Thursday, December 5, 2019

editing blog

Our music video was a mess. When we filmed we decided not to check out a camera. As discussed in my last blog, we did this because i was afraid of losing it. When we were filming we used an iPhone instead. I also discussed in my last blog how i accidentally filmed the whole thing portrait and not landscape. This is an issue because then when we transfer it to a computer it will look weird and different. We decided that it was too late to re film it landscape. So we took our portrait style videos and we put them together. We used iMovie on an iPhone as well. Another problem that arrived while we were editing, was that our song was not available on iMovie.

So after 10 minutes of trying, we decided to do something else. I tried to do a voiceover. The voice over was me recording on one phone and playing Starstruck on another. After I recorded the entire song I played it out loud. It was terrible. The sound was all funky and we cut different parts of the songs together so they didn’t match up. Then I realized it sounded weird because the volume was at 500%. Then once I turned the volume down to 100% it still sounded weird. So once I got home from winter break i showed my classmates and decided to re-do it. This time I created a whole new movie.

When I was recording the voice over this time I kept background noise to a minimum. I also used a Bose speaker so that it was better quality sound and louder. When cutting the different parts of the song together I tried to make it sound natural. Once I had all the sound worked out, another problem arose. Our video was too long. Our video was 1 minute and 28 seconds when they are supposed to be 1 minute and 15 seconds max. Then I decided to cut off part of me lip syncing the chorus and it was exactly 1 minute and 15 seconds. While doing this I struggled to match up the audio with the clips. On the last clip I wanted the song to end as the door closed. So now I plan on going home and filming the voiceover AGAIN. This is getting frustrating and I have put in so much time in this project but I won’t settle for less than perfection.

Monday, December 2, 2019

filming blog.

Since the last filming blog my group was yet to film for our music video. We were not sure if we were going to do part of it in Florida and part of it in Texas because I was traveling for Thanksgiving break. But at last, we filmed. I believe the more correct term would be “I filmed”. The filming process was difficult at times but overall rewarding. Once I was on vacation I asked my cousin to help me film because my group members were not with me. My cousin also gathered a few of his friends to help me film; they also were in our music video. We started off by selecting my outfits that would come off as either glamorous or incognito. Then we went outside and found a nice side walk with Fall trees on it so that our music video would have a Fall look. The first scene we did many times and ended up re-doing once we filmed the second scene.
When we started filming the second scene we realized that we should do a camera movement in-between both the first and second scene so that the jump cut would look smoother. In the first scene we did a particularly cool effect where a flashlight was shined into the camera to create the effect of paparazzi taking photos. We re-filmed the first and second scene and moved on to the next scene. In the third scene I walked out of “the V.I.P. room”.  For this we originally storyboarded me going behind a red rope and having a bunch of extras flock over me. Instead, since we could not find any extras, we decided to make the V.I.P. area a room. I printed out a piece of paper that said “V.I.P.” on it and taped it to the door. The final scene ended up looking like me walking out of the V.I.P. room with my cousin’s friend as the “bouncer”. Then for the fourth and fifth scene we just stuck to the storyboard and the were relatively easy to film. After, I changed into fancier “movie star” clothes for my big scene.
One of the issues when filming the chorus was the lighting. We wanted to get some guitars in the back but the lights were spread all across the wall. We tried turning the lights off but then we found that our video was too dark to film. Eventually, we tweaked and found a spot in the room where the lighting was good for us to film. In order to get my lip syncing perfect, we played the music out loud while filming. The next day, I had the change into my same outfit to do my tilt, then close up. The last part we filmed was the ending part. We wanted the end to be dark so we had to film it at night. Overall the filming process took two days. The most frustrating this was that at the end of filming everything, I realized we filmed portrait and not landscape which means part of our Fall landscape will be cut off.