Colouring and 'Sectioning'

Hello!

Me and Harry met yesterday to go over some things, we're now moving along in post-production quite nicely. This post is to tell you about the colouring techniques we might be using in the creation of our video as well as showing some of the ways we're hoping to differentiate between narrative and performance during the music video.

So firstly, here's a very early 'treatment for your music video' sheet I filled in several weeks ago. It describes briefly our ideas for the music video (I'll later justify our rea

sons by looking at other music videos of a similar genre). So as you can see we're opting for a half narrative and half performance based video. We've looked at a couple music videos (case studies will be worked on soon) of the acoustic genre such as Jason Mraz and Joshua Radin and we noticed for a big part of the time the 'feel-good' music that seems to be a running theme has conventions of using family and friends in their video. Showing people having a good time! Which is what we want to show in our video.

As touched on in the sheet we hope our location will be Wells Beach (weather permitting) for the narrative part and elsewhere, yet to be decided, for the performance parts.

To mark a distinctive differentiation between the two parts of the music video we're going to use two 'tools' that I've recently received the advantage of using.

A friend managed to get hold of a copy of Final Cut Studio 6 for me, which means I now have brilliant BRILLIANT tools at my disposal such as 'Color' (see right) which is an application specifically designed for the editing of colour in a video. The different features here are phenomenal and it will be a brilliant little application to play around to get the look we WANT when it comes to post production rather than having to keep with the amateur look that would come from the lack of any colouring software, or if we stretched our selves the use of the pretty basic colouring system in Final Cut Express.

There is also an application included called 'Motion' (see right) which means I can

edit many other features, one of which that will be of use to us will be the sophisticated and advanced levels of being able to edit masks, this will give us the ability to adapt an effect I used previously in my college promo at the start of last year. If you watch the embedded video below at 0:50 onwards we used a .psd (Photoshop file) with multiple layers to create each section of the screen appearing at different times. This is done by using the separate layers as a mask, we create

a black square, or shape and then layer the video clip on top and change the composite mode to 'Travel Matte - Luma' then in the position of the black square the clip above is shown through.

So to make use of this brilliant technique and create a way of separating the narrative from the we decided during the narrative portion we'll have the screen separated up into 'sections'. See left for the initial drawing of the idea. We decided feathered edges would most likely be the best way to keep the 'edge-y' summer feel and not seem too rigid to the audience. But after our first trial (See below - this was made from a few clips me and Harry went out and filmed for some footage) I feel that feathered edges could possibly be the wrong decision and some 'jagged-y' edges would be much more appealing. We will of course try more in the final stages of post-production, and perfect the edges a little more, as you will see in the video where the footage doesn't quite fill to the edge of the feathered sections it seems to cut of with a straight line.



After this we took a very quick look at the use of 'Color' and we hope to make a distinctive difference by the use of colour techniques. Below you will see a very short video just testing out two of the infinite different colour editing techniques we could use.



We hope to create a similar effect through our performance sections to that of the effects used throughout he 'watchlistentell' series on youtube.

More information on plans to come!


P.S. Hope you like the new layout, produced by myself from scratch on Photoshop!

Update!

Sorry it's been so long for an update on what we've been up to, just haven't had the time to get round to writing up all we've been doing!

So basically let's start with our choice of an artist, this has been the biggest hurdle so far for us, endless amounts of different problems and so on. Originally, right before we even started the project I had contacted an Ipswich based band called Underline the Sky (see right) but shortly after agreeing with the band roughly what we wanted to do with their music video and what song we'd choose and so on... it fell through. This was partially to blame for logistical reasons, getting from Ipswich to Norwich with the intention to make a (for all they knew) amateur looking music video for 5 students wasn't economically viable. They had also made it through the finals of Live and Unsigned which means that they had to devote a lot of time to this rather than our music video - and additionally as the qualification stipulates we must have an unsigned act if these guys won they would be in the running for signing a record deal before we were done with them.

We were sad to have lost such a raw talent but we weren't hopeless (just yet... that was to come) we moved our sights onto a more local band who Harry knew personally; Rules of Romance. But once again it unfortunately fell through, there was little or no communication between us and the band and we decided it would be best for our project to find a group that were willing enough and enthusiastically enough to not make thewhole of our A-Levels feel like a chore. Enter Answers... a very local metal band. But unfortunately the band were all away at different points which made it very difficult to secure a date to film and to actually work out what the band wanted as far as a music video goes - we also later discovered because of a recent line up change they had no currently recorded material which they would like to promote with a music video.

We were down on our luck, we'd secured 3 artists and then lost them... clearly 'secured' is only secured once we've started filming.

Downtrodden I'd met with some friends and Harry for a BBQ in my garden and was talking to Harry about his gig the night before in Kings Lynn with his band And The Winner Is... and it clicked there for us, playing with his band that night was Lewis Harold Walstanholme who goes by the stage name of The Next Forever. The Next Forever is a solo acoustic act who self-released his first EP just last month. We quickly figured he might be the man for us so emailed him with this:

We've since spoken to him through various other means of which data is perishable (like MSN conversations/facebook chat) so don't have records of such conversations. However I can confirm that we WILL be using The Next Forever and information on the music and plans for the music video will be coming along in my next post!