Q1 - Using, Developing and Challenging Real Media Product Conventions/Forms

­In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms or conventions of real media products?

Music videos mentioned in Q1: 

1st April 2012 - End of Practical Production and Start of Evaluation

Today we have completely finished all stages of practical production. Overall it was has been a long and stressful part of the project. One of the key skills that I learnt was to look for small mistakes in the footage so that we could get our music video as close to perfection as possible. The same applies to the ancillary texts. We had undergo so many drafts of the CD and magazine advert work. At the end of the production of the music video we had realised what it takes to make real media products. For us gigabytes work of footage are reduced to a 150 megabyte music video and 12 hours worth of footage are reduced to a 4 minute long music video. Hundreds of pictures are reduced to 5 edited images. We had also thought about the amount of costs we had to incur including travel.

Now that the production part is over, I must now move onto evaluating the work we did.

Construction of the CD Front and Back Covers (Adobe Photoshop CS5)

Here is a video of how we constructed the CD front and back covers. We decided to build both front and back cover on one canvas to allow the background image to flow from front to back. We later split up the front from the back.

Stop Motion/Moving Picture Editing - Adobe After Effects CS5

We used Adobe After Effects to implement the stop motion/moving picture effect that we had planned for our music video. Prior to this, we had to sequence the JPEG images that we took during the filming of the memory scene at Wembley Arena. We used Adobe Premiere Pro to sequence the images, setting them really short durations, not long enough to make them look choppy and not short enough to make it too fluent. We have already shown proof that it is possible to create this effect previously, in the experimental footage shown earlier. The skills that we had to use were motion tracking. In addition masking and frame-by-frame editing were also used with this software. Although I had used frame-by-frame editing before, masking was a new thing to me that I had not used before and was not sure how to use it. I overcame this problem by experimentation and with trial and error. Eventually after getting the grasp of the general concept of masking, I created the stop motion effect.

SA - Tell Me You're Sorry - Music Video 3rd/Final Cut (HD)

Changes we made from 2nd cut to 3rd cut:

• Sandhya shutting the door on Zein scene (shot composition was changed - jump cut was removed and splitscreen effect was shortened)
• Graphic match between Sandhya's bedroom to Zein writing the letter was shortened
• Harrow revisited scene - Nikhil's face was too small so we zoomed into his and Sandhya's face, making it easier to identify Nikhil as not being Zein

SA - Tell Me You're Sorry - Music Video 2nd Cut (HD)

Changes we made from 1st cut to 2nd cut:

• Video aspect ratio changed from 4:3 to 16:9 widescreen
• Upscaling from SD (standard definition) to 720P HD
• Piano scene (camera angles were changed. Audio and video was out of sync. Hair style and sleeve position did not match the letter reading scene)

SA - Tell Me You're Sorry - Music Video 1st Cut

This is the first cut of our music video. It took a surprisingly short time