Video Elective Evaluation

At the start it took us a while as a group to find a song that we would all enjoy working with to produce visuals for. We left the music decision late, but finally all agreed that Brian’s friend Dan would be suitable to work with. Dan is part of a blues band who plays at gigs quiet often. Because we had Dan we decided we would experiment with the green screen.

We shot the six minute green screen with Dan on from two angles, a medium-long shot and a side view. Because of the nature of the song we decided to base the idea of the film on the less attractive scenes around and in Leeds. The scenes and music would relate to that acoustic homeless person feels.

Separately we went around Leeds to shoot less attractive shots of the city, I based my clips around the more out of town shots, urban. This included abandoned homes, graffiti and rubbish.

When editing the video we all decided what effects and outcome we wanted to gain. The outcome was for the film to be either black and white or a sepia look, with Dan slowly fading in and our shots with the city’s depressing scenes slowly moving in and out using the different opacity.

The music track actually goes on for six minutes so we decided to cut it down to just gone over two minutes as we felt that would be enough time to communicate our idea.

At first I tried to edit the video. The first problem I occurred was transferring the tape in a cassette player because I had handed the camera in. This was a slow process but finally I moved it onto the Mac ready to edit. When I inserted the CD, the audio saved to iTunes, but when I tried to use it in Final Cut, it refused to open it, as it was not in the mp3 format. So I decided for the time being to use the audio captured from the green screen session (which was heavily distorted because we didn’t consider the audio at the time). I then put the scenes of what we captured around Leeds into and order to play with the music and put a grain filter on it and changed the levels to darken the clips to give it that depressing feel.

When I tried to use the footage captured on green screen I realised that we had never set the colour balance so when I tried to select the dark green of the screen it became pixalated and started the take away part of Dan’s jacket and hat. After talking to Brian he said that you could change the colours so it would be brighter and Brian had ago at this and it ended up working really well.

From making this video I learnt to always set the colour balance, use a tripod to get smoother shots and gained experience that I never knew before the music video in Final Cut.