The Use Of Effects In My Video

I used the program Final Cut Pro on an Apple Mac when creating my music video, this is a specialist program that allows you to add a whole range of effects and transitions to your video.

One of the effects that I decided to use was the "Desert Glare" on all of my shots filmed in the green room, this effect helped brighten the white backdrop and make any shadows less visible. This also helped make the colouring more vibrant and made the red of her dress more eye-catching and pop out in contrast to the backdrop. I think this effect also made the footage have better lighting in general and make it look clearer than it did originally.

On the first few shots of my video I have used a mixture of two effects to make the footage appear to be old fashioned. The first one of the effects is called "50's TV" which is what created the black and white/sepia tones in the image. The second effect is "Film Grain" and this made the footage appear more grainy and fuzzy giving the look that television would of had during that time.

Once the footage changes to be in colour I added a different effect to my museum location shots. This is the effect "Old World" and works well as it helps give more rich and darker tones to the setting and make it have more of a vintage feel to it.

When the beat picks up in the song I have added some flashing light effects to help go with the faster paced parts. On Final Cut Pro this is known as "Intro Flashes" and I think they work really well with the timing of the beat. I also added similar lighting effects that gradually fade out and back to the original footage.

I also fixed some of the framing of the shots, this example shows that there seems to be a little too much space above her head, and to be correctly framed then her head should be almost touching the top of the shot. I used the option to crop the shot in order to fix this, it allowed me to re-position the clip and get rid of the unnecessary area. I did this for a few of my shots, including one where you could see a corner of the green screen behind the white backdrop, by cropping I managed to fix that issue.

The Process Of Creating My Album Art Graphic

Throughout the creation of the graphic I have used for my album art, I had saved print screens so that the process of it being made can be seen. I created this graphic myself within Adobe Photoshop with the help of reference images and by using a print screen from my music video as a template, allowing me to get the general outline of the artist. I then added further layers in order to make the image have more depth, I finally added a polka dot effect so that the image looked to be from a 1950's comic strip, and blend in with my overall theme.

Album Art Experiments

I have done some further research into my 40's/50's theme and really liked the style of signs for hotels/restaurants and T.V shows from around that time period, so I decided incorporating these into my dig-pak and magazine advert would work really well.

These are some of my experiments I have created in Adobe Photoshop when I started to develop my digi-pak and magazine advertisement. I decided I liked the 4th one the most so I am planning to develop this further and use the images I have taken earlier to eventually bring them together. 

Second Full Draft

This is the second full draft of my music video, I have made several changes and improvements from my first full drafts. One of the most obvious changes would be the black and white effect I have added at the start of the video, this was suggested as feedback from the first draft and I agreed about this, The idea is that the video starts in black and white but turns into colour as she starts singing, I however plan to edit this slightly so the colour changes fits in more with the beat of the song.

I also added an effect to all of the shots that were filmed in the green screen room, this effect makes the colouring much more eye-catching and therefore makes the colour change effect seem more effective. This also makes the white background lighter and look makes the shadows less visible, this also makes her dress seem more vibrant.

I improved quite a lot of the lip-syncing within the video as well, even though there are still quite a few parts out of sync. I am aiming to make this look as realistic as possible so that it does not draw peoples attention when they are viewing it.

I am planning for the next version of the video to be my final one, for this I will correct all the lip-sync and also the editing pace, as some shots are lasting just a second too long and not fitting in with the beat. I also plan to add additional shots in the faster paced parts of the song such as the chorus.

Album Art Ideas & Inspiration

I plan to create some album art as part of my Digi-pak for the front cover whilst more images will be included inside. I was looking at vintage style fonts and layouts as a way to help me develop my ideas, from this I saw that pastel colouring is used a lot within these themes. I also had the idea of incorporating Pop Art into my creations as this form of artwork emerged during the 1950's so it therefore fits into my 1940-50's theme. I plan to experiment using the style of pop art within Photoshop, and potentially create a comic version of my artist in this form of artwork.

 

 

  

 

 

Magazine Advert Inspiration & Ideas

I began researching 1940's-50's inspired photography to gain some inspiration for the kind of images I wish to use for my magazine advert before filming at my location. I wanted to make the theme of the music video obvious through the use of images, so from early on I had planned to use some of the vehicles at the Streetlife Museum when taking images.

 

 

From looking at these images I had gathered I specifically love the mix of costumes and locations and how they represent the time era. The image with the suitcases seemed very relevant to my ideas as this was one of the props I was planning to use, I managed to capture visually similar images to these with the use of the location.

However, because of the difficulties I experienced with the camera making all the images appear to have a strong yellow colour and be quite blurry, the images do not look how I had originally imagined. I also used my mobile phone to take some images to see if it was in fact the camera and not the lighting of my location causing this, from doing this I found out it was an issue with the camera. I plan to use Photoshop to try and edit the colouring of the images I have taken, some examples of these images from both the camera and mobile phone are below: