music video finished

I am very happy with the completed video, it's changed a bit from what we had originally planned but for the better. 

Busking shoot

Latest Video Shoot

I was unable to make it to the shoot at the weekend unfortunately, so we were unable to film any parts of the band performing.
Sancha, Hamish and Louise went and filmed in Nottingham however and got some amazing shots, plenty of happy flashbacks, cutaways and male performance, and several takes of them as well.
The lighting on the day with the sunlight was beautiful and I'm gutted I wasn't able to make it. Here's to hoping that it looks as nice next time we film!

The party scene - how we've used it

I was unhappy with the  various shots of the party scene, the lighting in the bedroom was very poor, we had enough people and the music speakers and equipment it just does not meet the standard of the rest of the clips as you can see.

However we are still going to use the bit of the couple and their role within the scene, we've brightened and contrasted the colours so that it looks less dark. Although party's are often in dark settings we want it to be bright enough to be seen. We won't be using the shots of the party people but as the ending part it works well. 

editing progress

As you can see above weve edited most of the footage, there is just a few blank spaces at the beginning and bout 30 seconds towards the end, that we are going to fill with the footage we get on sunday. We are planning on shooting 'Crystal Castles' busking, with lots of close ups of me singing the female lines at the end. We will also be wanting some panning shots to add to the movement within the shot types in the video. 

Shots I Like

I LOVE the composition and lighting here. The way the sun flares looks amazing.  This shot was taken on the shoot I wasn't at and I'm not affraid to say I'm jealous of the gorgeous locations and lighting.

This was a spontaneous shot on the day of our first shoot way back when. Just before we packed up and left our first (secret) location, I noticed the beer can and I thought a quick pull focus would fit with everything else we'd filmed. Fortunately a kind little ant decided to walk across the can as I filmed, it was too perfect.

This close up of Hamish's eyes looks great, and the way we edited it he looks down at the photo in his hands exactly on the beat. Completely accidental but brilliant.

Two of many shots that were reversed. The top one where Hamish walks out of the room (or into the room...?) we edited the colours slightly to add more contrast and saturation to the shots of the 'party' in the room. This was both to add to the contrast of emotions and locations, as it was because the shots were badly lit.

A high angle tracking shot was never going to be easy, however nice it sounded on paper. It took us many, many attempts but we got it, after making our actors run backwards and forwards several times and us taking it in turns to run after them, camera aloft. I love the final one shot, the way the actor and camera weave around trees is very visually engaging, I wish we'd planned more tracking shots into the video, the movement is gorgeous with the song we chose.

 

Finally, this is ironically one of the first things we filmed. While Sancha talked through what we planned to do with the actors on the day and took some still digital photos on location, I went around cradling the camera like a child made of glass and weaved about the place, hoping to get some nice looking cutaways and the shot we'd storyboarded in of the camera tracking forwards through some tall grass. I set the focus to very close to the camera itself (similar to a macro focus) in an effort to create something very visual.

I'd like to think I succeeded.

My favourite shots

A 'bad' flashback, I like the way she flings herself forward and the lamp-post light above them works well as it lights the area they're sat within the evening.

The shot of us three together works well as were diagonally facing the camera it looks better than if we had just stood in a line. It links the cd cover and website in, with the brick wall. 

Shoot at the weekend

With the lack of Mitch the busking scene will have to be shot next weekend instead but I managed to get quite a few 'loving' shots of the actors together. We ran across town to catch the sunsetting in the background, so the lighting looks really good. Here are a few of the best framed shots I could get;

The location worked really well, it was quite spontaneous but the surroundings worked well, like the old styled lamplight's and the cobbled steps and path. I was able to get a few location shots and the sun in the sky looked beautiful so a few cut away clips to use within our video we believed would be essential.


When the sun went down later on I was then able to get the sparkler shots;

readjustments to the video

After the shoot on sunday and the lack of shots we believe are of the rest of the videos standard, we have came up with some better ideas to fill the end of the video. We are devoting the last section of the song to the performance side of things and more so with crystal castles in shots because we want our video to be well rounded.
Although the party scene didn't work out as well as we thought, some shots we got do look nice but I'm glad it didn't work out as well because I think our new idea will work better.
We will have shots of Crystal Castles busking on a street with Robert Smith walking past us on the way to the party, involving the band more and in a clever way so that we can have various shots of us busking and singing along. We've got a good location spot in mind to do the shots (beside the train station in town) and we will surround ourselves in little tea lights to make the image have a quirky hint.
We will also be getting a few more shots of the couple together; them playing with sparklers together, wiping her hair out of her face with the light shining behind them.
We are going to make sure that with CC we will get lots of close ups and also some shots of CC and Robert beside a brick wall singing together more so, we got some on sunday but some more choice for the chorus that might work better.

Latest Shoot

I felt the latest shoot went okay, we got a fair few scenes we've been needing shot, such as party scenes, 'Robert Smith' walking in/out the house, the female lead (Louise) being 'sick' as well as a several flashback/cutaways.
I do feel the shoot could have gone better however, the location were great and the extras really tried hard, as well as our leads, but I'm not entirely confident we've filmed enough of what we needed and we may have to re-plan a part of the video to compensate for that.
I am happy with a large number of the shots filmed, I think the composition and framing of the majority of what we captured looks great, though the lighting and colours aren't as good however. In hindsight, we should have tried to light the area better.
On the other hand, from what I've reviewed of it so far, the semi-darkness and graininess of the footage could help set the atmosphere and tone of the scene.

progression with editing

We concentrated on making the initial shots and cut away's fit to the beat of the music.

Within the plan at the beginning we didn't storyboard the cut away shots to fit the music, but we knew that we would take lots of different shots and that it was easy to adjust the opening section with how we wanted and improvise with different shots we got on the shoot.

Editing Progress

This lesson we began editing the video, the lip-synching wasn't as hard as I thought. After a few tries we were able to get it exact. I enjoyed editing the video and at the end of the lesson it was really satisfying to watch. We turned the forward shots and reversed the shot so it looked like he was walking backwards. 

More Editing Progress

We've officially started editing! Hoorah.

Editing to the beat can be difficult at times to fit with our plan and to also fit the lyrics, but we've been lip-syncing and following the plan and so far what we've edited looks great. 

We've not started the rapid cuts of the flashbacks yet, but i'm eager to start it!

comparing the complete cd pack to the original designs

It has spiralled off a lot from how we'd orginally planned the CD cover to be, however we adapted it to what we thought worked and looked best. We have used the main elements of what we had originally planned by using the three of us but on the front cover instead of the back, as it was the best photo and with the white space at the top it seemed to fit the bands name perfectly. We also found difficulty getting the bath we had planned into the wooded area and also decided that we needed more focus on Crystal Castles instead of it all on Robert Smith. With the brick theme linking all of the digipack and music video we included that within the inside sleeve, but we hadn't planned it, it was spontaneous but worked perfectly. Teh actual CD abit more detail  than we had planned just the simple pattern of fishnet tights worked well and added more of the working class theme.