Monday, 14 January 2008
Evaluation
Overall I'm not happy with my final piece for this project, but fortunately it's not the real thing and in retrospect it's probably best it went this way, instead of the mediocrity it could have been, as it has been a very valuable learning experience, and a fun one too, but I can now take all of the knowledge through to the real final piece of my AS.
Ambiguity, I started out thinking that a music video with a narrative should have a certain amount of this to give it a repeatability factor, as it is then left open to some amount of interpretation and I still believe this as well, the mistake I made was not carefully planning my video through either a shot list or a story board and basically the result was a plot that was incomprehensible. If I were to repeat the task I would plan my shots carefully and have included a mysterious character that could have been just a silhouette, see him start the fire, leave, get into a car and drive off, then when she escaped she would arrive at his house and the audience would know it was his house as they would recognise his car and it would make sense that she was getting revenge by burning him in his house.
I quite liked the Audioslave footage and I successfully kept it under 30% of my overall video but it was the most painful aspect to editing and doubled my time doing it. The problem was that the footage had a lot of crowd shots which I cut out, but I still had to keep the shots in sync with the music which created numerous problems. Then re-editing the footage solely to make it more my work than somebody else's conflicted completely with the first problem. This meant that all of the video had to be rushed and the result shows it. On a good note though this has taught me that my footage is the best footage in most circumstances as I know what shots I have got to work with and this makes the already laborious task that much easier as you enter it with more confidence of how you expect it to turn out. The one thing I liked about what I edited was some of the graphic matches which act as transitions between the Audioslave footage and the narrative, but unfortunately not enough to save it in my eyes.
During the planning and then making of my video the concept of my video had to change. This was due to being on such a short time scale and it was hard to work out a time when every member was available and this affected the overall video and also changed my perception of the song which I wanted to get across, but these things happen and I will have a much larger time scale in the real thing to make it work, as while getting everyone together was a problem, the people I was working with were not.
The cinematography of my piece is all right in my opinion even if the editing let it down. I captured a lot of shots that I really liked, such as the extreme close-ups of Alex at the beginning of the video. What I like about these shots is that because I decreased the depth of field it made the background out of focus giving it a similar feel to actual film, although it's still a long way from it, I like it. The lighting I used was a fluorescent light and it really gave the scene a cold, slightly unnatural feel to it, which was then successfully contrasted by the strong red and orange and deep black of the fire. If I were to do it again I would do some post-production editing to the colour and give it a darker feel by adding a blue tint and harsher blacks but I didn't have the time to do this.
What I most enjoyed about this piece of work was, and I'll try explain this without coming across as a mentally unstable arsonist, creating the fires. It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, my shoe caught fire and Alex and I probably suffered some extent of carbon monoxide poisoning from the petrol fire indoors, but it was fun and there are certain shots of the various fires that turned out very nicely, unfortunately though I still sound like a crazed arsonist.
Overall I am disappointed with the music video as it looks pretty amateur and worse, rushed which I really want to avoid, but through this experience I have learnt that the only way to achieve something that does not look amateur is plan everything and I will use this revelation in my final piece.
Ambiguity, I started out thinking that a music video with a narrative should have a certain amount of this to give it a repeatability factor, as it is then left open to some amount of interpretation and I still believe this as well, the mistake I made was not carefully planning my video through either a shot list or a story board and basically the result was a plot that was incomprehensible. If I were to repeat the task I would plan my shots carefully and have included a mysterious character that could have been just a silhouette, see him start the fire, leave, get into a car and drive off, then when she escaped she would arrive at his house and the audience would know it was his house as they would recognise his car and it would make sense that she was getting revenge by burning him in his house.
I quite liked the Audioslave footage and I successfully kept it under 30% of my overall video but it was the most painful aspect to editing and doubled my time doing it. The problem was that the footage had a lot of crowd shots which I cut out, but I still had to keep the shots in sync with the music which created numerous problems. Then re-editing the footage solely to make it more my work than somebody else's conflicted completely with the first problem. This meant that all of the video had to be rushed and the result shows it. On a good note though this has taught me that my footage is the best footage in most circumstances as I know what shots I have got to work with and this makes the already laborious task that much easier as you enter it with more confidence of how you expect it to turn out. The one thing I liked about what I edited was some of the graphic matches which act as transitions between the Audioslave footage and the narrative, but unfortunately not enough to save it in my eyes.
During the planning and then making of my video the concept of my video had to change. This was due to being on such a short time scale and it was hard to work out a time when every member was available and this affected the overall video and also changed my perception of the song which I wanted to get across, but these things happen and I will have a much larger time scale in the real thing to make it work, as while getting everyone together was a problem, the people I was working with were not.
The cinematography of my piece is all right in my opinion even if the editing let it down. I captured a lot of shots that I really liked, such as the extreme close-ups of Alex at the beginning of the video. What I like about these shots is that because I decreased the depth of field it made the background out of focus giving it a similar feel to actual film, although it's still a long way from it, I like it. The lighting I used was a fluorescent light and it really gave the scene a cold, slightly unnatural feel to it, which was then successfully contrasted by the strong red and orange and deep black of the fire. If I were to do it again I would do some post-production editing to the colour and give it a darker feel by adding a blue tint and harsher blacks but I didn't have the time to do this.
What I most enjoyed about this piece of work was, and I'll try explain this without coming across as a mentally unstable arsonist, creating the fires. It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, my shoe caught fire and Alex and I probably suffered some extent of carbon monoxide poisoning from the petrol fire indoors, but it was fun and there are certain shots of the various fires that turned out very nicely, unfortunately though I still sound like a crazed arsonist.
Overall I am disappointed with the music video as it looks pretty amateur and worse, rushed which I really want to avoid, but through this experience I have learnt that the only way to achieve something that does not look amateur is plan everything and I will use this revelation in my final piece.
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