LONG edit..

This overlapping split screening thing took me about 4 hours to complete, probably more. You can't see the all of it because the window wouldn't stretch wide enough to see all of the frames in one screen shot, but it's the majority of it.. there is more above and below what you can see here though.

The outcome of this stupid edit is a 9 way split screen, with each frame beginning zoomed, in the centre of the screen, then zooming out and fitting into its place in the 9 window frame. Each image does this, matching the beat of the music (even though that was VERY hard due to the ridiculously unhelpful, random beat of our chosen song) (so much hate for this song) (trust me, don't listen to it, you'll want to commit).

Ch ch ch changes

Through editing in the footage of the female character and testing out some split screen shots with her and the male lead, we have decided through our own opinion, and those of others we asked who slot into our target audience, that the female shots do not fit with the rest of the video. The colours do not really work, the split screen idea between inside and outside didn't work as we'd envisaged and looked as though the shots were from entirely different videos. From this, we thought about the narrative structure of our video, or our intentional lack of, and realised that it doesn't make sense having the female character anyway, as our point was that there would be no understandable narrative, and the video would be random and storyline-less as with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers video for 'Can't Stop' and 'In one ear' by Cage the Elephant. This meant therefore, that having a female character as representation of a relationship and the struggle with the boyfriend being stuck inside - being closed minded - and the girlfriend being outside - vibrant and interesting, and them being reunited at the end ALL wasn't necessary, and actually contradicted our main intention to create a video without narrative and that was entirely nonsensical. I am therefore VERY pleased with this decision, as the shots didn't look effective or appropriate to the style of the rest of the video, and in hindsight, they never really should've been part of the video. high five

Final filming

Last night we filmed our lead singer mouthing the lyrics to the verses, so we can now fill in some of the gaps that we have. Due to our resourses and the limited access we have to professional equipment/studio space, all of our shots are plainly of him singing alone, and we plan to create what we want through the post production side of things, rather than what we physically filmed. I have started, and will continue to play around with effects on Final Cut to apply to our footage, to create the look and style we set out to create. As mentioned earlier on the blog, this was inspired by several videos, one being '5 years time' by Noah and the Whale, whose use of split screen and post production editing and 'jazzing up' made the video different, interesting and entertaining to watch. I plan to explore lots of split screen variations and transitions to enhance our video.

Editing and.. stuff

I've been going into the media room at every opportunity to edit our footage because our decision to use stop motion was one we made naively.. and it's taking a long time to edit but I really enjoy editing so it's not a problem. As I said I've been going in to edit whenever I have the chance which has resulted in almost all our current footage being edited into the right sections of the song and cropped to the correct framing etc, but we can't go any further until we capture the last of our footage.

We have booked a camera for this weekend and I plan to film some shots at my house on saturday, because I need my younger sisters to feature in these, then we shall go to Anna's on Sunday to complete the rest of the shots we need of Alec singing the lyrics and some more shots of the female character.

I'm not too happy with the female shots so far as we decided on the spot one day to go outside and capture some footage because it was a sunny day and we weren't sure when we'd next see that big round yellow fella we all crave so much. SO we filmed then, but as it was spontaneous, I wasn't wearing particularly appropriate attire and didn't have much makeup on, so I hope to get some better shots this weekend :)

Filming Update

Here we are utilising our DIY film making equipment.. a standard desk lamp proved to be extremely helpful for us in creating different lighting and shadow effects :) (Quick note - apologies about the low quality of these pictures, they were taken on a mobile phone camera, therefore when I increased their size for the purpose of this blog post, they became incredibly pixelated.)

Here we are looking happy on the 567th trip through from Anna's kitchen to where the bookshelf is in the other room, it was a long day.. This was to capture the shots for 'I've only read in books' where we intend to create the look of book piles increasing and decreasing in height, in a stop motion kind of style.

^ That's dedication.. Me and Anna here giving the some leaves a nice pampering session. Due to the weather of this country all the leaves outside were soggy and wet so wouldn't float down gracefully and naturally when thrown on Alec's face.. they kind of clumped and just made him annoyed at us.. so we thought blow drying was the way forward :) and it worked, once dry the leaves floated down how we desired, and look much more effective

Capturing some general face shots, close ups and all that jazz. Also trying to get Alec to mime some lyrics at this point, but that proved a bit of a palaver due to him not knowing the song quite so well as us.. we have been forced into listening to it about 40 million times, which Alec hasn't.. so fair enough!

Editing

Over the last couple of days I've began the long editing trawl; I've been working on the section of stop motion where the pile of books builds up/down. It's been difficult getting the shots all the right length, and the right speed, also we need to crop every single one of our shots because they're too wide and radiators and paintings can be seen at the edges. SO yes, lots to do to get the effect right and the clips neat and sharp. Instead of editing each and every one individually, we've worked out how to copy particular 'aspects' of a clip, therefore you can copy the speed, crop, filter etc on to any other clips you wish to, quickly and easily.

Uhoh

Alec hair is officially gone, I'm so worried how our video's going to look now because I've been roughly editing our footage so far together the past couple of days, and although we have A LOT, it only amounts to very few seconds of music.. So we definitely need to film a lot more, meaning Alec's hair will change between long and short throughout the video. I'm really really hoping we twill get marked down for this as it's something we could've helped :/