Preliminary excercise

In todays lesson we were asked to create a preliminary excercise to experience what it's like to be in a music video and also to get used to memorising the words, recording whole song shots and also lip syncing in time.

The first thing we had to do was listen to the song and make sure we could hear it. The song we got given to do was 'Don't go breaking my heart' by Elton John and Kiki Dee. In order to do this we would have needed to ask someone to transfer the song from their Imac to one of our mobile phones. Although, we managed to avoid this by using the computer in one of the media class rooms by getting the song up on youtube. We chose a version with the lyrics in order to not only be able to hear the song by read the lyrics at the same time in order to not get any wrong and make it look more believable.

After downloading the music video from youtube we set up the tripod and camera and began to film. Our group did not get off to a very good start as we could not decide upon who to place in the music video, the original two members we chose, Leon and Yemi, found the lyrics too hard to grasp to be able to sing the song. Therefore, we wasted quite some time trying to help them to learn the words. Although, in order to be able to do it more quickly we chose two different members. However, these two members were a little nervous and didn't enjoy the fact they had to be in the video. We were asked to not lip sync but actually sing the lyrics in order to make the final editing of the lip syncing with the song more believable, in time and effective. This proved to be embarrassing and an obstacle for the members. We will need to practise and overcome this before our actual song as these two members, Connor and Sarah, will be starring in our actual video. Ideally we would have liked to shoot single shots of the two members in the preliminary task, although we ran out of time. Therefore, we decided to use shots of Leon and Yemi dancing to fill the gaps. 


We uploaded the footage onto the computer today and began to edit it. Although, we were unable to complete the footage as we only hada short amount of time. Therefore,we are going to continue this tomorrow and upload it when it is finished.


Editing the footage was much different to the editing process we had previously used the year before for our thriller footage. This was because we had to take long, full shots in order to not get any jumps in the footage or cuts. By doing this, we were then able to use the pen tool found in final cut express, shortening the time we spent editing.

Using the pen tool allows you to edit and cut parts of the footage to change the lengths of the clips and also to edit out any mistakes which we made:

We also found out that we could use split screen which enabled us to edit more easily as we could then hide the bits we had already edited and do not need and see the blips we were editing at the time: