Elements that I enjoyed during filming

Something that I greatly enjoyed was being able to be in a Wonderland for 3-4 days while filming. It was fantastic being able to independently decide what we were going to do and when we were going to do it, mostly because we got to improvise and figure out there and then what would be ideal. This worked well as myself and my group got on very well and normally we would come up with the same/similar ideas, meaning a better outcome owing to different interpretations of the same great idea.

What I found Difficult

In general, I felt that myself and my group overcame many of the speed bumps we found along the way, and overall worked extremely well together. We all got on very well, and helped each other to soldier through each and every task we were given.

There were many things that I did enjoy greatly, owing to Media being the field I would like to go into after college. One of which being, the fact that we could to independently decide on the plot, and getting to film it on our own. This was also very hard, but I enjoyed it greatly as I believe our music video is different from the rest.

What I found Difficult

Moreover, the hardest challenge of them all was filming in the dark. The light that we were supposed to put on top of the camera had a screw at the bottom in order for it to attach to the camera so that what we were filming could be seen. This screw broke as we were using it therefore we didn't have a professional light! This was overcome by another member of our group following around the camera man with the light, and having to make sure we didn't get his shadow in the shot. Filming in the dark, in November also meant freezing cold temperatures at night. I found this part very, very difficult as I was only wearing Alice's infamous blue dress with knee high socks. This was hard as I was trying not to show how cold I was in the footage. There's only so much we could control this, though, as my nose was red the whole way through! Filming in the dark also meant that I developed a chest infection, which meant I had to keep coughing every few seconds. This made filming impossible and unfortunately we couldn't include base tracks of me singing at the end. This was saved as we used colour filters within the editing process in the end, which not only change to the beat but also allow for a feel that the viewer is in a wonderland.

What I found Difficult

Another challenge that we came across was the weather. With the changes of scenery from the first day being dark and rainy to the second day being warm and bright, this was difficult to edit as we had to begin with the first set of footage, which was darker than the second. We overcame this as we added filters and played around with the contrast and lighting during the editing stages (this is shown in earlier posts through camtasia and screen shots).

Nearing the end of the project - What I Found Difficult

I enjoyed this project so much owing to my love of media, but with hard work and effort comes huge responsibilities, difficulties, and many speed bumps along the way. Filming is great, especially due to our idea being so 'out there' we could do anything that came into our imagination and there was a great deal of room for creativity. This meant, though, that there was a great deal of room for mistakes aswell, and things going wrong.

For example, in my previous posts there is a video of me explaining that we couldn't get into our location, being Alexandra Palace. This proved to be a huge challenge owing to myself and my group driving around for three hours trying to find another location/a safe place to watch another lot of fireworks. The dedication of my group was amazing as we did everything and anything we could to get the shot of 'Alice' watching the fireworks at the end of our video, which is what our idea was based solely around. At one point, we even stood on the roof of my car in order to get a good shot of the fireworks that we found. Anything was possible for us that night.

Feedback from Louisa 2/12

In todays lesson Louisa had looked through our rough cut to give us feedback on improvements we need to make in this lesson.

Targets for today;

• Lip syncing has fallen out on certain clips (probably due to editing other parts of the music video).
• On the drop the beat speeds up so cut to the sped up beat as well as the build up that we've already done.
• Add jump cuts to the beat when she's running up the stairs
• Try play around with different effects that we can use instead of the colour filters that we use at the end

For this lesson we plan to firstly fix the lip syncing again, it seems when creating the beginning it may of effected some of the clips that were lip synced further on and made them out of sync. After this we can add jump cuts on the sped up beat which appears at the end of the build up to make the jump cuts match the beat of the song a lot better. When we've finished this we can proceed till polishing the ending a lot more, to do this we need to add jump cuts when she is running up the stairs so it fits to the beat more than just adding colour filters, in addition to this we are gonna try other effects that we could potentially use instead of the colour filters.

Once we've finished all of these targets we also want to try and improve the ending as the book in the shot we used is not focused very well so to improve this we want to add in shots that we have of the book focused as we have multiple ones so we hope one would fit well with the shot we already have.

Progress with MV Post-production

So far in post-production, it has been going very well as my group keeps coming up with idea of how we could edit to make it better due to our footage is a bit off track.
Deadline is in couple of days and Im proud to say that we didn't need to film any extra footage as we filmed everything that we planned, which meant more time is added to post-production.

We did get allot of feedback referring back to the editing and i've been recording them on my phone and have posted them on the blog to look back and see what other small tweaks that i can change.

From 0 seconds till around 2:40 minutes, the MV is perfect however, the ending is our weakest point. But we are trying our best and trying out new ways of how we could end our music video.