Filming&Editing&Tweaking

 In terms of filming we have x2 shoots left to complete. From the start we knew our ambitions were extreme & our hopes were possibly unrealistic. We knew that blunders would block our path & something that has been extremely tricky is reliability of key actors & extras - as of course an industry production company would have the budget to pay for casting directors, an experienced cast & in turn their commitment. The reason i am drawing on this particular issue is that currently our lead male singer has fallen ill which has completely postponed our performance filming. originally we aimed to acquire an already formulated band to sing the performance pieces (which would  then be inter cut with our narrative), however the commitment of those we asked faltered and thus we made the decision to only use our lead male in the video itself & not feature an entire group. So far he has been fantastic : taken direction well, looked good on the camera, and been extremely punctual & reliable, however falling ill is hardly his fault, but it is slowing down our production line. 
                                                

We want to film him watching our lead female travel through the decades on a television - in the first established location (reiterating a place of comfort & one reminiscent of their relationship). We aimed to convey his constant presence in her mind, and his continual protection over her, even when separated unrealistically by years and years of history. In terms of this shoot we have orchestrated all costumes, props & planned hair style & makeup (blemish coverage & guy liner). We are however yet to upload the footage onto a disc (for the 'TV' effect). Though is only because we want to wait until we have shot our final era, as then we will have a clear idea of all the transitions & of the chronological order of the footage.


  

We have had to majorly cut down the footage on our timeline in order to make way for this shoot & the performance. We did actually debate cutting it altogether, especially because the performance needs to be almost equal to the narrative in terms of screen time & our song is a relatively short piece of music, which means we have an extremely acute time frame to play with. However I did really fight to keep this shoot in as i felt the aesthetics would help to create more of a complete piece of work. I knew we could experiment majorly with  symbolism & rely upon signifying features in order to make this era easily recognisable & visually powerful. Before we planned to shoot some 1970's punk rockers in a public place, clowning around, acting rebelliously - stereotyping typical hedonistic behaviour. However I thought the concept of using a protest to represent an era flooded with anarchy & resistance (for example Vietnam, Nuclear weaponry & Russia,). Thus we plan to film a slightly larger cast that anticipated running with banners as if off to protest (giving a clear impression of their actions without actually filming hundreds and hundreds of people at a protest). Using a larger cast makes organizing slightly more challenging in some respects, but in others it means we can be slightly less picky about casting (we were previously restricted to merely 'punky style people').. So we spent quite a lot of our meeting today making mock 'anti-vietnam' posters - as well as editing & blogging.

 


So far we have:

*Uploaded all of our footage from - the modern day & 1980's & 1950's & 1940's & 1920's
*chronologically ordered the footage
*Cut down all acquired clips to the correct size
*Altered the speed of clips 
*Reversed parts of actions, for example : at the end the entire sequence is played on rewind as if she is being thrust back into the present day 
*Reversed actors movements - EG: coffee shop scene - slowed & reversed the lead male's movements in order to extend the drama
*Added slow motion 
*Starting colour correcting (currently in this process & debating whether to set some eras in black&white and sepia)
*Removed unneeded sound & uploaded our artists track onto the timeline
*Cropped certain shots & zoomed in, in order to gain a wider variety of close ups as we were majorly lacking in them & desperately needed to artificially create some in order to a.) embody a greater sense of variety in our shots (more visually interesting) and b.) remain faithful to the conventions of music video.