Editing: 3rd December

Today we went up to the edit suit and all of the green screening was finished and we had achieved exactly what we wanted, we had a city skyline scene which worked and looked just as authentic as we needed. Not only this but the majority of the animations of wording was finished as well and fit into the video and looked good and helped create the retro theme that we were after. Also the colour grading was all finished as well and all the colours looked the same on each shot, which helped our music video look a lot better and more professional.

One other change that we made was that we put our video into 4:3 format to also help fit in with the retro 90's theme. However perfecting this took time as the shot had to be moved to the centre of the screen each time in order to create the focus on whoever was at the front, but after a while this was finally done

Now all we need to do is add a few more animated words and then we are there and will have finished the editing process of our music video.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 2nd December

Finally after finishing all the performance pieces of the video it was time to start adding the animatics which is something we had all been anticipating.

For example one of the things we added animatics to, was the first shot of our video. In which the girls were in the background and in the foreground was the boombox, from which we animated the words 'heyyyy yeahhhhh, i wanna shoop baby' coming out of it. Then we added a few more to other shots.

We had the same font and colour for all of the animations, the font being Diego Con and the text being block white. However they can in at different angles and what not. We chose to put around 7 animations into the video, all on different shots to help create an emphasis. But on the one with the phone number popping out, we are unsure of it and aren't positive that it works very well.



Then we went onto colour grading, which we are using in order to even out the colours and help again give our video a more of a retro feel. However this was a hard job as much of the lighting was different so it was hard to get all of the colours the same.

Overall its been a very busy morning which has taken up a lot of time, as we also had to make the green screen perfect, with an appropriate background which fits the theme and had to change the white and black balance to avoid any shimmering outlines.

Thanks for the post, Tyler/

Audience Feedback: Pop Video 2015

Feedback on both the rough cut and the final cut before special effects:

Further editing: Special effects on Adobe programmes

Having finish the final cut for our pop video, I, Oliver Tennant was tasked with creating the special effects for the video.

I was unable to actually begin creating the animations yet due to issues around font, which I will explain later on. Instead, I learnt how to take out the green from our green screen shots. When Matt first explained to me how I could do this, I was slightly confused and thought 'Oh God this could take a while', however I paused and thought about it, and really it is rather simple. All I had to do was press Alt and drag the clip I wanted to work on up to duplicate it, right click and disable the clip. This was so that if it turned out that I didn't like the changes I was about to make I could very easily go back a start again. Next I would right click again and click, 'export to Adobe special effects'. This took me into a seperate application where I would click an option that would highlight the green, then I would check it in Screen Matte, this would show me the whites and blacks. I would make sure that everything I wanted visible in the shot was white, and the green screen was black. Once I had done this I would go back to previous section of what was now hopefully, everything that was there originally but now a black screen. I did this with all 15 of our green screen shots, and already the video was looking better and I am very much looking forward to adding our background of the Los Angeles Skyline at night.

Now adding the special effects is not a simple task, and I decided to begin with searching the worldwide web for the appropriate font. Now, following a recomendation from Matt, I went onto the website Dafont.com.






On here I was able to type out the sentence I would like, so that when I looked through the hundreds, maybe even thousands of fonts available I would be able to get a clear and approximate view of what it would actually look like on screen. I decided to go with "I want to Shoop Baby"

1

I did this, and decided that catagory wise my best bet was to search through the 'comic' section. On entering this I was faced with a whole spectrum of different comic looking fonts. On trawling through these I struggled to make a decision as it was after all quite a big one to make without the help from my group, therefore I made a short list of seven, in which I have a favourite, so here they are.

I am also going to give a brief insight into my thought processes I had when short listing some of them.

Number 1: I feel that this one is nice, however the fuzz around it may make it harder to read, which could be a real problem as the words will not appear on screen for a particularly long time.

Number 2: This one is also nice, however I don't think that it is 80's enough and could appear tacky

Number 3: I love this one and it is in fact my favourite. It is clear, easy to read, and is slightly wonky, giving it that 80's look.

2

3

5

4

6

7

8

ALL THE SHOOP'ERZ

ALL THE SHOOP'ERZ

Editing: End of the month and end of the cut- 30th November

Today looked like it was going to be the last day in which we would add shots into the video or change anything within the main structure of what we have created so far. Our next step once this is finished is to start adding the animations that we want to incorporate within our video to help give it that 80's touch. So we just slowly went through the video checking each and every shot as well as how it cut to the next shot. As we looked through the video the main thing that we needed to sort out, was making sure that the shots we needed to cut on the beat. Also after watching the video a few times, we came to the conclusion that some of the shots were either a bit to long or a bit to short, so this just took a little bit of tweaking and fine tuning then it looked better, as it flowed more and looked much more like a professional product. After James reviewing what we had done, we took a few of the shots we had in, out and swapped them for ones that fit better. Not only this but James helped us realise that the song ended really abruptly, so we are going to try and get it to fade out and get the video to fade out as well which will also help with out creation of an 80's feeling. After putting the fade out, into the video it made the ending of the video look a lot better and less rushed.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 25th November

Today was a big day for our video. I spent 4 hours in the editing suite over the course of the day, and in that time I was able to finish our performance cut, and tidy it up. I found that it all went incredibly well, and even the performance cut works as a concept for the entire video. Having done this, I wanted to place some of the footage from our rough cut to add different elements of performance in different locations into the video. I made a start on doing this with our DJ's, and even though they currently lie above the performance cuts, I cut the shots to the beat and as they dont involve any lip syncing I can place them at any point in the video, as long as they cut on the beat.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 24th November

Now that I have finished our first rough cut of our music video, 'SHOOP', it was time to polish our video into something even better. To begin with I was unsure how to do this, but Matt and Luke both suggested that I create a performance/lip sync cut of the element in which we have the most footage. In our case, it was of our three main girls in front of the colour wall. However, I ran into another problem as I was unsure on how I should go about making this happen, but I sat down with Matt who showed me that I simply needed to gather all my footage, sort through it to see what worked and what didn't. This was complicated to start with, but once I got the ball rolling with it things started to look better and better and my vision was clearer. Unfortunently, just as I got everything going nicely, it was time to leave due to prior commitments.

Furthermore, today was the day that we would upload our first rough cut onto YouTube, little known to us this would take nearly the whole lesson. It took a fair few steps:

1. We had to export it to quicktime from adobe premier pro
2. Then we had to save this onto a USB
3. Then we had to transfer it onto someones laptop and then wait for it to download onto it
4. Then had to upload it onto YouTube
5. Finally it was published onto YouTube and now is available for everyone to watch 

James and India Feedback on our 1st Rough cut

India Moynihan and James Purdy, the couple together again. You may know India as Sandy in Grease on Broadway.

Editing: 23rd November

On Friday Ollie also got some extra advice from Luke, who watched the video and then told us how we could both make the video better and also make the editing easier for ourselves. Firstly he put markers in through out the video where he saw something wrong such as the shot being wrong, and from here we have to correct it and make it look better. Then he made us put all of the shots from each set on to separate performance beds, in order for it to be more clear to us where each shots from each set were and it overall made our timeline look a lot neater and it was easier to find the things we needed to find.

So from here we carried on editing small bits of the footage, and neatening everything up so we could make the job easier for ourselves.

We were having issues completing the advice that Luke had given us so Matt came to show us what we could do and see if it would help. So he saved it so that if we didn't like what he did we could revert to what we had originally. Matt then highlighted to us that some shots weren't synced because they didn't all start at the same point on the clapper board, as some shots started half way through the song. Then he locked some things so that we couldn't screw up any thing to do with the clapper board. Then he showed us how we would have to match each and every single piece of footage that we wanted to use the the clapper board individually. It is going to take a while, but it will make the editing so much easier once its all done.  

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

First Rough cut of SHOOP pop video FINISHED: Video feedback from Matt

Conversation that went on between myself and Matt for progress and further development:

Editing: 20th November

Its come to the stage where we are now filling in the last 45 seconds of the song, however we were fining it hard to find footage from the roof top scene where we could find good lip syncs from the singers. After searching we found a few that weren't perfect but could be used if they were synced perfectly and looked good where we put it in the video. Then it was time to introduce our best Shooper Jacky Li

He was at the back of the sofa and we decided out of the boys he was going to be our main focus as he looked the best with the shapes he was cutting. So we pieced pieces of footage including him and then the whole sofa scene and the girls together, which ended up looking quite good within the video

sneaky picture of Jacky in action, with Ollie coming in today with a new haircut and a new attitude

After reviewing our video and what we've done so far, watching it the whole way through. The group would say that we are pleased with the progress that we have made throughout the past few weeks, and feel as if we are slowly getting there. The footage we got on our shoot day has deemed itself to be sufficient in order for us to make the music video that we will want to be our final product. It is going to be a long process with all the things such as after effects that we want to add as well, but we need to finish the actually video itself first. The good thing is that we all still seem to be enjoying this whole process and luckily are not yet bored of listening to the same song on repeat for the last few months. We are hoping the have fully completed our full first rough cut by the latest at the end of next week. Then when its done we will export it as a Quicktime file and then upload it to YouTube.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 19th November

On Thursday, we were looking through our video with James and found that we had introduced both the rooftop scene and the silhouettes to early on in the video. So as we went through we decided to take those bits out and save them for later on in the video, so we had to find other footage to put in to fill the gaps that taking this footage out created. So we put the silhouettes and the rooftop scenes towards the end, and we need to put them in at the very end of the song, which we are not onto editing yet. So we found other footage to put into the gaps that we had created and this gave the video a smooth and much less random bit. Again we found some cuts that looked a bit jumpy, so we went through the process of finding them on the timeline and ensuring that the cuts were as smooth as they could be.

Thanks, Tyler, for the post.

Editing: 18th November

Today our good friend Gabe came and gave us a quick tutorial on how to use adobe lightroom for the pictures we wanted to use on our website and within our digipak. It was fairly simple, he just showed us how to edit things such as exposure, contrast and how to get rid of imperfections such as spots and shadows.

Gabriel was very helpful and made our job a lot easier as we didn't have to learn how to do all of it by ourselves, and hopefully well get some good pictures out of it, which will be uploaded to the blog at a later stage. We also continued to edit our rough version. We've now decided to add the coloured walls, where we realised we struggled to find a bit of lip sync for one of our main girls as she had difficulty with some of the lyrics.

Slowly getting closer to our first final edit of our first rough cut, we had adopted a new editing styler suggested to us by a few of the teachers and realised that it was a quicker and faster way of editing.

Thank you, Tyler, for the post.

Editing: 17th November

Today after a few days of not editing, we went up to the editing suite at the end of the day and used our enigma time to carry on with the editing process.

We decided to make the video more structured so it looked less random. So we started editing each of the sets bit by bit so it looked more visually pleasing. The main focus of today was making sure every clip that we were using or may use was well synced and looked sleek and professional

The face of a concentrated editor. Ollie hard at work. In the process of matching everything up, working like a pro.
We were looking for a close up of Kemi in the club as we thought it would be effective in establishing her as the main character. However we couldn't find one so we had to use one in which she was the centre of the camera, which gave a similar effect but not exactly what we wanted.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 13th November

Once again we went up to the editing suite to carry on with our music video. We watched through what we had done and then realised that we were actually fairly close to finishing our first rough cut which was good to know. However whilst looking through the footage we realised that some of the cuts were quite jumpy and looked a bit weird. So then we went and looked at the timeline and realised that some of the shots were not exactly in line with each other which was causing the weird effect on these cuts, so we moved the shots and then it ran smoothly all the way through. The James came to watch our video and reminded us that we wanted the main focus of our video to be our boombox, however when you watched our video it was quite hard to tell if it was meant to be the focus or what. So we decided to play on the original idea of having words coming out the boombox and maximise it by picking certain words from the lyrics to come out of the speakers of the boombox to create effect. Then we realised that it may look a bit weird if this didn't happen through out the whole video, so we decided with other bits of the lyrics as well we'd use this idea of words coming out, so we are in the process of choosing the lyrics we want to use this for.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 12th November

12th November

Today we had lost Grace to a music video shoot, but she had given us some advice on what to do, but as a team of three we needed to step up and carry on editing. Again we were questioning whether we wanted to use the 3 extra girls who were dancing or not, as when we went through the shots of them just dancing on their own, we thought it could be a bit boring and they didn't really fit in. However we thought that we could incorporate each of them dancing with the boombox as it is the focus of our video. Matt then came over and showed us some VHS effects we could use, and we decided that we will use them at a later stage in order to give our music video more of an 80's effect. We started to incorporate the green screen scene with the sofa.

Editing: 11th November

11th November

It was our fourth day of editing, and we all re-grouped up in the edit suite. We decided to see if you could work on some lyric specific shots, with the idea being that what was in the lyrics would match what we were seeing of screen. It took a while to get it completely in time or even find the shot that we actually wanted to use but after a while we found two shots that matched very well with two sets of lyrics so we used that. We also tried to move forward within certain aspects of the video, going onto another verse and trying to incorporate the three girls that we got into dance, which is seeming to be difficult because we are finding it hard to decide where to place them within the video. Also as we watched the video back we realised that there are a few shots that we have chosen that don't actually work as well as we though they did when we watched it the first time through, so we are in the process of again, looking through all of our shots and trying to find something that may fit the lyrics and the video better. Finally we realised that we didn't have a video of someone singing the first bit of the video in our footage that we had edited into the video. Which held us back a bit as it took a while to find a piece of footage that incorporated the first part of the song, but eventually in one of our last pieces of footage we found a shot of Kemi doing and it fit perfectly so we have decided to use it. This lesson was really productive as it showed us that we did have a few mistakes, but that also they can be easily fixed, and it also feels like we are making a lot of progress within our first cut which is promising in order to get our successful video.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 10th November

10th November

On the third day editing, some of the group decided to take one for the team and missed their free in order to carry on with the editing to get us a few steps ahead. In our lesson, we carried on editing the rest of the song, using the chosen shots. We started shuffling the shots around to get them into an order, which we thought would fit the video best. Then we edited the first minute to what we thought we would want it to be, however, we then looked through them again and thought we could shuffle them into a better order. Luke and James came up and had a look at what we had done so far, and they thought it was good but thought we could make the editing a bit smoother. We received some advice on including a few more shots and syncing every shot up to the video just incase we don't need to use them. In short we got told that we were doing well on our editing and that we should keep up the hard work, as it has the potential to be a good music video. We were informed that usually you don't stay in one location for just one shot, so if we structure it so that there are more shots in the same location it would be a lot more effective, otherwise we will run out of footage. We want different shots on each screen.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 9th November

9th November

On our second day of editing we went up to the edit suite and tried to cut more of the video in, we looked at our shots in further detail deciding if the ones that we had chosen would actually work for our video, after we reviewed the ones we had chosen we carried on trying to piece it together and match the visuals to the music. We dragged multiple pieces of footage onto the timeline so that we could sync them all up with the music, then the idea is that from here we cut it where we want and then start piecing it together, to become our final music video.  However after a lot of group thought we decided to cut the footage of the extra girls dancing on their own, and decided that them as a group worked better for our video as they were all in time and it gave a nice little touch for the video.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Editing: 6th November

6th November

We started editing our footage the day after we shot the music video, and we were using the software adobe premiere pro, which we are familiar with from last year.

Our editing process started by logging onto the computer, and finding our footage located in a specific folder. From here we watched through all of the shots that we recorded and slowly started picking the ones that we wanted to use for the video. We came up with a list of all the shots we wanted to use, and then we started creating a performance bed, for which we had to match the footage up to the sound so the lip synced actually worked. For the bed we used the colour screen background with all the girls.

Thanks for the post, Tyler.

Account of shoot day

Thursday, 5th November was the day of the shoot for Shoop. The day before, we finalised our shooting schedual, deciding to shoot the three boys in the underground club set first, as it allowed the girls time to have their makeup and hair done.

However, it started slowly for us due to lack of time to finish the set build the previous day. Therefore, while Grace and Elisa picked up our main actor, Kemi, myself and Tyler began to put up our 80's music posters, patch up the brick walls, and set up the DJ decks on the tables and this went very well. Having finished this part of the set up, we got the three boys in, Jacky, Henry and Rob. Henry was particularly good on the decks, having experience in using them already, and Jacky and Rob began doing things in a slightly lower key to Henry, as instructed. On looking at this it was clear that it looked unatural with all three of them on the decks, therefore we had Rob put the boom-box on his shoulder and dance around, which added to the 80's vibe perfectly.

Here is a look at the underground club set:

Helen doing Kemi's makeup

Makeup

Make-up

Jacky

On filming this sequence, we began by shooting two wide shots, while the entire track ran. This was great, however we wanted to do a big hand-held camera shot, which was simply awesome to do and looked great.

Having shot the boys, the girls were now ready. We got them into the studio and got to have our first look at Kemi working with the rest of the girls. Kemi was great, and this was easy to recognise instantly. We again shot from wide, which is the only shot we did of them with the DJ's. This was good though, especially when Kemi came right up close to the camera.


Now we had shot this sequence, it was time to say goodbye to the boys until 15:30, and let the three main girls have a break. We got our backing girls in, who were Molly, Loa and Steph. Prior to this however, we changed the set, which involved taking down the flats and putting them back into the container out the back of the studio. Myself and Tyler then put up and secured the colour wall at the back of the set, and set up lights behind to shine through the squares. Once this was all ready and in position, with the lights on etc, there was clearly an issue in that the light was spilling out from the side of the colour wall, which wasn't ideal, and in a wide frame some of the set was very visible. To correct this we put up two black flats at a slight diagonal to the colour screen, which both contained the light, but also gave us a wider set, and therefore more space to shoot and for our actresses to move around in.

Once the set was secured, it was time to begin shooting. The girls were great, and we shot from a wide frame. They performed the dance, choreographed by Grace, multiple times. First with no front lights, which put them in a nice sillhouete. Then we shot it with front facing lights to show our girls more clearly. This also means that in our post production we can cut the shots from sillhouete to visible, which will hopefully create a nice strobe lighting-esque effect.

Having done this a few times until we were sure that we had what we were after, we moved onto the individual shots. First we shot Loa carrying the boom-box on her shoulder and dancing, next we shot Molly carrying it in front of her (it was too heavy to carry), and last but not least, Steph who swung it around in one hand very nicely indeed.
Lunch was getting nearer and nearer and everyone was getting hungry and impatient, therefore we decided to do one more shot before going for an hour's break. We decided to do the first of shots that involved the camera on the floor, with the boom-box in shallow focus and with the dancing girls out of focus in the background. After this we called for a break and went to lunch, ready to shoot our main girls in front of the colour screen.

Lunch was over, and at 2 o'clock we started shooting again. We repeated the previous process, shooting the sequence from a wide frame, and then focussing on the girls individually, while they danced alongside the other girls. Then we filmed Kemi dancing against the screen on her own, then Romany and lastly, Vogue. This all went very well, with the sequence ending with another shot of the boom-box in shallow focus with the girls dancing behind, out of focus. What we did differently with this one was that we had Kemi crouch down and say one line directly to the camera, which looked great. The line was:

I like what ya do when you do what ya do
You make me wanna shoop

Here is a brief look of our second set (the colour wall):

In the pictures either side you can see Loa performing part of the dance.

Our final set was our rooftop scene with all of our characters being on a sofa on a green screen and on the green screen we will put our roof top/ skyline idea. Everyone was put on the sofas and told to just dance really and the three main girls were singing the lyrics. We found it hard where to position everyone but by the end we were able to find positions were everyone was visible on camera and where they looked good. We did many shots of this scene as we kept trying to fins somewhere t put the boom box and in the end we decided on putting it on kemis lap who was in the middle of the sofa thus it would be the centre of attention. 

I feel that the overall experience of the shoot day was really enjoyable, as i was able to have a go doing everything such as playback and using the camera. I feel our shoot went well after the little issue in the morning and that we were able to work well as a unit and got what we actually wanted out of the experience. After looking at some of the footage in post production i think were all happy with what weve filmed and think it has the basis to be a good music video. Now all we've got to do is put it all together.

Costume for the three main girls

These are the costumes we ordered for our three main girls. The extras have sent us pictures of what they are wearing. 

Securing our final cast

As we are shooting in the studio, we have less space than we would on location therefore we decided that we should cut down our cast in order to maximise efficiency. On talking about it we said that we would have our three main girls, Kemi Smith-Kline, Vogue Phelps and Romany Henry. Furthermore, we wanted to have more girls for use as back up dancers. We chose Hannah Palmer, Stephanie Amata, Loa Pour-Mirza, and Molly Green. As for the boys we wanted Robert Keith, Alec Heretier, James Purdy, Damini Ige, Jacky Li and Josh Thomas.

Kemi

Romany

Vogue

Steph

Jacky

Josh

Alec

Damini

Hannah

Molly