Practical Skills Evaluation

 The Final

Practical and Professional skills I've covered but it's time to see how well I covered them.

Looking at camera and lighting I feel that I have covered everything necessary here, I have gone into good detail about the various areas such as what lighting is best for the right situations when filming providing decent advice into what lighting products work best for the right circumstances. When discussing DSLR basics and ISO usage I feel that I covered the right details and gave good advice based off of it, while providing examples of what I talk about to demonstrate points and show what happens when talking about the various settings and other accessories when doing so.

However I do feel that I had some weakness to in the work that I did for this area, for example when discussing standard lighting for photography studios, I only covered the basics of what the area had and only really covered the basic idea behind each lighting type rather than discussing not only that but real world application of these techniques.

In future I need to remember that while analysing and providing examples of what each technique can do is good showing and giving real life applications and effectiveness is also necessary as that's where they'll be used more than how they have been used in the past.

The next area to cover is legal and health. I covered this exceptionally well as I gave some strong real world examples and scenarios as well as relating them to the current project.

In relation to health I covered all applicable situations that could arise from doing certain pieces of work or projects, it covers damages to camera operators, actors and others around the area while the project is underway and how best to cover them from these incidents should they occur. However it's not just damages to people directly but indirectly like having something wet around electrical sockets etc.

When covering the idea of legal I feel like this was my biggest strength. I covered all possible legal conflicts or ideas when making a production from copyright to fair usage and actor regulation. I made sure that every aspect showed what each part does and more importantly how these aspects would impact the production and how I would help move it along from there.

The next time I do a project like this the improvements would be based on the lesser amount of detail that I gave to the health aspect of productions as while the multiple posts gave them good coverage I feel that there was still aspects I could have given more details to or maybe instead of giving a great focus to the real world part of the development I could instead have provided more considerations that might not be known to most but still give importance to the production as a whole.

Lastly would be planning and how effective I was at doing so. In the first project I covered planning to a heavy degree, talking about shot lists and equipment as well as budgeting and other such necessities for a large scale production.

For the promotional video I feel that this was my strongest area as I gave great detail to every important area within it and showed how each of these details impacted my decision. I feel that my strongest piece in this was discussing the budgeting as I provided greater detail from this and demonstrated how these details would impact the choices I make for my project.

The music video was weaker I didn't give as much detailed analysis of the same areas as before and what I did cover was flimsy and didn't capture what I discussed to the same effect as in previous projects. I only gave small pieces of what each was alongside what I was using them for.

For future projects and other such ideas I need to dedicate the same amount of time to the each area in order to make sure that they're all as effective as each other to give me the best result for my project which helps me to ensure that I'm getting a quality product by the end. 

Editing Review

 Review overall

With the end of the units I feel that it's important to cover everything that I have done that involves editing, from things I've made to assessing other works.

Starting with how I have assessed other works, when I looked at Jaws I assessed how the edits were put together in order to give greater meaning for the scenes. I felt that I covered this area well, I covered all the camera shots alongside how they were edited in place in order to seem sequential or how those edits created meaning. An example of this is found when I covered the edits between the characters talking and how the edit of jumpcutting to the protagonist showed the isolation compared to his peers.

Now this is not to say that I couldn't improve, for example I could have gone into more detail about why there was such little editing within that scene and how that helped to boost the impact of the scene as there was a primay focus on the two around the table or how the simple cuts were used more than others that were too.

Easy Rider was a less than strong argument about how editing was used. For a start there was little to no assessing of the actual edits themselves but more of a recap in what was used, I also only referenced them in a proper light when refereeing to them in the context of other pieces of the scene meaning that there was no cohesion in how I looked at the topic.

For next time when I look at this idea, I should have more dedicated to the editing techniques, what they are, how effectively they're used but most importantly the impact they have on the scene and the audience overall as this will give me not only better detail when assessing these edits but gives me more of an idea of how that could impact the scene later on.

When I discussed the rules of cinematography in talking about shots, I mentioned how these were edited together (should they need it) in order to create a strong scene. As this mention was only breif however I feel that I gave the detail necessary to be understood about how it relates to the largeer set as a whole.

I could have given more detail about why these shots needed to be edited together for the scenes to achieve their effect, for example in the shot reverse shot, which would have made my point on why its important to the set-up stronger but I feel that I achieved what I needed to for this are despite this.

For the music videos I'll give a brief summary of each below:

In the Katy Perry video I covered the impact some of the chosen edits had on the video as a whole and more importantly how that gave an extra layer of meaning and depth to the song overall. I feel that my coverage explained how impactful these edits were to a basic level and gave a brief explanation as to why it had this impact.

I could have given some better inclusion to these edits and talked about them in more detail such as explaining an idea of why certain ones are used the way they are. I also didn't cover them in the right way, it was in the context of talking about the narrative of the video itself rather than dedicating its own section to make my points clear and just giving the context of the shot.

For the Tenacious D video I briefly go over what's needed but it's in no way detailed and barely covers what happens in the video for the edits to be effective enough to cover the true effect of the edits within the video itself and therefore any detailed analysis or results that I could have gained from it which would impact my own work.

In future I should remember to give explicit details about the editing as a whole and relate it back to my own work to assess the impact it could have on my own production.

Onto my own productions:

The first is my new wave film. Within this I feel that I managed to achieve some goals, for example I gained meaning from edits by having them demonstrate certain effects and impacts that I wanted my production to have, for example using a disorientating transition in order to demonstrate a passage of time but also to show the characters dizziness and confusion in a literal sense but using this method also gave the audience the same feeling of confusion. The sequence in which its edited together does show a clear story narrative in a focused order and everything was put into the place for it and worked well with each piece within it.

Improvements I could have made are to maybe make it a bit more clear about the story arc or given it a bit more of a clear focus to the actual thing itself. The transitions could've been a lot smoother too between scenes and making sure that each one had a clear purpose for being used.

For next time I think stronger plannign would give me a better result and clearer focus and structure to what I had to make, but it would also give me something to proof my final product against to see how it compares to what I had envisioned over a guide of what I want done.

The last is the music video. This was my worst, the edits emphasized the idea I wanted but were sloppy in use and placement, contrary to typical music videos the edits that I used here did nothing to amplify the lyrics of the song or the visuals themselves of the video. The use of them was bad too, it seemed to be just for the use of that changing from one scene to the next.

In  future I need a better dedicated structure for what I want to get out of the video and how well what I've chosen to do goes with the lyrics of the song which gives strong amplification of the song used in order to hghlight more meaning to it. 

Evaluation Part 1-The Plan

 Where Did I Go Wrong?

So now we come to the bit which all artists fear. The evaluation. Now this will be in two parts the first being my plan and strategy and the next will be of the final product that has come out of the plan.

With that lets get to it, so I'll break down each section of the plan like I did in its dedicated post and discuss the good and bad points about it and where I could improve.

First I'll cover the legal and health concerns and how I worked around them. Overall I think that in terms of the considerations I looked at all the necessary bases that I needed to in order to make sure that the final video is successful but that more importantly if there's any legal problems in regards to distribution. The first point I made was about royalties, now looking back at it I can see that while it was important and necessary to cover I won't be making money off of this however looking in a broader perspective it will be good to go over at least once. The other consideration that I feel was covered well was the fact of legal ownership and rights to the intellectual property and the consequences thereof.

Now onto what I consider to be the worst parts of the plan, as I'm sure that you can tell my planning was not great from the get-go it wasn't detailed at all in the right places and was all too brief for the scale of project that I was working on, going backwards from how I structured it in the post.

So other logistics I needed to spread it out more and give better detail into each one even if I didn't to clarify what each section was due to it being covered in a separate section, looking at it now the other significant logistics are all but non-existent and the only good thing was the look at the equipment for the production.

The second part would be the idea portion of the plan, while I feel it was good to scrap the original plan and use something I felt confident with I shouldn't have ditched the first project entirely as it had a somewhat planned out back-up incase things didn't workout and that should have carried over to the project that I am currently doing. In future what I or whoever does a similar project need to cover is the idea that a back-up is necessary for when things don't go right and make sure that it's viable for the project at large and work it into the plan.

The Evaluation 2-The Video

 

 Here we go the be all end all. The fruits of my labors and I have to say that it's rather plain and a bit dull.

So before I get into what went horribly wrong lets go through what was actually okay. For a start I felt that the transitions were okay, they worked well with the effect theme that I was going for in terms of a VHS style by using static to signify the change in what the primary visual is on the screen. On this area I like the overlay that I managed to put together for this as it helped to achieve the goal of home made that I wanted to achieve when planning out this video. There's not much to break down for the audio so I won't cover it as it's just the unedited band audio.

Back to the video and I think that the live video shots were alright. They weren't perfect or what I thought I could get out of it but for the purposes that I needed it worked well.

Now we get to the worst and where it went bad boogle, starting with where I left off above with the real time cinematography. The quality of the recordings was awful, the lighting wasn't anywhere near as consistent or developed as it should have been and the angle wasn't symmetric enough for the effect to fully work, now what was captured failed as well as the video files weren't originally compatible with what I was doing so there was no proofing on what settings the camera therefore it made an inferior product.

The synchronicity of how the visuals were aligned is really off as well, when you look at a typical music video you look at one of the examples that we've used for this area ordinarily the artist pre-records the audio then the visuals are aligned in time with the right balance between the audio and what's being shown on screen to get the full effect of the song as it were. It's not just this that caused big problems but matching the beat is way off too. Generally using the beat to mark where certain points go is vital as it can make or break the flow and unfortunately that's where I dropped the obvious ball for this area. 

Another point is that there's no general story or narrative behind the images I've used in order to reach any of the two ideas that I have discussed previously or the theory behind the original video that made it so successful.

Music Video Analysis 3-Human by Rag'n'Bone Man

What's Over Here?

 Alright now we come to a more recent number in that it was produced in 2016 and breaks up what we've seen so far in quite a few ways. In the past few posts we've spoken about star iconography and how this is used to sell the song more than the song itself and how its the brand of what the celebrity is sells the song. 

So if we look at this first there's a bit of it but it's not as explicit and in your face as some of the other songs that we've looked at so far it's just the artist stood however its more of a narrative message than any of the other videos we've seen. It's equality. Think about the lyrics and the visuals that accompany them, "I'm only human after all." followed by a blur shot of various different people and singular focus before going back to the artist once again which demonstrates a deeper meaning behind the visuals of the video itself.

This video works on a deep level as it tries to demonstrate an idea that we're all people and it uses interesting techniques to make sure that we understand this, I have spoken about Illustration before in this area and it does apply here as it does show a true visual of the lyrics but it has more of an impact behind it as it accompanies what's being said.

This does help to become further impacted by the environment brought by seemingly filmed in location at an abandoned warehouse helping to give this idea that we are all one in the same but isolated giving the song extra layers of depth and meaning.

Looking at this we can see a lot of inspiration from the ideas of Andrew Goodwin, in short one of his ideas comes from the thought of the visuals are more important than the audio of the song and that it should appeal to everyone and this is an idea that's represented within the video itself. The visuals are more definite to see this idea forward by having the main visual of the video being the change of person with certain audio cues.  

The Legal

 Why No Health?

So now get onto the big and the juicy bit again the Legal problems faced with making a video like this but first lets address something.

There's a limit to the amount of health concerns in this type of production. This is down to two primary reasons the first of which being restrictions, due to the COVID restrictions that have been presented and passed I'm not able to utilize as many resources as I would do normally which brings down the health and safety risks a bit. The second thing is limiting the use of original footage which come with it and doing that means that I limit the amount of people involved in this project which helps in terms of keeping things narrow.

I have spoken about legal and health in a previous post (See Promotional Video Tag) however this is an entirely different circumstance with new rules and methods of achieving the end goal for the entire project as a whole.

Now the big and the bad, the legal that hangs over every project and with something like this there's a few big doozies that need to be covered. In a video project like this there's an obvious thing to cover and that's the legality and licensing behind the music/audio used in this video. Since any and all music is licensed and protected in its own way is fully protected by copyright it means that how I proceed will need to be careful as there is no protections that I have which will make this claimable for profit.

Two stages would need to be completed before I could do this the first giving a portion to the official owners of the song and its rights in this case would be the band 'Tenacious D' and the production company there of as they own all the rights to anything made off of it as royalties.

A Royalty is a small portion of profit to be paid out to any owning company for the song or material used when in being used for monetized purposes, it works in a similar way to when you buy a song off of a platform like Spotify. You can pay a predetermined amount of cash for the track, some of that will end up with the platform company while some will go to whoever gets paid the royalty amount which is ordinarily the band or the record company depending on the owner for the rights.

The second is actually talking about the rights themselves, see when you hear in a private establishment a piece of established music like say 'OOPS! I DID IT AGAIN' by Britney Spears there's a license that the company or organization has submitted in order to be able to play and use that set of music within a commercial setting as its copyrighted and protected against usage through an unlawful or 'unlicensed' manner. This helps to protect the owner of the rights and ensures that they get a return and that their intellectual property is protected proceeding but it also helps to protect the companies using it from any unnecessary legal preceding's.

Obviously there's a work around from this and that's use royalty free music. This is free to use and doesn't require all of this technical jargon, but for argument sake its necessary to mention and learn as it's important especially to this project.

Now as I do not have any of this in anyway as the standard cost for a license like this can be anywhere between £300-£400 and this wouldn't help with a second condition of this project and that's the fact that I plan to post this on big social platform so unless I indicate in someway that I am legally covered I do not get the chance to use this in a financial way and posting it onto sites like YouTube mean that the end product will be placed on an unlisted method until this is sorted and it will also block me from being able to possibly monetize it.

Neither of this is a problem as I have no intention of gaining profit and I will share the link elsewhere meaning that the final product will still have reach and impact it will just be in a more indirect manner than before. 

The Plan

 What do I wanna do?

This is a reiteration of what I wanted to do for my last project (the promotional video) as such I won't go into too much depth with these as I covered them to a greater extent in a set of previous posts but I will still cover all of the necessary bases that are required so you get a good idea of what I'm thinking.

Mood Board

So we'll start with the basics of any good production plan and that's the mood board. Now all of you know what a mood board is from a previous post that I made from the last project that involved it, so I won't cover it to much but in essence it's a stage of the plan where you take inspiration from evidence around you and make sure that everything you have is relevant to the project that you wanna make and develop it to make some sense and have it as almost like a proof of concept.

Having the board is essentially like saying "Hey this technique or idea is interesting, I think it could be applied to X through my video and it'll add the layer I'm looking for." so you draw from it in order to get yours to be as unique as possible from outside sources.

So this would be my board, four videos to demonstrate where I took my ideas from. 3 out of 4 of them feature the main artist stationary in some way and one follows a narrative in some way.

This I thought would be a good way to start having some thoughts about what I wanted to get out of it. Given my small amount of resources I decided that making a video using this trend would be a good idea, with the thought of making sure it had a comedic edge to it as this would suit the type of song well.

Taking the idea of a narrative worked well too, this would enable some good planning and projections to make sure that I more control over what I could produce and more importantly will help me to make sure that and it would be great in helping to create a structure making sure I match videos to the beat of the audio.

 Examining the existing video

As this is essentially a remake of an existing video I need to look at what ideas are present inside it as well as what techniques are used to ensure that I make sure to not step on anyone's toes and avoid some serious bite back. This examination has already been written about in a post previously, titled Music Video analysis 2 where I break the video down and talk about some of the ideas techniques and images that they use.

What's the idea?

So now I have looked at the video and thought about some ideas from other ones too and have decided that making my video will be making it in a more comedic sense of things as this will be a good idea to make sure it gets a more wider appeal. It also follows in with the theme idea of the original video itself as much as it is a serious rock type it lets itself be silly with some cheesy effects and ideas itself so I was going to play off the basic of the comedic element from the footage I have in order to make sure that I get it to look bad but work it so that it becomes almost the point.

So after talking to a few people in the form of surveys and a focus group I got a clearer idea of what direction would be best in order to make this project a success. A suggestion that came out of the focus group was to have the footage to look like an old VHS style using an overlay which was a great idea to play the minimalist and to get the full effect of the minimal that I was looking for.

So using the feedback from those areas I can now develop it a bit more, so using the idea of minimal but adding to it by making it seem like a home movie using static for transition from time to time to make sure to keep up this aesthetic. The main purpose behind me doing this is to have the video match the lyrics in a narration form whilst keeping in with the idea of star iconography and other such things.

The Times

So as I have discussed previously discussed setting up a schedule in order to keep up with times and keeping an orderly production is key. Now in the last project I already discussed what a Gantt Chart is and why they're important so I'll keep the summary quick and light, so this helps to give a quick showing of how long the project will take in a more visual style and helps to show a client or team how long you want to spend on each section of the project.

Here is my schedule blocked out into different sections based on the different stages of the production. I kept it to the same style of my previous project as when I was structuring out the various sections for this one the structure of where time was dedicated felt good and that each section had enough of its own dedicated time which lets me ensure this project gets the full quality that the final product deserves.

Now on the face you might think that the various considerations that I made from the last project (see Promotional Video Tag) would just factor in, while this is true not every part is the same for example the filming section links within the planning more, I have spoken in previous posts about how different a music video is to the standard type of video that everyone is used to as it follows different patterns like iconography or choreography which means that you need to plan around it to have an idea on the basic structure to make sure that all of that is incorporated to the best level possible and to a capacity that means the goals are fulfilled (which more often than not is selling the artist and their brand.)

Remaining Logistics

So with all of these ideas and other plans coming together there's still a lot to talk about so I'm going to quickly go over what's left of the planning stage here before moving. 

In essence there is little to no storyboarding related to this type of project as much as it is a recreation of an original music video it almost becomes a fan-made tribute so there wasn't as much planning behind many of the shots in the production but it also helped to keep in with the idea of this to make it as corny and home-made looking as possible so using  minimalist planning and structure helps to achieve that goal.

Equipment list is small too, I've summarized everything I'll need in the production below:

• Camera-Standard DSLR with a basic rig- Free
• Tripod-Normal and used for stability when filming- Free
• Inflatable Guitar-Prop for great usage in filming to help provide the sense of a guitar as back-up incase main prop gets lost or damaged- Free
• Microphone-To help in an emphasis of singing and mark a shift within the edit- Free
• Book-This will help me to mark beginning and end points on the video but also provide a good point of reference for the calmer bits of the song- Free

Everything here has a reason for its involvement as I have stated above and everything that has been used in this production is free as I have it on hand in one capacity or another.