Update from Roisin

Sorry I haven't been blogging recently, i've had the flu for the past 2 weeks and can't look at screens for too long as I get a nasty headache! - I'm really pleased, and i'm sure everyone else is, at how the music video is progressing at the moment. We've had the chance to show it to a select few people and they've been impressed with the quality of the footage (thanks to the hd camera) and how organised we are!! We've all played to our strengths well; and I think we're finally starting to develop some solid roles within the group. We've all tried our hand at everything within the pre and post-production stages and it is definitely a balanced work ethic, with no-one in the group doing more or less.

Soon we will be focussing more on the smaller details of our music video; after the initial editing process is done it will all come down to perfection! (which some of us...all of us...are obsessed with when it comes to media!) The we will continue working on photoshop. Soon we shall be having discussions about the layouts and themes of our digi-pack and website and beginning to create those, We have all individually been looking at the resources given to us in order to carry out these pieces of work.

Overall, I'm really excited about how far we've come and how much has been done We're all really proud of how we've managed our time and soon it will be time for the evaluation - meaning a lot more blogging a lot more often! We have already started thinking about how we can make our evaluation more creative than last year's!

Editing

So finally editing is all rolling. We had to learn a few techniques because final cut is completely different to what are all used to. As a group we are far ahead of others and we have worked hard to get there. Photoshop is now our next challenge to over come but I feel that we will have no problem with it and come up with some very good photos which will help us with our website and digipack.

Final cut

On Mondays lesson we learnt the bases of how to use final cut, but with Roisin ill on that day, she has caught up very easily. With us all knowing how to use this programme now, we finally got some good editing done. Currently, we are in our exam period, so this has also made it hard for our group to get together outside of our lessons as we all need to do some last minute revision sessions at certain point. With the main bases of the video put together, now we are putting the last touches on. At this point, each member of our group needs to have the same amount of time editing because we all need to make sure that we are contributing the same amount.

Different strengths

Each member group has our own different strengths. Along with this, we all prefer different aspects of making the video. For example, some prefer the planning aspect to the filming of editing aspect. However, as we all our strengths and weaknesses, we can learn off each other and depend of each. This is why we have worked so well together and hopefully this will be soon through the final product of our music video.

Photoshop

With having one member of our group having used this programme before, we are looking at her for guidance. However, on Tuesday we played around with this programme as a group where we realised that we all needed to learn the basics of it again. However, playing around has made us use the some aspects that we wouldn't have tried if we were doing the photos for real and what we did try out, we found that we liked what we did. For the Winter photo, we need to colour over the blanket which our actor was lying on. After doing that, we realised that it didn't seem right and you could tell we did that. Therefore, we planned of putting the background out of focus which we found looked good. Along with this, we plan on putting a blue tint over the top to enhance the Winter season.

Editing Editing EDITING!

So after getting to grips with the crazily complicated programme that is Final Cut, our footage has been uploaded and is beginning to look like a brilliant music video.
Rachel (being the most 'iMac Literate' of the four of us) has been an absolute star and has really adopted editing well; she now has the difficult task of teaching the rest of us how to use final cut as well as she can! We are all dedicating various study periods and Lunchtimes to aiding the process and making sure the decisions taken are collective in creating an amazing final product.
Most of the 'skeleton' has been constructed already, we only have to work on the final chorus sequence. After that is completed, the focus can move nipping-and-tucking the footage to perfection; a stage which we always enjoy!

The group is also very impressed with the production and professional photographs taken by fiona; we have already identified a number of strong images in the running of key motif. Today, we experimented with the Art Programme 'Photoshop' in the hope of manipulating particular photos in order to more dramatically affiliate them with their corresponding season. At the moment, we are still learning the ins-and-outs of Photoshop (despite obtaining a little knowledge in my Art lessons, my overall skill is still rather rusty!) but I'm sure as with everything else A-Level media has thrown at us, we'll champion it eventually!!

Representations of women in music videos

Tonight on BBC3 there was a TV show about representations of women in music videos, particularly in the hip hop genre. Although our video doesn't fit into this genre, it was still very interesting, as we have specifically aimed our video at women in order to challenge the common stereotypes of women seen in many videos these days.

In the programme they specifically mention the negative image of females seen in the song 'Carry Out' by Timbaland feat. Justin Timberlake:



We have already spoken on here about how we plan to combat this in our own video, and so I won't bore you with more information about it, but I thought it was interesting that programmes highlighting this issue are finally being brought to the forefront of popular culture.

Here is a link to the show on iPlayer, if anyone wants to see it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/x1wz7/

Just some more pictures

Here are some more pictures of us filming our music video. These are showing the setting and the construction of our course work. These photos are from the summer and spring seasons.






Here are a couple of photos of the music sheets which helped our actor play the music in the black and white scene.

Just an update

Sorry I haven't been dropping in recently, exams are taking over. This is a little post to say that all of our group are looking forward to uploading our footage. We are very pleased with what we filmed and we are hoping that it will just look better when we put it on the computers. We then have many challenges ahead of us with tight deadlines, but the stress will be worth while when we see out final products.

Finished :)

Today I managed to get all the footage loaded onto my laptop as well as all the pics I took on my camera and the pics Fiona took. The shots we are going to use for the digi-pack look really professional, and with just a touch of a photoshop I'm hoping it will look lovely! As Gemma already mentioned, a massive thank youto everyone involved, and I hope to keep Amy (our actress) - as well as everyone else who gave up their time for us! - up to date with all the processes we will now be going through...Amy even wants to show our music video to her sixth form; in order to plea for a hd camera!! haha! Andeven though she was ill, she did extremely well and i'm so pleased looking back on the footage...So keep your eyes peeled folks! It's all downhill from here...We hope!! Well done guys :)

Here are some sneak peek pictures before I pick out the best ones of our shoots :)

More to come...