Planning Editing

Planning what editing tools and effects that I want in my music video is essential because I've come up with a strong ideology and concept behind what I as a music video producer want to portray and reflect on to my audience. Therefore it's important that I select accurate and conventional elements to the style that's shown in frames and throughout the whole music video.

Some of the editing tools I plan to use are as followed: 

• Colour Balance: In order to create a 'fantasy' and 'fairy-tale' like feel that will be important in the theme of my music video.
• Desaturate: This will show the differences in tense throughout the narrative (present action and flashbacks) but it'll also emphasize the dullness of everyday life against the brightness that fame and the big city seems to have. 
• Glow: Like Desaturate, this helps show the vibrance and promise of London against the lives we're all living at the moment, day-to-day, which my target audience may want to escape from when they watch my music video (as the target audience of R&B do at times) 
• Bad TV: This helps show how sometimes things are 'dream like' and desirable - such as the lives you see on channels such as MTV and in celebrity culture, but there's also flip sides to them that nobody notices until your living the lifestyle. I also plan to use Add Noise alongside this effect to make it seem more TV-like with bad feedback.
• Mirror: This symbolizes the concept of 'through the looking glass' which will hopefully connote the way that the 'Alice' persona in the music video is almost entering a dream-like state of a life she's always wanted, only to have it shattered in the end. 

Further analysis of some of my editing styles: Post-Video Production

Mirror

The mirror effect helped symbolize the 'looking glass effect' and was often used during the London frames to create a more fantasy feel which is exactly what we wanted to show. It also connotes an 'illusion' which is sort of what the 'Good Life' is, meaning it's harder to reach that people who look for it initially think. 

Glow 
Again, the glow effect was used to help me create the Wonderland effect again, which helps keep the theme constant. However, put in place it also helps emphasis the desirability of the high life which is exactly what conventional R&B videos do. Of course though, at the end of our music video you see that the materialistic life isn't being represented positively at all which puts an interesting spin on the ideologies that the audience have been exposed to throughout the length of the music video. 

Contrast and Threshold
Threshold worked really well with some of the London shots as it directly connotes the darkness and hidden negative side which we're trying to show throughout the whole motif of our video. Also, it's a lot stronger than the Desaturate effect that we chose so therefore it was certain that the two types of shots wouldn't have been similar as the aim was to give them different emotions and ideologies behind them. Adding the 'blink' effect which caused the shot to flicker, which almost showed the dark side of the 'Wonderland' shot shown above breaking through and the glamorous side of London stripping down to a darker side. 

Overall 
Overall, I think that editing let me express and place certain emphasis on the shots that were either vital to expressing ideologies, narratives or both throughout the product. This way I made sure that my artist could get a clear message that I wanted to translate and had planned way back in the Research/Planning stages of my brief.

Storyboards

 As a way of planning our music video product, my group and I decided to draw up a storyboard showing the vital frames that we wanted to include within our product. This way we could:

• refer back to it during the filming process to see if we'd missed anything
  
• refer back to it in the editing process to remember the order in which we wanted the music video to play
  
• to see if our final music video would work well and made sense, enhancing the themes and ideologies that we'd set out to show the audience.
  
• help us consider the type of shot (close-up, mid shot, long shot) and what action would be happening in order to make our filming process more efficient and make it easier to create a shot list. 

I think the overall process of creating a storyboard helped me to consider in detail what kind of things I wanted to be happening within my music video product and also because I was using Narrative, Performance and some concept within the video, it helped me to see if there was a clear balance between the three.

When it came to filming, my storyboard along with my shot list made my groups sessions more efficient as we didn't have to try and remember what we'd planned back in class verbally and had it in front of us shot by shot. The story board was a visual way of showing me what each shot had to look like and what piece of music it was going to go to. This then went forwards and helped me with things such as - length, speed, accuracy, lip sync timings etc.

However, I think when it came to editing I began to notice some of the flaws in our work. There were certain sequences within the song that the storyboard hadn't fully covered - luckily it wasn't too much of a problem because they were parts that we'd specifically planned to have the same shot but rewound and so on. But also, once we laid all of the frames out onto the Final Cut Express timeline, it was apparent that there were sections that were performance heavy (i.e. the artist lip syncing for 5-6 seconds as oppose to 2-4) which made watching quite tedious, so rearranging of certain frames was needed. Therefore if I were to do a storyboard again, I think I'd consider in more detail the delicate and tiny bits of detail to save a lot more time when it came to editing and making changes. 

In conclusion, the storyboard helped me a lot in the practical side of my brief as when working towards deadlines (just like music videos do in the real industry) it's effective to be working efficiently and with a visual prompt such as the one I'd created, that skill became possible. 

Meetings

Group Schedule

Week One: My group and I researched into different music videos from YouTube and Vevo in order to look for codes, conventions and ideologies that could perhaps be interrpreted into our own work. For instance we took a look at Katy Perry's 'Wide Awake' music video which had a fairytale/dark Wonderland theme. We liked this ideology and with the help from Andrew Goodwin's Theory we managed to adapt our R&B/Pop conventions into a Wonderland Theme.

• Later in the week in a seperate meeting, we began drawing out our storyboard which helped us consider iconography, cinematography and the artist and actors that we'd be using. This was a very brief outline of what we'd be doing for our final product as we still had many gaps to fill in.

Week Two: Me and my group then went on to looking at existing digipaks and adverts for different inspirations when it came to creating our own ancillary products. For example, I looked at Rita Ora's 'ORA' tour poster and Katy Perrys' 'Teenage Dream' poster which gave me two different perspective on the micro-elements that went into different genres. We decided to do this after looking at secondary music videos because that way we were able to find correlations between the two and find a solid concrete genre that'd run through all three products.

• This lead us on to drafting our inital ancillary packs where we began to experiment with our existing knowledge of Photoshop as well as adapt new skills along the way in order to meet the conventions that we wanted to. Our first seperate drafts consisted of the basic inserting texts, different colours and taking photographs for our photoshoots that we'd use on the products.

Week Three: At this stage my group was beginning to finalize our storyboard and the ideologies behind it. We managed to finalize the shots and conventions that we wanted to abide by too. This gave us the opportunity to put the conventions and themes we'd decided on into our ancillary packs, which also helped the progress of finalizing the design for the two of them.

• Next we decided that we'd finalize our storyboards so that we knew what we wanted to do for our music video as well as get our final digipaks onto our blogs. After this, we were able to finalize our locations as well as begin making a filming schedule in order to get our music video done. We planned to get the London scenes done first and then the bedroom/field scenes after. This also led us to coming up with back-up locations just incase they were needed.

Week Four & Five: My group spent these two weeks visiting our locations in Brick Lane, Oxford Circus and the mutal setting of a bedroom to get all our shots completed. Throughout this process we had to swerve major obsticles along the way like the weather which affected half of our video hence why we moved the field scenes to a bedroom instead. This worked because they both connotated the same thing. We also filmed in front of a brick wall in the local area for our performance shots.

• Towards the end of these meeting periods we also began to export our footage from our camera onto the Macs so that it was ready for our next meetings when we'd begin to put the frames into place, sort through the footage and edit on Final Cut Express.

Final Weeks: During my groups final weeks before the deadline, my group and I began to edit footage on Final Cut Express by exporting our selected track that we'd downloaded from iTunes in advance and picking frames from all of our rough footage that we wanted. Once we'd done this we were able to experiment with effects on the software that complimented our initial themes and ideologies that we'd incorporated into our storyboards.

• Alongside this we worked on neating up our cutting rate and matching our visuals to be in time with the music so that it applied to various theories that we'd studied such as Goodwin's so that we'd have the same broad microelements and conventions.

Final Group Advert

Final Group Digipak (2)