Editing continued.

Today we continued to finalising our editing. We are now in the penultimate stage of the process and working on the little tweaks & tying up all loose ends. There have been many things which have unfortunately been unachievable to complete, i really wanted to film the 1970's for example - finally deciding that we could use a wig wham i own & have our protagonist emerging into a world of 'free love' with people grouped round an acoustic guitar, wearing tie-die, long patterned skirts, loose shirts, and having their hair loose, long, wavy, and decorated with flowers. I felt this era would be able to give the piece that flash of colour that it desperately needed.

  

 Yet though this would have been aesthetically pleasing due to others exams & the robbery slowing down our filming availability (not to mention the lack of help for fellow students due to their own coursework deadlines & stress!) we were unable to orchestrate this decade. Another issue is the quality of our footage, the school cameras we used for most of the music video were extremely outdated, and naturally the clips (once imported) weren't as sharp as we'd have liked them to be. For our performance pieces however Grace's camera -  top end piece of equipment, was available for use (It was being mended prior to these filming sessions) which made a huge impact on the visual worth of the images. These aspects were unfortunately out of our hands, and today we felt it was important to just stop for a minute & work out strategically all the steps we needed to take in order to complete the deadline & exceed our expectations. 

1.) We needed to overlay a picture of a clock onto the start of each era, fading the image & dimming it out in order to establish overtly the fact she was traveling back in time. We were aware that music video doesn't have to establish itself in the same way as film, rigorously using master shots & close ups to link each action & reaction into a linear narrative (or at least one that will help you to connect the actions - or feel distanced & confused if aiming for an enigmatic feel). However we also knew that though some people would pick up on our historic references, others wouldn't, and we needed to exaggerate our ideas. The  'clock'  thus has been embedded in order to display a passing of time & distance Rhianna from Bing. Adding to the intensity of the piece by elongating the gap their is between their locations - years / decades. 

2.) We needed to colour correct all our clips - Making the current day shots a better quality of image (hoping to fix some of the problems posed by the camera quality), and making the earlier decades reflect the style of film used in those eras. We researched into the progression of colour filming & altered the saturation of the 1920's to nil. This monochromatic effect was aided by adjusting the backlighting, thinning the edge width, adding a striped effect, and a flicker effect. Overall we aimed to mimic the projected b&w films of the roaring 20's & clearly display to the audience that Rhianna was in another time frame - as although they may not be able to connect all of the iconography commonly associated with the era, they would be able to link the use of black & white to the past.

   

We also edited the 1940's sketch in order to make it sepia tone & are going to increase the saturation on the 1980's to parody the neon brightness of the decade. 
3.) what we were going to do about our fake band, we still haven't been able to group together 3 more boys to form 'Suburban Typo', so we are now most probably going to have to individually photo graph people in order to create the bio pages for our website (as our digi-paks /imagery used on our websites is mostly either of Bing or uses images unconnected to the band, seeing as most indie rock album covers tend not to use the actual band / artist and rely on images which connote their hedonistic life styles & anti authority ethos).  

FINAL PLANNING

In our final planning stage we started to brain storm all of the loose ends we needed to tie up. We were unsure at this point of which other x3 boys we were going to use for our band & were debating weather to photograph boys at school against the green screen, use our friends out of school and meet up for a quick photo shoot or use Facebook photographs which we had already taken on other occasions. This was the bane of our project, we had found it so hard to find people to use for our band, partly because we were too fussy & partly because of peoples lack of time commitment, reliability & availability. We also needed to work on colour correcting all of the eras in order to signify their time frame to an audience who weren't as overly familiar with the narrative we had created. We have now transformed the 1920's into black & white, adding the 'stripe' effect & lowering the tolerance & thinning / feathering the edges the parody the project style from the time.  Furthermore we made the 1940's a dull sepia tone, added a pink / red tint to the 1940's by adjusting the RBG balance & saturation, and brightened the 1980's altering the saturation, hue & contrast.     

      

Editing the Performance

We are currently working on editing our shots from our x2 days of performance filming into our sequence of narrative, keeping the different threads on x2 separate timelines in order to simplify the process. The computers we have been using are extremely clogged up and therefore take a great deal of time in order to operate on final cut. Thus rendering files has become an extremely time consuming job and has majorly slowed down our production. We are concentrating on stringing together the entire song through performance clips, even though around 50-60% of the final music video will be narrative based, purely because we want to leave all our options open in terms of our overall style  and shot range. Something which has proved particularly challenging is lip synchronisation, mainly because our lead male singer (Bing) harmonises 'The Vaccines' song and has trouble enunciating his speech, singing at times as though he were a ventriloquist. We had to be extremely brutal in choosing the selection of clips & spent a great deal of time moving the audio along the time line / slowing it up or speeding it down, in order for his vocals to match the rhythm of the song. We are aware at times that the narrative/performance is perhaps incongruous to the audio, though we planned to sustain this effect in order to make our piece as abstract and surreal as possible. In fact today when editing my co-worker said "If we hadn't made this, I would have no clue what it was about", and my response was..."yes but that doesn't matter" - simply because we aimed for a basic thread of intertextuality & historical references, but even if our audience members do not understand the intended plot, they will still (hopefully) be able to gain pleasure from viewing our piece, which is after all our key aim - along with selling 'Suburban Typo' as a commercialised industry product.