Director's Commentary - Task 4

1. We first found the song ‘Young Love’ on an iPod belonging to a member of our group, liking the song we began researching ‘The Mystery Jets’ and their original video. We found them to be young, fun and quirky and so tried to incorporate these concepts in our own video. When on location we used a Sony PD 170 camera to film the stop motion shots that involved food, and of the feedback we received the most positive was in reference to the stop motion filming. This type of animation has been in use since 1898 and is created by making an object appear to move on its own by physically manipulating it by small increments between individually photographed frames. It creates a fun quirky atmosphere and is in some ways a hermeneutic code.
On the shoot day we used playback in the studio for the band to play along to whilst we watched them on an LCD TV monitor. This technology was put in place in order for us to maintain correct framing while shooting and for the band to be able to hear the song clearly. The lighting director controlled our pink “mover” lights in the studio using an app on his iPhone connected to the Chansys Magic Q lighting desk in the studio. In order to capture this lighting we brought photographers in on the day to take images of the band in action; this was also because we intended to use these pictures for our ancillary products.

2. To edit we used a programme called Final Cut Pro on G5 Macs in the edit suite, here we created our timeline by layering a series of sequences on top of a main wide shot sequence individually. Because we had two very different locations and we wanted to make sure our band appeared organically made, we had to cut between the two locations as equally as possible. We also cut down our song that was too long, using a programme called Wave pad so as to give the video a clean finish.
In the editing programme; After Effects we coloured and graded our finished piece to give it a more professional look, we also tried to create a split screen sequence with a ‘falling hearts’ backdrop but this was not possible in the end. When creating our poster and Digipak cover we used the Adobe CS2 Version of Photoshop on ----- computers. Here we used the healing brush, clone tool and blur tool among others to give our band member’s a slight make over so as to attract more audience members.

3. We then uploaded our finished product to internet social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Blogger in order to receive useful feedback. We also analysed our work by creating a focus group and setting up a showing of our video using an interactive board and an over-head projector. We also gave the group questionnaires to fill out for feedback purposes. Overall we feel that our end product was successful in using digital technology that was not commonly used 10 years ago, however, if we were to film the video again we would definitely use more stop motion filming because our audience feedback suggested that this was the most successful part of our video.