Preliminary Evaluation

Media Evaluation Questions - Prelim

1) Pre Production – At the start of this task we picked a video to make, we did this by watching several different music videos and thinking which song would work well and was achievable. After we picked the song we had to story board how we would make the video and make any adaptions to the video. On the story board we chose what type of shot we were going to do and for how long and what the clip will consist of. We then had to consider a location for the film and lighting, we didn’t follow the conventions in that we chose a light room instead of a dark room, however the main components in the video were there, pictures, cat, beer, sofa etc. this meant that we were following the conventions of the video in that we were using the same props as them and ultimately making the same video as them. This helped me to think about all the variables that could come up.

2) Production – When we started filming, we found it easy to do. We found this because we had planned everything in pre-production. This meant that we knew everything that we would be doing and got started straight away. We found that as we didn’t have a real cat is was difficult to film the close ups of the cat and they looked rubbish so we missed them out as much as we could and stuck to long shots. We had to reshoot some of the shots as they didn’t quite look right or it wasn’t long enough, however, some were right first time. Another problem we encountered was that we didn’t have a girl available at the time of filming and so we had to substitute the video of a girl to a picture, which didn’t look bad. The whole production process taught me to be patient and it won’t always go right first time, but it is helpful to plan first.

3) Post Production – When we started editing the task we found it tricky to start with as we hadn’t used final cut before. We found out how to add in audio and detach the audio from the videos we shot so we only had the music of the song and no ambient sound. We also learned how to add in sub titles at the bottom of the clip and to change the words to say what we wanted. This helped us to follow the conventions of the video as the video we chose had sub titles at the bottom on some of the clips. This meant that we could copy the music video accurately and make it look good. We then had to assemble the clips we shot in the right order and crop then to fit. This was easy as we didn’t have any lip syncing to get perfect because the video we chose had no lip syncing in it. This helped me to learn how to use the programme for next year.