To find our chosen track we look at the website www.unsigned.com. This website allows unsigned artist to post their track and give information about themselves in the hope that they will create a fan base and gain work though their music. We used this website to prevent any issues with copyright, as the music is unsigned and original is not technically copyrighted to anyone, meaning that we can uses the track, make a promo out of it and then unload the video on to YouTube without any problems. Once we found our track we emailed Andrea asking her permission to uses the track. We did this as we felt it would be the right thing to do, as we would be using her own original work. Andera was very kind and allowed us to use the track with the condition that we sent her a link to the final video, something we were happy to do.
The biggest video shoot skill I
have learnt during this production is stop motion. We decided to use stop
motion in our music promo after using it in 'Initial
ideas for our promo' video and from this we realised how effective it could
potentially be. We were inspired by Peter
Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’- as in this video he uses the animation that links to
the lyrics. For example as he says ‘You could have a steam train’ a track is
built around his head and a toy train starts to move around it. We decided to
uses stop motion based around the lyrics ‘as it heals the scabs they crack’ by
having black cracks going up our performer arms, neck and back. We had never
done something like this in previous projects, so I practise the stop motion of drawing cracks up my arm.
From both the ‘initial ideas for our promo’ and the practise we learnt that
continuity was extremely important and only small amount could be added and
chanced at a time to get enough footage to make it worthwhile. We applied what
we learnt when filming it for our music promo and as a result of this, we had
an effect stop motion in our music promo.
Another
skill we learnt was how to uses lighting effectively when shooting the music
promo. In previous projects we had just
relied on natural lighting when filming and sometimes we couldn’t use some of
our footage as the lighting was so bad. To ensure that this didn’t happen again
we borrowed a professional nature flood light used in drama productions. This
gave brilliant lighting, which meant the we could use any shot we filmed as it
was clear. However, we did have problems when using this lighting which we had
to overcome on the day of filming. The light we used need a high stand to stay
on so throughout filming so that light was directly on our performer. We didn’t have a high stand, so we had to
create one. Using a ladder and duct tape we were able to stick the light to the
ladder at a suitable high for our filming.
By doing this it allowed uses to move the lighting around very easily
and it meant that it was secure so we didn’t have to worry about it falling off
during filming.
The
other skill we wanted to perfect during our filming was having every shoot
steady and not wobbly. In every project we have done before, we always have a
couple of shots that were wobbly and our audience always pointed this out. So,
we made sure that this didn’t happen by filming every shot on a tri-pod and
once we started recording nobody touched it until the shot was finished. We
also only planned to have on shot in the whole video that was panning. This
worked as all of our shots were steady and was not wobbly in our music promo.
The
biggest technical issue we had on our filming days was the memory card we for
the camera could only have about 20 minutes of footage put on to it before the
memory was full, which when we were filming shot that were 3 minutes long at a
time made the memory go very quickly. Not only this but the camera we used
battery life did not last long and could over easily died while filming a
shot. We learnt all of this on the days
of filming, so it was to late to get a bigger memory card and get a better
camera. So, we would film so many shot until the memory was nearly full, them
when would transfer the footage on to one of our laptops and change the
batteries. This made the filming days last a longer and sometime meant we would
waste time just downloading the footage onto a laptop. However, by doing this
we did manage to film all of the shot we wanted and the camera never died when
filming shots.
One
major issue we had to overcome before we started editing was getting our
footage on to Final Cut Express. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue if we had
all the footage on a memory card, but we had all of our footage on a laptop
which had automatically changed the footage to file type that suited it.
However Final Cut would not put our footage on to the program in this file
type. The only way we were able to sort this problem was to put the footage on
to IMovie, export every clip individually and them place in on to Final Cut
Express. This took a long time do, as we had a lot of clips to do it for and we
had to wait every time the clip exported, which meant we had less time to edit
the video. It did work buy doing this and meant that we were able to edit on
Final Cut, so it was worth it. But given the chance to re-do the project I
would make sure we had a big enough memory card to film the footage on so we
didn’t have to waste time on both filming days and editing.
The
biggest challenge we had had out of the whole production was learning to use
Final Cut Express. In all of our other
projects we had used iMovie, however because we wanted to spilt our video in
quarters and iMovie cannot do this, we had to learn how use Final Cut. I took the main role in editing the video, so
I was the first person to learn how to us it in our group and I also had the responsibly
of teaching another member our group to uses it. This program is far more complexes than
iMovie, so it did take me a day just how to work out how to add shots, cut the
shots, move the shots and resize them. I did use Google a lot to help me
understand the program and asked for lots a advice from other students and
teachers. Not only this but this version of Final Cut renders anything and
everything once something is changed. This
meant that using Final Cut was a very time consuming program to uses- by the
end of the first week of using the program I had only managed to edited four
seconds worth of the video. My skills in using the program did in improve and
by the end of the second week not only edited 1 minute and 37 seconds worth of
the video, but also I was able to show the other member of our group how to
uses the program. It did work out really
well using Final Cut, as we were able to produce something that we not only
proud of, but also looked how we wanted it to. 
We also had considered the creation of the digipak and advert, not just the music promo. To create these two elements we used Photoshop in which we used several different tools to help create our final products. The most helpful tool we used in Photoshop was that Magic wand tool. This allowed us to select certain parts of the photo (mainly the paint) and edit this without affecting the rest of the image. By using this tool we were able to change the colours of the paint but still just using one image, something which our audience complemented us on when gaining feedback. Also by using the magic wand tool we were very easily able to change the main four images of our artist into black and white by using the adjustment opinion. This once again helped to make the digipak and advert stand out and look professional. The only issues that we had using Photoshop using different layers made it slightly confusing when trying to edit certain points of the products. But as time went on we got used to the different layers and it became no longer an issue. 
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