Music Video Evaluation...

As we were told to use music from the free music archive I was a little bit stuck for songs as initially I couldn't find any that I knew/ liked.

After having searched the library of songs I came across trash80 and Podington Bear. Both were appealing to me and I had strong Ideas for both. After attempting a few test runs with Trash80 in Maya i found that the video would be far too long to edit. My idea was to have geometric shapes pulsing to the beat with an array of imagery synced to the song in AE. Due to the amount of screens needed for exporting out of Maya I decided this wasn't the best method.

Having found that out I went for the Podington Bear audio and just listening to it suggested twinkly lights and soft focus night time shots. I then started to develop my idea in the form of a storyboard.

I had a very clear idea of what I wanted for my video sequence after receiving the brief. This helped in some ways to speed up the development process, although I did come across a few problems while developing. I was influenced mainly from Ed Sheeran's 'The A Team' music video. As mentioned on my blog I found this video to be exactly what I was wanted to create in terms of the focusing used, the scenery and the fact that it was shot all at night. I was comfortable that I could recreate these effects and apply them to my footage.

When I heard the brief I was keen to develop my skills, and fine tune my approach to upcoming modules. I had used After effects before and was fairly confident that I would be able to use my skills from the previous module with my music video. I knew that I would have to develop my Final Cut Pro skills to be able to edit effectively, although I gave this role to one of my team as I knew that I could get the desired outcome by overlooking the process.

I also wanted to test my skills with new equipment. I had previously used the HD cam on other modules and was confident with the camera, although I knew for this brief I would have to use the XD cam with the 50mm lens adapter. This would give me the depth of field for the focus that I was looking for.

Now that I knew what equipment I was going to use and what I needed to make my idea that I had on paper. I was ready to go filming.

Me and Ken went into town with the XD cam with the 50mm lens adapter. The previous night I had used the HD cam which worked fine apart from it didn't have the depth of field that the 50mm lens has, making it more of a test run than potential footage. I had a good idea of the shots I wanted to shoot, which made the process a lot quicker. Ken shot all the scenes with instructions from me explaining what I wanted. It was a great help to have another person, not only for equipment transport, but for tips on composition, establishing shots, and getting the correct framing (rule of thirds etc).

The main plot scenes were fairly easy to film, although they had to be stationary shots to reduce the amount of tracking while compositing the Orb in After Effects.

We had to inform the police with the locations we were shooting as we were shooting in public places. We had reflective jackets so we had no trouble getting the shots we wanted. We also had to have transport to and from each location as the equipment was heavy and we were not allowed to take the camera outside of college without a form of transport, luckily my flat mate helped us out with that.

Most of the filming was done in the city center, but I felt I needed more shots to fill out the video. So I filmed a few shots on my street which were abstract enough to be incorporated into any part of the video.

These shots helped to break up the 'plot scenes' and to establish some of the shots. In the end we got the filming done in one night, which allowed me to move straight onto the editing.

When I got to editing I got Ben to cut up and edit the footage in Final Cut Pro, with a few transitions although I didn't want to disrupt the flow of the video too much by getting hung up on effects within Final cut as I knew the majority of visual effects would be done in AE. I did this process with him to ensure I had what I wanted. My original worry was that I would not have enough footage to last the length of the full song. However when I took the footage from the XD Cam using the card reader (with the help of Matt) I had a lot more footage than expected, even without the first nights filming (on the HD cam).

This made the editing process longer than anticipated and a lot of shots had to be scraped just to get it down to size.

After having done a few tests with the Orb I found that it was suitable for my music video. I had to get to grips with creating the floor glow as well as making the orb look and flow smoothly.

Now that I have to final cut of the video I can take it into After Effects and like my Orb tests, experiment with how to composite the Orb into the shots effectively. I used the same method of layering masks with different modes to blend the masks into each other. Feathering out the circular mask for a glow effect, the same technique was used for the floor glow, which was parented to the Orb, to save me key framing that as well.

There were a few shots that need to have a little more work spent on them due to the complexity of the Orbs route. For these shots I used the alpha matte inverted mode for the orb, while masking out the objects in the scene. A good example of this would be the bollard scene where the Orb floats behind the bollards, then swings around, and past the camera.

For the majority of the shots this method was used to obscure the Orb within the scene, and to give it realistic feel.

The final scene of the video was the hardest part to edit within After effects as the camera wasn't completely still I had to manually key frame the orbs movement to get a realistic movement.

Due to the amount of grain used while filming it was too difficult to make an effective floor glow for the orb as the grain didn't work well with the masks feather.

When it came to rendering out the footage in After Effects after the orb had been composited over the footage. I had a few problems with the output. The first two times I tried it came out with a bad quality. I realised that I didn't have the Pro Res HQ settings applied to the render output module in AE. This allowed me to export at full quality.

When creating the DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro it was fairly simple although I had nee used the software before I managed to make a simple Menu using the DVD cover imagery, a play button, and a few added details for the video.

Over all I am pleased with the outcome of the video. I feel the effects have been incorporated better than I previously imagined. The camera was a big save for us as the depth of field was one of the techniques that the whole video was based around.

Having worked on my game character for longer than anticipated, gave me less time for the music video as the modules were side by side. After the extension for the game character I could focus entirely on the music sequence. The whole process for the video took about 3 days, which despite the extension was a very stressful process. In future I will be focusing on time management a lot more, being able to prioritise my workflow will benefit me in the long run and is one of the methods i will be implementing in my upcoming modules.