Thursday, 10 February 2011

Exhibition Piece Analysis

I am very happy with my exhibition piece. The video for The Gospel According to Coldplay took a huge amount of work that covered planning, shooting and editing. It was the first video I've made entirely on my own, and the first (and probably the only) time I've picked up a video camera since Comm Tech in first year.

In one sense I wish I had made this my Visual Language project, but it has worked well to tie up Visual Language and introduce my project next semester where I want to make videos.

There were three services, the first on Saturday 5th February. I spent all day Saturday at church to plan shots at the rehearsal. I got a good idea of the sort of shots I wanted to get, but it was hard to remember many of them or put them into practice... so this taught me my first lesson- write everything down. This later was reiterated as I forgot which songs I had recorded in full and which I only had clips of.

The second lesson came in the 2nd service on Sunday where I ran out of memory right in the middle of filming. I was well prepared in terms of having a back up battery, but I needed to make sure I went into every service with an empty card.

I found it exceptionally difficult to get a good range of good shots. I got some great ones from my tripod, but as this was a fixed position I could only get relatively similar pans/zooms. I tried to get good shots with dingle where possible, but with difficulty. In total, I filmed around 100 clips; some were several minute long buzz tracks, others cutaways. I also filmed around 15 interviews, although the quality of the sound generally dictated which ones were usable. I only worked out how to increase the brightness on the last shoot too, which was rather frustrating.

Having said all this, I am happy I'm able to watch the video back and see where errors lie.
Improvements:

  1. Remember which way is focus and 'unfocus' as the first clip is part out of focus
  2. Use separate audio tracks to ensure maximum sound quality- the entire clip could have better sound (although it's not bad to say it's straight from the camera).
  3. At 0:37, I would like to have some more cutaways rather than going straight to an interview
  4. At 1:18, I would ideally have a smooth pan up. I considered setting up the tripod here on Sunday to get this, but this would have been very restricting in getting any other shots for the sake of one shot.
  5. The way I ended 'Fix You'. There was little choice here as I couldn't find a full buzz track of it (although I thought I'd filmed one). Better organisation and planning could have prevented this.
  6. I would have generally made the clip longer with more footage of music. I would need better planning of shots to enable this.
Things I'm pleased with:
  1. The introduction. I think the way the music starts while the title slide is on works well.
  2. The pan at 0:30 works really well I think, and captures the atmosphere perfectly.
  3. The shots between 1:13 and 1:26. These pans work with the song.
  4. The cutaways at 1:32 and the following pan that enforces the social aspect of it.
  5. Interviews were great- loved speaking with people and being able to get good quality shots on those.
  6. The ending where it goes out of focus, zooms out and fades to black.
  7. Most of all I'm happy I remembered how to use Final Cut Pro ...and that I got a bottle of wine of thanks out of it!

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