Audience Research

Audience Research - Harry White (9197) & Kennet Tanner (9139) from harry white on Vimeo.

Audience research

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DV or HDV?

Luckily me and Harry got the chance to use one of the schools 5 Sony HVR-HD1000E which is of much better quality than the cameras which we used to film last year, which were Sony Handycams.
Last year the opportunity was indeed there to use Mini-HDV tapes over the more frequently used Mini-DV tapes. However we felt that although technically the aspect ratio would be classed as HD the actual difference (especially in the low-lighting we were using to capture the conventions set out by a thriller) noticed on screen wouldn't be worthy of the extra cost.
However this year due to the differences in filming equipment we were faced with a very different opportunity. We were filming in good light, with a much higher quality camera so visible differences would be apparent. So the question was: is it worth it?
When filming in HD you run into a lot of different problems with compatibility etc, not to mention the cost factor - where Mini-HDV costs around 10x more than a standard Mini-DV. When capturing footage in HD it is not consistently possible to capture in real-time (depending on the speed of your processor) and therefor this could have in theory slowed down our capturing process - and with over 3 hours of footage to capture this would have amounted to a lot more than we would have wished to have spent on capturing.
After this you then have to look at comparability with different systems, some computers do not 'work' with HD footage if it is not correctly de-interlaced meaning two frames can 'merge' together so to speak looking like the picture to the left. This became an issue because we would then have to spend extra time exporting any finished footage (or simply footage to look at) twice, once in high definition once in standard.
Through post-production would also have been a difficult time as we were working with masks there was a lot time consuming rendering to be done, and this could have been double-y so if we had have gone with HD footage. So with an accumulation of all these reasons we decided against Mini-HDV and instead have opted for every-day standard Mini-DV.

During filming we used three different Mini-DV tapes an shot a total of 2 Hours and 53 minutes of footage.

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!

Slowly Gaining Contacts and Music Video Festival

So, as I've said in the previous post that we've emailed the founder of Creative Norfolk and he's now forwarded it on Adrian Cooke at Community Music East who should get in touch with us in the near future.

I've now been emailing some other of my 'contacts' or just people who's email address I've managed to get hold of. The first is a young freelance promotional video maker, he used to work for

http://www.sitcomsoldiers.com/ before recently going solo. His latest video Futures - Sal Paradise can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnU6l4q8K0

We've also emailed Gary Standley who is the executive producer of BBC Radio Norfolk: Introducing show. We recently attented an event that him and his team were running which was the first ever Music Video Festival. We had a short workshop with him where we were shown many different good and bad examples of music videos and common themes that run through poorly made and clichéd

music videos. The experience was invaluable and meeting Gary was very beneficial to our music video, as he's given us lots of ideas to work on, he also gave us his email address to contact us if there was anything he could help with... so we have!

I will update you on replies and any locations that we find in the comments.

Kenny

Locations

A couple of weeks back we had a Careers Day at Reepham College and I met this really nice man called Richard Cox who has worked for quite a long time at the BBC and later Channel 4 working on stuff like Dad's Army and Gladiators! He now runs a company called 'Creative Norfolk' where he works with all the creative industries in Norfolk, so when we were looking into different locations to use during the footage we decided he'd be a good man to contact!

Music Video Analysis #2 - Paramore

Here's my music video analysis for Paramore's 'That's What You Get' video can be seen below.

Paramore - That's What You Get, Music Video Analysis

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Anndddd.... embedding's been turned off. Annoyingly so here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kz6hNDlEEg

Music Video Analysis 1 - Johnny Cash "Hurt"

I'm afraid for some incredibly frustrating reason the embedding section on google docs wont actually copy the whole embed code out. So instead I've just got a link for you to go to the file.

Welcome Back

HELLO

Hello, been a tiny bit of time since the Media AS Blog, and here I am already with the Media A2 Blog...

This year I've already jumped headlong into work and have (almost) secured Underline the Sky (pictured right) as the unsigned band I will be working with on the promotional pack which we'll be graded on for A2. Currently, after fears of ending up working along I'll be working with Harry White.

Read about Underline the Sky

Kenny