Editing (6)

Today I went over what I was going to do with my music video and its ending. I spoke to Matt and we discussed how the water sequence which was the original ending as we have around 10 shots with this strand but we felt as if it just come out of nowhere as there is no water throughout the video and that we would be introducing this strand within the final 30 second of the video. After discussing I came to the conclusion of just not using the footage at all and I was going to continue with the idea of the dancers with the blue and red lights on either side and different shots of them at pace. All I am not eating for is the approval from Luke!

Focus Groups

Aim of a focus group

To develop a understanding of products and use this to refine our promo products.

Objectives

Learn how to find facilitate effective focus group and prepare to host one on Friday.

Through focus groups they are going to receive qualitative (opinions and feelings) so that the business (the people pitching) can review what their focus group say about their product(s) so that they can change or remove unwanted parts.

Effective research requires contributors who reflect the target audience in terms of age, gender, population, etc.

Things to avoid in a focus group

• Closed questions (don’t give much space for an answer)
• Leading questions (edges the respondents to give a specific answer)

Whats important

• 8-10 participants so all can be heard and not felt pressured.
• Pre-prepared questions and make sure that you ask all of them and that you are ready of the focus group.
• Record the session to make sure that you know everything what was said (full set of data).
• Introduction for the focus group (help the participant understand what is going to be talked about).
• Keep it so that everyone gets to talk (politely).

What useful things can come out of a focus group

• Observations that we were unaware of before about how the products may be interpreted by an audience.
• Suggestions about how the products might be further refined to make them more effective.

What to remember for our focus group

• We need to show the digipak and website BEFORE the video. This will enable us to test out whether or not the focus group can identify the genre the act is working in (which should obviously be given away by the video.
• We should defend our products at all. In fact we should just try to remain silent which they are talking (the people presenting to our focus group). We can reject ideas after the focus group but if we shut down the respondents during the presentation we wont be able to gather their true views.

Editing (5)

Getting started on 'the drop' of our music video i had to really pick up the pace. The progress I have made is below:

Editing (4)

For the past day or two I have been creating the much wanted graphical match for my video. It have been quite a tedious and time consuming process as the cutting of the two dancers was difficult to cut on the beat and with the dance.

Editing (3)

For the past few days I have been adding to my project. The progress I have made is shown below:

Developing our digipak (1)

David, on digipaks, has been going through creating a first idea. I have given him some help with ideas and minor details but I have been mainly focussing on the editing of my piece. We did manage to come up and create a first draft which was had a front, two insides (one for disc) and back (for the song list of album). Below is our first draft:

 Front

 Inside left

 Inside right (disc)

 Idea for back (1)

 Idea for back (2)

Idea for back (3)

Editing (2)

This week's aim for the editing process is to continue on with completing a full cut with the dancers and the performance together. This should enable to my group and I to go into the Christmas holidays in a completed or a very secure and comfortable position with the coursework. To date, after finishing the performance cut, I have been able to start editing the dancers of my video by placing them on top of the already existing footage of the performance cut. I have only completed around 20-30 seconds worth of the dancers footage to go into the final video but this time has been used to figure out what type of editing style I was going to go for. I have now decided that it would be best for the dancers to be very quick cut and pacy throughout the video and especially on the 'drop' of the song.

Editing (1)

For the past two weeks of editing daily I have been creating a performance cut before I start to add in the other strand of dancing and the water effects. Below is the performance cut without the dancers:

Evaluation of shoot day (3)

I would say the changing of the dancers and order of what we were doing because we already planned the everything we wanted to go into our video. Overall, it just all went effectively. One part of which could have gone better. David took part with the directing of how the performers looked but not what movements they did. The main direction he gave them was to just “jam out” on the drop of the song. Looking at what we did with the talent we used we got the dancers to do freestyle as David (who is a dancer) said that freestyle can really show your own personality and character in dance. He did give them parts to work on (the specific genre) but apart from a small amount of managing and telling them do better or change parts we didn't create anything at all. Whilst they were dancing David did help them if they did get stuck by standing next to the camera and to give them a few pointers. 

Throughout the day I enjoyed how it was a very relaxed experience of a task which could, very easily, become overly stressful. This was kept relaxed throughout the day because of the way the group and our cast (most importantly the group) worked together as we all helped each other and let one one another to work individually is they wanted. After filming and starting to edit our work (which is my job, editing) I am looking forward to finish with the performance cut and start on the dancers, especially the graphical matching which was highlighted when receiving feedback. 

One big thing which I feel that we learned which would help in the future is that we needed to be more organised in the different shots we wanted and how we were going to take them. This would help as it would give us a set out plan and less time thinking about what we are going to do next. One thing which may have effected our website and digipak is the use of the band as they played a much bigger part but we did use our lead on his own so we haven't limited what we can use. We were going to have logo as a crown but the crown kept on falling off. So we managed to have it on a shot were he wasn’t moving so we can still have it as a logo if we wanted to. 

Evaluation of shoot day (2)

Dividing the roles came naturally as we started to shoot. This was because as we started with the performance element Jonty was on the drum pad so he was in front of the camera. I went to do the camera work for the first half of the day. David was doing most of the directing while I was on the camera along with playback. After we had finished with the performance element I took charge of playback which Jonty was on camera. David was directing as he knew all about our dance element (what to do and how to do it). 

As a team we worked efficiently and sufficiently throughout the day to make sure that we could get all we needed to get done, done. I feel as if I performed well, using the camera with the different shots (along with using the dolly for the first time).

One problem which we had was that Matty needed a risk assessment for his flips so we organised getting that sorted the day before and on the shoot day we needed a particular person watching him while he did it. That person was busy, so instead of getting Matty done straight away we did all the dancers until the person was ready to watch Matty and then he did his flips and we carried on as normal. Other that that there wont many problems at all. Apart from our lead (Gareth) who wore a crown which kept falling off so we go rid of it.

Evaluation of shoot day (1)

The day before our shoot my group and I went into the studio to help clear up the group before us to we could get straight into it on the day. We also looked at making sure our costume was exactly where we needed it to be ready for the day (shown in a previous blog).

The morning of our shoot day the team (my group and I) double checked that we had everything to bring into school, along with checking of our cast remember what they needed to wear/bring in as well.

Before we started shooting, at breakfast, we got the cast to meet us upstairs at 8:40 so we would be ready to get starting with the day at 8:45. After we met everyone upstairs and we were all together we gave the cast their coloured dungarees to they could get a feel for them and then (for the dancers) David took them to the dance studio to check if the costume was good and they could perform at their full before they were on camera. As the dancers were practicing I went into the studio to help set up the first set of which we first shot for. 

The first set we shot is shown below and it looked pretty much identical to how we wanted it to. This was the performance set with the lead singer and the two backups on the drumpad and keyboard. In the background was the lighting which were pixel lights.

Splitting up

Now, as a group, we have finished our shoot and that there are three of us we can each split up into different sections for our coursework. I have taken the role of editing, Jonty and David are both looking at digipaks and websites until they have decided who is doing who (they are doing it together). I am going to be using the same software as last year for my thriller and using the skills and techniques which I learned at the end of A1 school year.

Costumes for our shoot

The day before our shoot day we went to double check on our costumes and props for 'the big day'. This turned out to have a very positive response with the costumes as they fit perfectly. In evaluation of looking at the costumes we changed the idea of the crown as we felt that it came across as too 'tacky'.