Monday, 29 November 2010

account of rough cut

We have completed our rough cut of we are rockstars, we made a narrative thought the video of Felix, our singer editing the video on minority report like screen, we cut this together with the dance and performance aspects of our video. We are workingh on green screen effects now, as all of our shots of editing will be from the green screen shots. The first cut that we made was a cut without any green screen shots, jusrt the dance and performance aspects, we were planning on adding the green screen shots in after we had completed this. We stopped this idea after a while though because it was hard to cut the green screen shots in, we then started from scratch using some of the shots we had already cut together but with a different feel, this is when we decided that he should be editing the video instead of looking for a girl at a party.
The basic idea of our new cut was that we would have felix at the green screen adding different aspects slowly into the viseo, so starting with the white performance room, then the black smoke room and the dancers shots. We had kept the beatmarkers already set down from our first cut and this meant that it was a lot easier to edit as we were cutting to the beat of the music or sometimes on off beats. Because of this however the shots seemed very fast and jumpy so we decided to elongate some of the preferred shots so that they spread out across the time more. We now have a variety of longer shots and groupings of fast short ones.
Now what we need is to do our after effects on the green screen room, making it look as if felix is editing the video on his own screen. This takes a lot of time and I think it will be our hardest task yet because of how complicated it can be. We had to have completed our rough cut before we edited the green screen room because the shots have to match up with the shots on his minority report like screen. When we have finished this it will add a lot more sense and flow to the video.

Thursday, 11 November 2010

account of shoot day














On the morning of our shoot day, we gathered all of our dancers and band members after breakfast. We had already prepared the set for our performance room the night before. The dancers were sent with Megan and Cat to go through basic dance sequences, most of our dancing was however improvised. Me and george were in the studio preparing our band and doing the last touches to the set, we had a few dry runs with the band so that they knew the feel of the song as a group and how we wanted them to perform. Most of our band had learnt the song on their chosen instruments and our singer felix had learn the lyrics, this made the whole performance much easier to conduct.

Our first room was the performance room, this was a pure white room with the instruments and speakers set up. We found that setting up the speakers and the instruments was the easy bit of filling our set but plugging all the wires in to all the speakers and synth was time consuming. We managed to wrap up the performance room in about an hour, and whilst we were finishing up, megan and cat started to paint the girls in uv body paint. They wanted to achieve a mix of different patterns with a tribal underlying theme. The girls came back into the room and the paint looked good but not incredible, then we turned on the uv lights and they just lit up. It looked incredible. The paint had been placed so that as our dancers moved and contorted with the music the bends were elaborated. This looked incredible. Megan directed the girls dancing from the sequence she had prepared and the freestyle element. Some of our dancers could perform tricks such as jumps and back bends which looked very effective in the uv.

After a short 30 minute lunch break we gathered felix, our singer and our dancers and we had set up our laser room, we had six red laser pens and 6 green laser pens, we got our dancer to stand and dance with the lights off and smoke machine on, we then lit her up from both sides with the laser pointers. This looked very good in the room but I was doubtful about what it would look like on the camera as it was not me filming at that time. But looking back on the footage, it really looked amazing. We had to slow the shutter speed down very much so that the effect could be amplified which gave it a blurry movement look but still very good. We then did shots of all the girls dancing with the lasers on them in the room but it was hard to illuminate all of them at one time as we only had 12 laser pens. But this still worked very effectively. We shot a variety of different shots in this room to give us more room when editing for change.

We then set up a green screen room and had our lead singer do hand movements as if he was in a minority report type computer, this looked quite funny as it was just green screen but once we have edited it and added sfx then it should look amazing.

Our final room was a dry ice room, this was a dancing aspect again and we gathered the dancers. We had had great problems earlier on in the day as we were not sure whether the dry ice was going to arrive, due to their being a problem with the delivery. But in the end it came. This did mean that we had to save this room until last when we had planned on shooting it earlier in the day. But it worked out being the best order of shooting anyway.

I felt that the shoot day went incredibly well despite some minor problems with the dry ice and the uv paint on the girls starting to crack. It was a very successful shoot and I look forward to the editing process.