Personality of our Music Video/Artist

Our Music Video takes on a personality of its own through the shot types, the artist's personality and different elements of Mise En Scene.

- Here we have our artist as a sort of silhouette figure. The natural lighting at our venue allowed us to do this shot. The fact that we cant see her face and costume in this shot; which is at the beginning of  our Music Video builds a bit of tension from the audience's point of view as thy want to badly know what the artist looks like and the costume of the artist, building excitement levels. It also gives the artist a mysterious personality from the start.

- Here's a shot with part of our artist revealed and other parts not. This shot was to primarily showcase the utterances of artist as well as add to the mysterious personality of the artist, putting questions in the viewer's mind as to what the artist may be feeling at the time. In later shots the artists performance will answer these questions, mainly through her actions and body language.

- A shot towards the end of the Video shows our artist with black clothing and a make up mask painted on her face. A mask is used to conceal one's identity, keeping up the theme of the mysterious profile of our artist through out the Music Video. 

   

Green screen; The ups and downs

The green screen is obviously a very good and powerful tool when filming a music video because it allows for us to insert any type of background we want.

Following these steps on Final Cut Pro to remove the green background:

Though in theory it is brilliant, there were a few obstacles we faced when filming our Music Video that we will all learn from in the future.

- In order for shots to come out correctly, it is imperative to film the artist on the green screen only. The problem was when trying to film certain shots, we found it almost impossible to not include parts of the surrounding background. This meant not including planned shots because of a fear of poor Mise En Scene elements in the video.

- It was also hard to position the lighting on the green screen in order to not have bad shadows. We had allot of shots where both the camera and the artist were moving, some of which came out poorly because of the drastic shadows, which wouldn't happen on a plain black background per say.

- It was also quite time consuming to roll the green screen down; before filming and then back up; after filming. Time that could be better used elsewhere.

Production of Music Video: Basetracks

In the making of this music video, the concept of base tracks allowed us to be very efficient in how we exert our filming time and effort. A base track consists of filming the artist from the start of the track to the end of the track as opposed to just filming different sections of the track every time. The advantage of this is when a good variety of base tracks have been captured; in different locations, costumes and actions,  it is then quite simple to edit. We can now just cut bits of each base track out (the cutting tool on Final Cut Pro comes in very handy here), leaving what will be quite a smooth, free flowing video. It is very useful whether your video follows some sort of narrative or if it follows the disjuncture route.

The location is Finsbury Park, where a few of our base tracks were shot.

The green screen in the background is where our other base tracks were shot.

Production of Music Video: Green Screen Tutorial

Editing : The reason behind using 'markers'

On the left is markers which were used on in our editing process for our music video, on the right is an image of markers used for a piece of professional work. 

The markers which we used in final cut are used so our editing would be more precise of video editing and audio editing. Markers are more useful when editing the audio of a music track, so it would begin directly at the downbeat of the song. Setting markers can be difficult and frustrating at first which we experienced for ourself, to put in a marker it needs to be set whilst editing the audio at a the downbeat of a song, which we then had to add a video clip at that specific point so both video and audio would be first precise. 

To set a marker we moved the play-head to the point in our video which we wanted to use, we then pressed the 'M' key which would set a marker for the downbeat of our audio. You can see from the image above that we set a first few markers at the beginning of our song, we had to ensure that we put the markers in at the right point on the timeline to ensure that the audio corresponded correctly with the video clip. Setting to markers wasn't easy but we got the hang of it by the second day of editing which was really good, it made editing run more smoothly. 

Day 2 : Editing

Second day of editing went as planned, we got more base tracks edited and we also checked out the different effects on the green screen shots, so far I think the editing process is running smoothly and to plan, things can only get better from here !

Day 1: Editing