Evaluation of the music video

This evaluation is to explain the processes used to film and edit our music video.

when shooting our footage, we decided not to use the college's Canon XM2's. Instead we used our own camera which was actually as digital single lens reflex camera. This enabled us to shoot a high digital resolution of 720p. It also allowed us to make use of additional lenses for more camera angle opportunities and sharper image quality. We primarily stuck to a 50mm f/1.8 lens. this allowed us to get a perspective equivalent of what the human eye sees. Also the large aperture of 1.8 allowed us to create shots that used pull focusing without having to a telephoto or zoom lens. The large aperture also allowed us to film in low light situations where other lenses would not cope.

The setting on the DSLR are easier to manipulate than on the canon XM2. this is because you have separate and independent controls to operate essential controls such as white balance, exposure compensation, aperture etc. With the XM2 its a lot harder to access these controls on demand, loosing location time. Also using digital format it is a lot easier to check back footage on location to check lighting and composition. Digital footage is also a lot easier to use in post production, in our case the industry standard, Final Cut Pro.

All of our shots we done with our camera mounted on a tripod, this is essential for good quality smooth shots and also for checking and setting up compositions. We also found the tripod valuable when it came to pull focusing to enable smooth transition of depth of field. To check that the camera was level , we clipped a spirit level to the hot shoe of the camera and lined it up to ensure all of our shots have consistent level angles.

We decided that we were going to keep the camera's position still in all the shots. Therefore we used no panning or tracking shots. We thought this would keep a consistent flow the the video and not get in the way of the actually story the video was telling. However we did use pull focusing on several occasions by smoothly and slowly twisting the focusing ring on our lens using a large aperture. All our shots were filmed in manual focus, this is to avoid sudden changes in focus if the camera were to pick a fly or a small speck of dust in front or behind the intended point of focus and depth of field.

When filming on location, especially the indoor footage, we used a piece of white paper to set our White balance correctly instead of the camera trying to work out its own white balance, judging the colour of the light in the room. we manually adjusted the white balance on the camera using the setting to adjust the colour balance in the kelvin temperature spectrum to get the correct white balance.

In general we let the camera decide the shutter speed based on what aperture we were using. If we needed to compensate less or more light we adjusted the exposure compensation value as it is easier to get consistent results using a Digital SLR.

early on in the blog I talk about the use of a Shooting Scrip, Skeleton and storyboard and how it helped us to film each shot in order and to save time thinking up shots or plots on the spot. In combination with this we used a piece of paper with the shot number and take number written on it as a clapperboard. in conjunction with the storyboard this made it much clearer which good shots we were going to use when beginning our post production in final cut pro. further more each shot saved as a different digital file, saving us the time of capturing back to a digital format and sifting through a load of film to find our shots. Sometimes we thought of improved shots and new ideas on location and ended up using these ideas in the final video, but on the whole the storyboard kept us on track and moving in a positive direction.

as we had a very small cast selection (2 people) and smaller crew (2 people) I was doubling as one of the actors and crew, setting up camera angles, checking exposures and apertures and white balances. This made the total of our entire cast/crew 3 people. Due to this it was fairly easy to organise times to film on location, therefore eradicating the need to a production schedule.

All of my ideas were my own and though i have seen a few things briefly on music video channels I was inspired mainly from the music.

There were a few problems when in the post production stages. because we shot in a high resolution of 720p, we found the time to render our footage in final cut pro was taking an extremely long time. There were two solutions to this. One was to re shoot in a smaller resolution which would have taken too much time for our tight deadline. The second option was to cut the footage down into smaller sizes which we could then pre position before rendering. This is the option that we took. Our camera recorded sound that we did not want as we just wanted to put footage with no audio. It was easier to unlink the audio that went with the visual footage but pressing command + L.