Rough Cut Video

As it was a rough draft a lot of things were not synced or edited properly. A lot of the lip-synching was off as we had just moved a lot of the clips down to fit in the intro part and had not had the time to resync it. Additionally, there was a lot of blank space in between where we did not have footage, so we made a note to get footage to fit into these places. I think the Lil Kim part was quite good in terms of the clips and editing as it all seemed to flow. Ariana's part was also good but the lip synching needed to be fix and we also needed to add shots that were similar because some of them looked too random. Same with Nicki's part. Additionally some of the shots looked too long so we needed to find shots to cross cut with. Overall, it is a good start but needs to be largely improved and edited.

Rough Cut Feedback Video

In this video, we got feedback from a class of first year media students as well as my class on our rough cut of our music video. Whilst a lot of people said that they liked it, it seemed like the main issues were lighting, colouring and lip-synching synchronization therefore these are the things we will focus on when editing the rest of the music video.

In the next lesson, we also got direct feedback from Vanessa and Tom. In this feedback, we were told that we had too many mid-shots, not enough location shots, the colours did not mix well and that our pink studio scenes did not work. From this feedback, we planned to film more close ups and long shots when re-filming Nicki Minaj's scenes as well as to go to more graffiti locations such as Hackney Wick and Shoreditch. We were also planning to change the pink scenes to the all white studio scenes however we both still liked how it looked so we decided to leave them in.

Southbank Filming

Today we went to Southbank to film some location shots. We initially planned to go to Leake Street Graffiti Tunnel however we could not find the area, and the people around did not know either, so they directed us to Southbank skatepark. Before we went to the skatepark, we shot some videos and took some pictures at the Southbank centre, that we could use in our print product. Here is a few of them:

Southbank by Keisha
We then went to the skate park to film our parts, and get some shots of the skaters. As it took us long to find the area, it was dark by then so we only got night time shots and it was raining however I think we managed to get good shots:

I also decided that we should wear the outfits that I had previously allocated to hackney wick as it fit with the graffiti style of southbank more, however I slightly modified them:

Location Photos Call Sheet

Filming

During yesterday's lesson, me and Sharay decided to do filming of Nicki's part. We originally planned to film in the basketball court but it was in use so we decided to film in the locker rooms instead as it still gives off the sports vibe and can fit the theme:

After filming, we went back to lesson and put the footage onto the harddrive and Premiere Pro. As Sharay did not have a lesson next, she stayed to do some editing on the new footage:

Today's Lesson: Editing

During today's lesson, I started to edit together the clips we had filmed in the studio. As we had two sets of locations for Ariana's part, I focused on editing together that part. I did some editing on Nicki's part as well, however it was only some scenes as we didn't have lots of footage filmed for that part:


I played around with some effects, such as strobe light and transitions like cross dissolve. With the strobe light. it looked good but it was hard to time it at the specific times that we wanted it to strobe therefore we took it out and decided to just add a cut or fade to black in those parts:


Whilst I was editing, Sharay was creating titles for us to place on three of our shots on illustrator. She purposely used the same font that was used for the films that we were referencing:


One thing we found about the studio scenes was that a lot of them were out of focus or we were out of frame therefore unusable. Due to this, we planned to re-film some of the scenes, and change the way we filmed it.

Studio Filming

Today, we had the studio booked so we shot Ariana and Nicki's studio scenes. I brought in my own camera equipment:

This included a LED head light, as we were planning to film outside and didn't know if it would be too dark and so wanted to take the precaution. The headlight is attached to the top of the camera, and a dial on the side can be used to make it brighter or dimmer:

The headlight comes with two different covers, we decided to use the white one as it seemed to make the picture brighter but not too bright which is what happened with the cover off:


After lesson we went into the studio, set up the lights and me and our other actress, Jamariah, got changed into our outfits. We took a few scenes with just the white background, but then we wanted to add some effects and colour so we taped pink filters over the lights to change the room colour to pink.  When doing the pink, we had to change the IOS of the camera to make it darker in order for the pink to come out properly whilst simultaneously showing us on the camera properly. We tried to do this with the blue but it didn't come out as well on the camera: