From Preliminary to Now

Since creating my Prelim task at the beginning of the course My skills have advanced a lot and I have learnt so much, during every part of the process. But like most projects we still had our problems, finding actors, technical difficulties e.t.c however I think we overcame these well.

As the person responsible for filming, I was in charge of setting up the shot and making sure that when filming, the things in shot were framed well. This wasn't new to me as being a photography student I spend most of the time looking at things and framing them, however as most of our film is set outside and in a forest, it was more challenging finding different ways and interesting ways to frame it.

For example in this shot from the dream sequence it is part of a continuous sequence and when filming i mades rue that i got the two trees either side of him because it makes a bit of a frame inside the picture. Then when filming behind him you still have the trees next to him only further away.
When filming I made sure that when I was filming the singing parts, my actor being the singer was really moving his mouth. I did this because it made it easier to lip synch the video to music in the post production stage. This was difficult enough as it was, but by making my actor over emphasise his movements it was easier. As this was one of the most important aspects to get right, this took us the longest to get right. When filming we played the music so that our actor knew how fast to sing which made it easier when synching. However during the post-production stage it was a lot harder to get the lip synching perfect and to make the lips to the words exactly. However there are a few moments where it was impossible to get it exactly in time. I don't think this hindered the overall product as it still looks quite professional.

When we were creating our storyboard we had quite a clear idea of how we wanted it to look and the overall effect. However over time this changed dramatically. Once we had filmed all the footage we had planned we went to put it in the video but we discovered that for where we had planned to put clips they didn't fit and that we had too much footage. So in order to fit it all, we had to cut some of the clips and ended up changing some of the order of the clips, but not too much so it didn't make sense. We understood from our audience feedback that the narrative still made sense and that they understood what was going on.
This wasn't a problem that we had anticipated so doing this has made me more flexible in my ideas and  has made me trust in my own abilities because at the part that was different to our storyboard we were having to wing it slightly and edit it without any help.

During my AS coursework I didn't really comprehend how useful and essential audience feedback is, but now I can see that it is an essential part of the process. Having audience feedback was so important when creating a music video with a narrative because they were accepting that the narrative made sense and especially with ours, as it was quite a complex narrative, we needed to make sure that it definitely made sense. Luckily all our audience feedback was positive and they said it made sense.