Evaluation of Final Music Video - Sky High

Whilst making our one day lip sync music video project myself, Reece and Josh picked up on several issues we were going to need to work on when we started making our final project turning out to be a valuable experience. The first thing we noticed was that we needed to have a very good idea of the locations and shots that we were going to use whilst shooting the video, as we were just coming up with ideas for the entire thing as we went along. So we put in a lot of time thinking of suitable location and shots to complement these locations, we also considered related costume that we could wear for separate scenes. We had spotted some locations that we thought would be suitable whilst we were driving around. As soon as we came up with the genre of song we were going to create, which was hip-hop/pop, we already had some ideas in mind for locations and the style we were going to create as we wanted to make it a stereotypical video to the genre of music. We also wanted to feature a basketball theme and I instantly knew of a suitable location to use that I have used in the past, a quiet and relatively unused court in Bawdsey and with Reece’s car we had easy transport to get there. We had also spotted a location in the docks that was unused and easy to access that was suitable to the style we were aiming at and complemented the music.
We came up with suitable lyrics and recorded our first attempt of the song, but after getting negative responses from ourselves and others about the sound and timing we decided to redo a couple bits of it including the chorus which we went from having all three singing at the same time to a line each which worked much better. Once we got that done we could start thinking more about the video itself and we drew up a version of a storyboard for how we envisioned it being like. I was due to go on holiday for the week we had to film but I stayed behind for Monday and Tuesday and we managed to get all the filming done in those two days, allowing Reece and Josh to start editing for the rest of the week despite a problem with time codes which was sorted out. The editing went very well and we had few problems with the timing of the lip-sync, one of the problems we had whilst editing the one day lip-sync project was that we didn’t enough footage to fill the song so we made sure we had enough this time and we did. We finished editing early which gave us time to play around with it and we found some interesting effects which we felt complimented the style of the video well and after some discussion about if they didn’t work or not we decided to keep them. They are one of the bits we have received a bit of negative feedback for as they can look slightly tacky and we agreed in some parts so removed some but we decided to keep some as we felt it gave the video a different dimension so it doesn’t get to repetitive and gives the audience constantly something different to look at.
We decided not to try anything too difficult to do e.g. green screen and just kept to basic shots and cuts using normal locations and lighting. One of my favourite bits of the music video however was the lighting we used in the studio, we use the barn door lighting equipment and used an added red lighting effect which was very effective and gave it the style we wanted. I also really like the style of the music video, it is very conventional to the music video genre and the song goes very well with the video itself, although none of us are singers we decided to give it a go as we saw it as good fun and nothing serious and we have got positive feed back for it. The overall outcome of the final edit looks very smooth and the cuts link up nicely, nothing is too complicated but it also isn’t too basic having the right mix making it work simple but still effective. We also didn’t want the acting in each scene to look to serious and kept it light-hearted, we have gotten very good feedback since the first edit so haven’t changed much. Some of the shots we filmed were slightly wobbly as it didn’t require a tripod but it is still useable, also in some of the shots you can see us talking but it isn’t enough to affect the finished video too much. If we could do it again I would have got a few more extra shots in so we had more back up of shots as we completely sure how much left over room we were going to have in between the mains scenes and we had parts in between verse that required a bit more footage and we used one of two shots twice but it isn’t too noticeable. We used the compressor to compress the video down and converted it into a Quick Play file before burning it onto a DVD disk.