My Introduction

Hello! My name name is Alistair Price (candidate number 9137) and this is my A2 Media blog. As a member of group 1, I am working alongside Amber Mota (candidate number 9114) and Shayam Utting (candidate number 9164). To see my work, please use the labels on the right named "A2 Research and Planning", "A2 Construction" and "A2 Evaluation".

'Trip Switch' by Come What May

Our Album Cover

Our Album Cover
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Our Album Cover 2
Inside Digipak Panels
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Sunday 19 July 2015

1. Did you enjoy the main workshop shoot day? What role(s) did you take and what did you learn? What were your best bits and why?

Our director of photography: Jack
The main workshop day was easily the most useful and enjoyable day of the project. Everyone had gathered in the studio by 8am and by the time we had finished shooting it was close to 8pm, meaning the shoot day had lasted a whole twelve hours.
Our director: Dom
Therefore it was useful as experience for a real working day in the industry. During this time, when I wasn't performing, I was able to talk to our director and director of photography to further my understanding about their roles.


I was able to learn the
fundamentals of a variety of tasks
As we were shooting footage for three versions of the band, there were many times in which I had time to help out with the set. This ranged from acting as a cable-basher or dolly grip to more menial tasks like managing the clapper board and acting as a runner for the staff or students who were performing. Not only did my participation in these roles help to improve the speed and ease of the shoot, but it also allowed me to witness all of the tasks which were necessary for the shoot.


Our performance coach: Jasmine
When it came to the performance, I quickly realised that it requires a lot more thought rather than strumming in time to the music. Talking to our performance coach, Jasmine, made me realise that the best performance requires the whole band to look natural and professional. This means that we all had to be comfortable with the roles we were playing and also interact with eachother, rather than focusing solely on our own performance. With this mindset, our performance was much more enjoyable and we were able to get some pretty difficult shots quite quickly.


I enjoyed the entirety of the shoot day, but I have to admit that the performance was much more enjoyable than I had expected at the start of the project. However, it was still very useful to balance the time performing with technical work, as well as time spent talking to the staff and runners.
Not everyone in our class felt comfortable with the performance, but thankfully all of us in our group were very committed, which resulted in some footage which looked brilliant in the final edit:

Saturday 18 July 2015

2. What have you learnt from participating in prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

Task 1 - The audition
Considering the emotion behind
each line was very important
Our first task of the project was to produce an audition video, which would determine which member of the band we would be. This was our first experience of acting in front of the camera, so we spent a lot of time planning out the actions we would perform during the song. We also incorporated various lip-syncing techniques to ensure that our performance looked as convincing as possible. Some of these techniques were obvious such as actually singing the song, but others required more attention, such as thinking about the way each lyric should be performed and the feeling behind each line. 

Whilst we were familiarising ourselves with the audition process, I realised that the actions that I should perform were actually much more complicated than I had assumed. As I was auditioning for the role of the lead guitarist or the bass guitarist, I decided to attune my performance to these roles. However, this obviously had its limitations. In the end, I decided to just perform a variety of moves so that the audition didn't seem too stale.

Task 2 - Practising the performance
In order to refine this performance, there were a couple of things I did to practice. I own an acoustic guitar at home, which allowed me to replicate the performance more closely. However, the majority of my practice time was spent listening to the song; specifically to the electric guitar. It was important for me to learn how each note was being played, how quickly or slowly the guitarist was strumming and so on. This later meant that it was easier to sync my playing to the track.

Task 3 - Costume, hair and make-up
By this point, we had started thinking about costume. I had been given the role of the lead guitarist, which meant that I need a black jacket, yellow t-shirt, red skinny jeans and black shoes. We were able to gather a lot of clothing for everyone's costume, but the bigger issue was finding clothing that was both similar to that worn in the video and comfortable for the performer. 


As for makeup, it was decided that I would have part of my hair sprayed orange. On top of t¬his, the general theme that we were aiming to achieve was that of a punk-rock band, so makeup was applied with this intention. 




Task 5 - The edit
After the shoot, we had one week to edit our footage. Our priority was to edit a sequence which was as close to the original music video as possible. However, this did not come at the cost of overall quality. If there was ever a shot missing or if there were any other problems, we would use the best possible shot; even if it weren't as accurate to the real video.
By using the method of laying a performance bed, we were able
to find the shots we needed for each setup quickly and easily.

Our approach to the editing phase was quite different to what we have done previously. Rather than just picking out clips from a take, we had to lay the whole take out into the timeline. From there, we synced the take to the real song and cut out the necessary clips from the take. This method is called "laying a performance bed", and it allowed us to deal with a large number of setups more easily, as well as being much quicker than finding, syncing and cutting each clip consecutively. With this method, we were able to finish editing our music video within the deadline.

Friday 17 July 2015

3. Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

Our finished edit:

Ali and Iggy - Misery Business Remake SD from Latymermedia on Vimeo.
Having finished our editing and taken some time to step away and review it critically, I am very happy with what we have been able to produce. The quality of our finished remake is much higher than I had expected at the start of the project due to the nature of the music video. The video for Misery Business is very hyper-kinetic, and I feel as though we were able to replicate this in our performance and editing very well.
The top shot is framed quite well, but the
bottom shot, one of our groups takes,
is not framed as well

With this said, we did fall victim to a number of limitations during both the shoot and the editing process. On the shoot day, we had an allotted space of time to gather all of the necessary footage for three versions of the band. Needless to say, this proved to be quite the challenge when time become more of a problem. Due to these constraints, some of the planned setups had to be merge, whereas in more extreme cases, mistakes began to occur.

The shots on the right show a comparison of setup 15, with group 3's shot on the top and our group's shot on the bottom. As you can see the framing of group 3's shot is closer to the original than our group's. With this said, minor framing issues are not too bad since shots from each setup are spread out sparsely throughout the video.
With this said, I feel as though some of our shots looked really great after we finished editing them. Although we weren't able to completely replicate the effects in the music video due to software limitations, we were able to successfully in mimic the over-exposure in some of the scenes using a video effect on Adobe Premiere Pro called Luma Corrector.


Furthermore, we were able to grade our shots effectively. Comparing the same shot with and without the grading shows how big a difference it made. The top shot is the original, whereas the bottom shot is graded.

Overall, I am very happy with our final edit. I believe we have recreated the video to a very high quality, whilst still maintaining a professional look where the shots were not as close to the original. Remaking this music video has given me great guidance in preparation for next year.

Thursday 16 July 2015

4. How do you think your prelim experiences will impact your approach to next term's music video coursework?

Participating in the music video remake has had a huge impact on my approach to the music video coursework next year. Previously, I was unaware of how different a music video shoot and a short film shoot was. Furthermore, I've realised the importance of planning ahead: we were expecting to finish the shoot at 6pm, but the studio was booked until 8pm in case we suffered delays. This proved to be the case, meaning we would have missed a lot of footage if we had not had those two extra hours.
The call sheet for the shoot day was integral.
The other major impact that the preliminary exercise had was the attitude towards performing. Not only did we all underestimate the technicalities of a performance, but without the prelim I doubt any of us would have felt comfortable acting in our music videos. Reflecting on the behind the scenes video that was shot reveals how we all warmed up to our roles. If we maintain our enthusiasm from the prelim in our approach to our coursework next term, I imagine most of us would be willing to act in our own productions.

Beyond that, I learnt about the various roles that are necessary for the shoot, ranging from that of the director and camera operator to hair, make-up and costume. All of these departments must work together cohesively or problems begin to emerge. Observing the crew in action has given me an insight on how to manage my own music video production in order to ensure that the final cut is perfect.

The shoot day was an unforgettable experience thanks to the hard work of our crew. Our director Dom, our director of photography Jack, our assistant director Chris and our performance coach Jasmine were some of the key figures, but everyone in the crew including our runners and costume teams were vital to the success of the remake.
A behind the scenes video and a highlights video courtesy of Josh Stevenson and Jack Downes




This time lapse video reveals just how much setup was required to make this remake possible.