Song/Pitch

The main focus of our few previous was to mainly decide on a song and genre, in which we decided to choose a song by Boogie wit da Hoodie ft. Kodak Black ' Drowning'. We chose to do the Hip Hop genre as my group believed the actors including myself and another person would feel more comfortable with Hip Hop as it is very lively and animated  compared to a pop song or something similar with singing in which we discussed we would feel out of place. Secondly, we individually gathered a list of Hip Hop songs that  we each thought one another would like, and one that would be relevant. As we were deciding which would be the best option, we decided to go with the song 'Drowning' as we each had plenty of ideas that we could put towards the video. We recently started a pitch about the song which is in the process of being finished. The pitch has been written up on Google Slides which is effective and efficient as we can all edit the presentation simultaneously, however once we have all completed our individual slides, we may move the information onto Prezi so that we can add some effects to go with the presentation and possibly some background music which will be the song 'Drowning'. This pitch will include; possible locations to shoot the video, target audience, inspiration, actors/dancers etc. Lastly,  as our group presents our pitch which will last for approximately 10-15 minutes, we will also be recorded.

The song depicted down below does include some profanity which may be seen as sexiest and offensive to women and also the use of a racist word, however reasons for that will be provided in the upcoming pitch.

Initial ideas for music video

Todays lesson included our group verbally discussing and planning out our ideas for the music video, for example, the definite genre we are going to focus on, which we decided would be Hip Hop as we believe it would be the easiest genre to act out for us specifically, and the fact that there are countless areas in London suitable for the genre. The second factor that we talked about possibly adding in our final video was different editing techniques and visuals that could improve the aesthetics of the video. The last and final objective that we completed in todays session was viewing and analysing examples of previous music videos to gain a basic understanding of what a top grade video looks like, which then gave us tips and ideas that we could include in our final.

Editing session 2

Today was the second and final session to edit our footage, I believe today was very successful as me and my group did complete the task, which was to record a music video to a song which didn't have one, and then sync the video with the audio.This task was completed and my opinion on the final outcome of the video was positive however there were still mistakes that could yet be improved in the final project but as a practice round, this went pretty well. Once the audio and the video were in sync the task was basically completed, however, myself and my group decided to add in different transitions in between cuts and scenes which made the video appear more professional, however upon adding certain effects to the video it was clear that no one knew quite how to remove them or undo the process, resulting in an unwanted video effect in one of the scenes, which slightly downgraded the video.

Footage editing session

The main aim for todays session was to start editing the footage recorded from the day before. This session was rather productive as I would personally say we are about 50% from the final product. Although this process was quite simple  which might sound biased, but from my point of view, it followed through with quite a few steps. First of all our group and every other group had to collect their specific DSLR camera as they all still had the SD card in them, this SD card would then be ejected from the camera and inserted into the SD card port on the side of the mac. The second piece of equipment that we had to collect was a hard drive which similar to the cameras was organised with a number, purposely making it easier for the groups to identify their work. Once the hard drive was plugged into the mac, the next process was to import the footage and a couple relevant pictures from the SD card to the hard drive which took about two to three minutes due to the fact that there were so many files to move over. Whilst waiting for this process to be completed I opened a default app on the mac used for editing videos which is called 'Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac'. Once the files were imported, we then went on to open the files in the video editor which allowed us to obviously edit and save our work in progress. The first step to actually editing the video included finding an original version of the song, then opening that file in Adobe editor, and then syncing the our video with the audio of Drakes 'One Dance'. Although it was relatively easy to play the audio over the clips of the video, it's quite difficult to correctly align the two as the mac was automatically jumping to different periods and wasn't letting us manually adjust when the two started, for example the audio would play a millisecond before the video, and even though it seems minor, it was very visible in the playbacks and was simply destroying the outcome, however after many failed attempts we did succeed in syncing the two at the exact same time. This was the conclusion of todays session, and hopefully tomorrow we can finish adding in a few extra clips and the outro and also remove all of the default hard cuts in between the scenes and replace them with nice transactions to help the video flow.

Diagram 1



Diagram 2 

DSLR recap

Today, we recapped the topic of how to use a DSLR correctly since we haven't used them in a while, initially I couldn't remember a lot about the DSLR, however after going through a couple of key steps and features of the camera I started to remember specific concepts of the camera, such as; white balance, Auto and Manuel focus (AF-MF) etc. Once the recap session had concluded, I then went on to choose small groups of three including myself, I decided to choose two other individuals who shared a common interest relating to the genre of music, once I located these two individuals we then decided and agreed on a song relating to the music genre of Pop, this song being 'One dance by Drake, who isn't traditionally known for being a Pop artist and more specifically Rap, however this particular song is known to be a Pop and was good as it wasn't conventional for a Pop song to have a Rapper sing, which is unusual but interesting. The next process was to decide on one or two of us to then act out in our chosen location(s) for the practice run and the other individual to film on the DSLR. The location mainly included a field as it had exceptional lighting, probably due to the time of day which was roughly 10:35AM . Once all of this was completed we then chose a range of three shots to shoot with, including a; close up, mid shot and finally long shot as we thought that they were a necessity for a functional music video . The next step was to analyse the footage that was created and identify any possible mistakes and any strengths. One key flaw, which is not so much a mistake included a lack of movement between the two individuals in front of the lens, at first glance it was the first aspect that I noticed and made the footage rather awkward.

Production schedule