and visuals together more
• Neat editing and appropriate transitions

The first thing we did was annotate our lyrics...

Lyrics Bloc Party lyrics - Flux lyrics

The image created from these lyrics isn't a break up or more importantly does not mention a male being stalked. Although we really liked our narrative we did not play attention to the LYRICS, which is extremely important!

Instead the lyrics talk about a state of flux, a state of change and possible confusion. Therefore we must steer away from the obsessive stalker image or a break up. Instead, it could be a couple that are unsure what they want and things are not working which is causing this state of flux.

Furthermore, we thought it was equally important to connotate our lyrics and visuals, showing evidence of the lyrics rather than ignoring them.

Also, although we orginially planned to do a narrative based music video we now realize that performance base would look more professional and would just work much better especially due to the pace of the music, fast editing would look great with this!

Feedback from Rough Cut

From our feedback of our rough cut, we have realised as a group we need to seriously change major parts!

Our overall feedback from our audience was:

• Unclear narrative- making it hard to follow
• Editing not matching
• Strobe lighting scene was not visible enough
• Needs to look more professional- instead of just walking through London
• Performance? Needs to show the performer being more of an artist, promotional vechile
• More of a link with lyrics and visuals

With our feedback it really made us realize that a lot has to be done. Even though we knew how we wanted to create our music video it came across differently to our peers. It is clear that we need more filming so we can work more flexibily when it comes to the editing part.

However, location and setting did work very well and so did our protagonist characters therefore we intend on keeping these the same.

The image below is the feedback we got from our peers:

As you can see we did have a lot of feedback to work with which was actually very detailed therefore helped us greatly.

Editing Rough Cut in Final cut

We decided as a team that the people responsible for editing our video would be Vicky and Emily because they wanted to do this particular part of the process.

At first it did come with its difficulties as final cut is a pretty confusing software, however we were able to overcome this with tutorials.

This is a grab show of our overlays, we found out how to do this on a youtube tutorial. We had to place one part below the other then click the overlay button to place the image under the other one. However, we had to play around with the opacity and decide how visible we wanted it. This grab show shows this process however also shows how we had to render it afterwards so it would work properly.

This grab shot shows the process of cutting the parts we did not want. As you can see in the first screen Emily is very close to Jake however in the second screen she is far away, we wanted to show this quick transition without Emily actually walking away. We did this through the editing screen where we simply cut down the part we did not want. This is very much the bulk of how we edited and was very time-consuming especially because we had to render every change we made.

Overall, we enjoyed working with Final Cut however because we haven't worked with it before we did find it challenging especially because it is time consuming. However, it is good we highlighted this as an issue because we will not make the same mistakes in our Final Cut development. It is a possibility we may have to change video camera because the one we are working with currently is HD therefore is a huge size meaning it is slow in the editing programme. However, we are going to wait until we get our feedback then we will make the necessary changes.