Evaluation Q3 Plan

During filming our predominant choice of camera was a Sony Cybershot HX300 – this allowed us to get clear footage quality at 720p and 50x optical zoom, which came in handy for close-ups, which we used a lot. This camera was used to film both of our scenes, with the footage being saved onto a 16gb memory card and downloaded onto the computer via a flash drive which allowed a memory card to be inserted into it. We saved our footage in the media drive and Lucy’s files in order to ensure we had it available in two file locations should any footage somehow become corrupted.  In addition to the DSLR camera, we also used iPhone 6 and 7 cameras to film our glass bottle smashing and our interview. We found the iPhone camera quality was good enough to provide clear footage of the glass bottle shards and glitter - while the iPhone 7 footage was unable to be used, the footage Lucy filmed on her iPhone 6 was successfully implemented into various sections of our video. These shots were uploaded to the computer via a USB cable connected directly to Lucy’s iPhone, saved into a file named “glass videos” in order to clearly separate and label the footage.

We utilised social media in order to promote and strengthen our brand image and communicate with “fans”. We found that musical artists often share their latest news and updates via twitter, Facebook and Instagram. While we didn’t feel our target audience would be as present on facebook, we decided it was vital to create twitter and Instagram accounts and post on them as our characters Bea and Coco. We shared images taken onset and sneak peeks at clips from the video, which artists often do in order to create hype for upcoming events or videos. This is shown on synth-pop duo Empire Of The Sun’s Instagram, which posted behind-the-scenes photos and small clips of an upcoming music video.           

Websites and programmes used in the music video process include CANVA, Wix, Photoshop and of course Adobe Premiere.

CANVA was used to create our tour date poster, magazine cover and advertising poster. This was a fairly easy programme to use as it involved choosing a layout and fitting in your own images and text to suit the design you wanted. Phoebe edited our magazine cover on Photoshop after creating it on CANVA, and used a variety of tools in order to make the image look more professional – this included using the burn effect in order to darken the background and highlight Lucy as the main subject, minus red eye to reduce the effects of the camera flash and the sponge effect to brighten Lucy and make her the main focus.

Although Wix has templates available, Phoebe created the website entirely from scratch, choosing to create an original design, as she felt none of the templates suited the image we wanted to promote our band with. The website carries our synergy through, with a bright pink background, kaleidoscopic imagery and photos taken onset. It has mulitple pages to click on, including a home page, merchandise, tour dates and a gallery. These all work together to promote our band image and give enough information to create a proffessional looking website.

Adobe Premiere Pro was the programme we used to edit our video, and it allowed us to fully create the video we wanted and make it look as accurate to our plans and ideas as possible. While we had previously used basic Premiere skills for other tasks, making this music video allowed us to be even more creative with effects and layering footage. We learnt new editing skills along the way, as I mentioned, how to layer one piece of footage on top another – we learnt this specifically so we would be able to create the illusion that the scenes filmed in the pink room were playing on the television used in the living room scenes. While there could have been a away for us to actually play that footage on the television, the camera would have picked up static and reflection from the glass screen itself, which would have looked shoddy and unprofessional. In order to layer the footage, I placed one clip on top of the other, cropped it to -13 either side and used the effcts “Roughen Edges” and “Edge Feather”. These allowed the layered clip to blend seamlessly into the clip below, giving it the look of actually being on the television.

In addition to these effects, we used Colour Balance, Brightness and Contrast and changed the speed of some clips in order to either make them in time with the song or speed them up in a way that made the actors movements look very jarring, which we intended for certain parts of the video. This was also contributed to by reversing some pieces of footage.

We used Powerpoint to create our Digipak, as this was a programme we were both extremely comfortable with and it allowed us to do everything we needed to make our Digipak look as true to our original ideas as possible. We used the “Remove Bcakground” tool to layer part of an image over one section, and used the “Grain” and “Saturation +” effects to give each image a bright, colourful and vintage feel.

During the research and planning stages, we mainly used Blogger to document our progress, PowerPoint and Prezi to create presentations showing our ideas, feedback and general information regarding the music video. These allowed us to create posts which showed our journey to creating a fully-fledged product that we  could be proud of and which linked together in terms of synergy, band image and creativity.