Evaluation of workshop

1. Did you enjoy the workshop day? What were your best bits and why?

I found the workshop day enlightening and educational, not to mention fun and tiring. I had some concerns at the beginning of the day that we would be incredibly behind schedule - the first shots took over 2 hours to prepare for and shoot, but we soldiered through and managed to finish just an hour and a half behind schedule.

It was inspiring to see all the equipment that was in for the day, the track and cart, the monitor to show the camera screen in a larger resolution and the jib, I think working in the industry would be very interesting, as would daily usage of the equipment. My favourite part of the day was the whole day, sometimes chilling out and the rest jumping up and down and waving our hands around. And my impromptu nap on the crash mats outside.

2. What did you learn from participating in the workshop?

I learned that a LOT of time is needed to set up for every shot, and that you should plan for every contingency. Even with the 2 extra hours from 6 til 8, we almost ran out of time. Doing a music video shoot also takes a lot of energy; at the beginning we had a lot of energy and we had a lot more gusto than towards the end when we were all fatigued, but we pushed through the aches and kept going.

We will have to keep the spirits of our actors up when we're doing our shoots, or use ourselves as actors. I also learned that we should record full takes for every shot, because sometimes there is a piece of magic that you might miss if you just do each shot bit by bit. Lighting can make all the difference on a shoot. Having the backlights pulse from 40%-70% brightness gave a nice flashing effect and filled the shots with a hazy fog like glow.

Finally, as with the re-edit of the original music video, lipsynching is extremely tedious, but even 1 frame can make the difference between an accurate synch and a sequence that seems off for some reason. This means that most of the time in our music videos will be spent cropping footage to fit right and matching up lips to music, which we will have to plan for beforehand.

3. Are you pleased with the footage and your edit? Is it how you expected it to look?

I was amazed by the quality of all the footage and how much it actually looked like the real thing. Our footage did not have the flashing blue strobe lights, unfortunately, but the natural wood grain diffusion gave an orange glow to our shots, which looks almost the same as the real music video. The footage from the Canon 5D MK2 however, did not pick up the light from the stage lights, which resulted in a dull grey colour in all the footage and no amount of colour correction could make it fit the rest of the footage.

I am pleased with the edit we have created, it stays true to the original music video, but it has a distinct feel of Latymer around it. Since it follows the original closely, it's pretty much exactly how I expected it to look.

4. How do you think your workshop experiences will impact on your approach to next term's music video coursework?

Knowing what I've learned from this workshop, I know that there is going to be a lot of work involved in preperation and planning. We will have to keep a strict schedule so that we don't waste time working on one shot over and over again, if we have takes and it's time for the next shot, we will have to move on. Given that we know how much effort it takes to keep going through the day and keeping up the energy, we will also have to find a way to keep our actors happy and rested throughout the day, unless we use ourselves as actors, because we are more likely to remain focused than actors from outside. We will also be to lipsynch our videos more accurately after the practice we've had editing the footage we got.