Evaluation - Question 1

What did you find the most challenging and why?

Throughout these three weeks of making our product, our whole group was challenged during the planning, filming and editing process. I would say that the most challenging part during our planning stage was the first step, choosing a song. We spent a lot of time looking on Youtube for fun, yet possible, music videos that we could re-create. Our initial idea was to choose a slow song because we thought that we would be able to focus on the emotion of the song and this would be an easier video to shoot as it doesn't require as many upbeat and quick shots. From this, we looked at Beyonce songs because they are very well-known and her lyrics are very inspirational and emotional to many people. Our first choice of song was If I Were A Boy by Beyonce but we decided against this because, for most of the video, a police uniform is required and no-one in our group had access to this. We looked at many different videos such as Love Never Felt So Good by Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake, Birthday by Katy Perry and I Will Never Let You Down by Rita Ora but we were unable to re-make any of these videos because the mise-en-scene was either too complex or we could not get the right costumes or locations. We then looked at Someone Like You by Adele and realised that this was a video that we could easily re-create as the mise-en-scene was not too complicated. Our whole group, was very happy with this song choice and all we had to do now was decide which minute of the song we wanted to film. 

Filming was very fun and a good experience for all of us but it was very challenging due to the very long tracking shot which lasted 42 seconds so we needed to make sure that the camera angles were exactly the same throughout the entire time, the actress moved in the correct way and at the correct time and that her lips were in sync with the music for the full 42 seconds. This was very challenging and required our group to take multiple takes of this shot in order to get it right but once we did a few shots we knew the scene very well and were able to film it almost identical to the real video.

I enjoyed editing the footage because it was fun to see how individual shots can come together to create a music video that looks and sounds effective. The most challenging part of the editing process was creating the fade effect over two shots because we didn't know how to create a fade effect but make the two shots visible for a long period of time. We tried lots of different methods in order to get the desired effect that we all wanted but none of them worked. So we tried not using a fade effect and just decreasing the opacity of one of the shots enabling you to see both of the shots on top of each other at the same time. This worked out very well and we were very pleased with the result.