Editing post 6.

I have finally finished cutting the video together. What I did today was to put the finishing stylistic touches to the video. I did this in After Effects, I desaturated the color slightly and added a similar green/blue color tone to that in their previous video. I also added some extra contrast.

Editing post 5.

Today I watched the video through at what I had put together as I was nearing the completion of the editing. The begging of the video did not look how I had wanted it to. So I set out to re-do the opening montage. I was finding it increasingly difficult to get this sequence right as I could not seem to find the right shots to go in at the right time. I had used a large majority of the shots of the light bulbs and have realized that we did not shoot enough. This meant that I was going to be repeating clips in the montage.
However I soon decided that less is more when it came to the beginning sequence.

Editing post 4.

I wanted to make the alignment of these cuts to be in perfect timing to add to the effectiveness of the technique.

I originally found it hard to find correct shots to cut to, however after doing this for a while I soon saw which types of shot looked good when cut between quickly.

After editing the montages for the second day, I felt that I had achieved the right level of accuracy when cutting the shots in time with each other.

Editing post 3.

The video has a large amount of montage use in it. This means cutting from clip to clip quickly using different images or in my case clips of video.

The montages which I was making were mainly cutting from abstract images of the light bulbs cutting to shots of the band playing their instruments. This took some time to select all of the short cuts and to align them into time with the rhythm of the song.

Editing post 2.

The second day of editing involved me starting to create the rough cut of the video. This meant that I put together a basic version of the video to give me a basis to work from.
One thing which was tedious at times and was time consuming was the syncing of the video up to the track. Because we used a backing track to film to it meant that the band were more or less in time. However there were moments where there would be small details in which something would go out of sync with the track I was cutting to. However it was usually due to a mistake on my behalf. For instance when you hit the backspace key the video alignment jumps back to fill the space which you removed the clip from. This puts whatever you have aligned later in the track out of sync. Although I had the beat markers in, I still had trouble trying to sync everything with as much ease as I would have liked. It became easier as I did more and more of the video.

Editing post 1.

After filming the video the footage was all uploaded onto Final Cut Pro. I cut the sequence into the different shot types which were filmed and placed them into their own separate folders. This did not take long to do. This will make the cutting and editing more manageable and organized. Otherwise I would have to go through large chunks of video which would waste unnecessary time and effort.

I then put markers to the beat of the song so that it will again make it easier when it comes to syncing up the video to the track. This involved me sitting and listening to the song and measuring out where each beat was and hitting the key to add the marker.

Shooting order:


We started off by shooting a set of three wide shots, we did three so that we could let the band warm up, and also so that we would have a larger bank of video to work from when we came to edit. We then filmed a selection of close up’s of the band members individually, then did them in pairs. We also filmed some of the lights by themselves, so that we could use them in the film for effect.

We also used the crane to get shots from overhead above the band to add a sense of variety to the shots, and after this we filmed the tracking shots.

Shoot Day Write Up

SETTING UP:


I started off the shoot by setting up the lights the night before. We had 36 normal light bulbs hanging from the ceiling with blue, green and white bulbs hung in random sequence. We tried to make the lights so that there weren’t any of the same colours too close to each other, because this I believe would have reduced the artistic quality, which was meant to be achieved. When setting the lights up I had to direct the lighting technician as to where I wanted to hang them in order to get the right stage set up, and the right proximity and depth.

At the back there were 5 LED light trips arranged into a pyramid, which would vaguely frame the band. These also added an effective sense of symmetry and allowed us a variation of shots; the LED’s were capable of changing and giving lots of different lighting effects, however we decided to stick with white light on the back LED’s so that we could keep an effective image, and so that it would not distract the viewers from the actual song itself, which can easily be done if you have to many distracting and glaring lights.

Finally we had 8 strip lights on the floor, which at first we did not really know exactly what we wanted to use them for, however we soon decided on placing them on the floor around the band, this gave more of an impression of a performance area. We also used them to light up some of the close up shots of the drum kit.

The next day we finished setting up when the band had arrived and we set up the drum kit in the right position where we wanted it, and made sure that the light bulbs were not in danger of being smashed when the band were performing. I had previously taken into account that they would need room in which to perform, so I had given them room by positioning the light bulbs at varying levels and different areas of the set.