RC - Editing (6)

Casey and I, in our lesson on Tuesday, were in discussion about ways we can improve our music video. After watching the video many times we felt that it was still disjointed in some places, being that there are gaps (even if very minute) in the good girl sequence, the car sequence and in the in the last section of the video. The tiny gap that is in the good girl sequence is due to synching, as the original two shots that were next to each other had to be separated slightly so that the visuals matched with the soundtrack, this means that we have about 2 seconds that are not catered for. Casey and I have come up with a solution for this; if we take a number of photographs of objects/belongings that compliment with the good girl then we can develop our theme of a photo montage by creating a short and a quickly cut montage sequence. I have already taken a few myself; being that I am playing the role of the good girl I have some of the belongings that I wore on the shoot whilst playing her, these include gold, dangly earrings, a brown over-the-shoulder bag and a pink flower hair-clip. When taking these photographs I had to make sure that they were close up, not only to stress that these are clearly items that belong to the good girl, but to ensure that there was no chance of damaging the narrative because I obviously had to take these photos in my own home (a different location to where the good girl sequence was set).

Another challenge that we are trying to overcome is the good boy sequence. I have already mentioned about the poor quality of lighting and despite our attempts at improving this by either enhancing/reducing the brightness/contrast it only compromises other areas such as the image resolution. One idea that we came up with was removing the last couple of shots in this sequence and replacing them with a few band shots; this could work to our advantage being that we do need to incorporate more of the band performance and we would be getting rid of the shots that are of the worst quality. One disadvantage is that compared to the other characters, the good boy's narrative wont be quite as established. However, I think that this is better than having shots that could be an impediment to the quality of the rest our video.

We are working towards completing the last section of our video which consists of shots of each character and finally ending with a shot of all four characters together. On Monday night I took out the camera equipment in order to film the individual shot of the good girl, which would be of her slouching on a toilet. I have now incorporated this shot into our video although I do have my concerns; I feel that because this shot of the good girl is in a completely different location compared to the shots of the other three characters all of which were filmed in Hastings, it may not necessarily fit into the narrative and could confuse the audience. This adds onto the fact that the ending shot is of all of the characters walking together in Hastings, however, the presumption is that this shot of the good girl is of her in a public toilet in the same place where they are all out together for the night. Hopefully this will come across in the video, and even if this is not the case, this is not my top priority.

There is also a gap in the car sequence, I feel that is because we did not collect enough footage of the car whilst out on our shoots (despite at the time thinking that we did) and the footage that we did manage to film we have already exhausted. I have already used shots that we recorded whilst on our preliminary reccies, which include a POV shot taken from inside the car of the car driving through town and a CU shot of the bad girl waving her arm out the passenger window. Regardless of these additions more are still needed to be made, we may have to look further into the reccie shots as well as the shots we took on the official shoots to see if we haven't missed anything.

One last thing that needs to be amended is the second band sequence in our video where synching is a problem as well more shots being needed. A few other alterations that are expected at this stage include fastening the cutting the rates in some parts, particularly the arcade section where some shots are too prolonged, as well as modifying the synching in other areas.

Granting that this post proves to show that there is still a lot to be done I do think that we are well on our way to the completion our product.