Camera practice:
During rehearsals, we set up some Zoom cameras to film. We had a total of 3 and used them to get multiple angles. The first was of the main vocalist. We recorded this for two of the songs that The Notes performed. The first being of Alfie and the second, Barbora.
In the above video, nothing exciting really happened. The camerawork was mediocre and needs improvement. To do this, things like pans and zooms needed to be added. Luckily, there was a fault with the sound and for the first part of the song, no vocals were playing out of the speakers. This meant that there was an opportunity for improvement. You can see that below in Barbora’s video.
In this shot, there is panning around. This is not overly effective on the vocalist unless they are moving around on the stage. However, Barbora does not move around here and the camera is just changing angles, many of which were described as “unflattering” by my tutor Lewis. It is not the best take but the movement is a good improvement.
In this angle, we can see Michael, the drummer. This is a unique shot but has a lot of things wrong with it. For instance, I can be seen in the background with another one of the cameras. As well as this, there is limited movement and you can see things such as the door and chairs in the background too.
This shot begins with a shot of the band. I do not like the position I put it in to start with as it seems to be more focused on the wall and cuts out the vocalist a little. This camera does, however, have much more movement. Including pans and zooms. This is effective as it means that the video does not become boring to watch due to its large amounts of movement. I prefer the wide shot at 1:30 as it fits everyone in the band in the frame. The way I would improve this, is by asking the band members to move or stand in other places as they look too far apart from each other and it does not seem like they are working together.
In the above video, I edited the footage to create a ‘music video’. In order to do this, we used iMovie. Getting started was quite difficult because I had to sync up all of the audio. This was, however, made easier by recording claps at the start of the take so that we could find a point to line up all of the cameras. Starting with this made the process of editing much easier because everything was in time.
After doing that, I got started on the edit itself. Firstly, I added a simple title. This allows the viewer to know what they are watching. I just included the song title and band name. Then I began to look at the actual footage. I decided to use Michael’s drumming to start as I was unhappy with my zoom in from the whole band shot. In order to use this, I had to crop the video so that I was no longer visible and focused the attention more onto the drum kit.
I then moved onto Barbora, the vocalist, as the lyrics began. In order to do so, I used the crop again to get a close up on her but it does not look very good. If anything, it is too close. I also used a transition, which I then continued to use every time I changed between the cameras.
For a brief moment, just before the chorus, I used the wide shot to include the other band members. Then as the drum fill to move onto the chorus starts, I switched back to the drums. This continued for a while, using the Ken Burns feature to create a downward pan. This made the video a little bit more interesting.
Just as it gets into the second verse, I cut back to the band shot and used the Ken Burns feature to zoom into James (the guitarist). This was an interesting decision, described as “candid” when watched by a peer. I also used this feature during the chorus to create a smooth pan across the band.
During the stripped back chorus, I added a black and white filter onto Barbora as it was an interesting change and caused a few people in the class to say “ooh” when they were shocked by the change in a good way. This is then unfortunately followed by another shot of Michael which starts with part of his head cut off. I should have refrained from trying this as instead of focusing on the kit like I wanted it to, it seemed a little bit unprofessional.
Finally, the last band shot seems like it was thrown in last minute and probably would have been more effective as a static shot of Barbora. But the fade to black seems to work well when ending the video.
Editing Millie and the Floor Gang:
After finishing the recordings for our stream, it was time to give out the videos to edit. I worked with Amelia to work out how to share the workload fairly. We decided to split the 5 bands between 5 people, with Amelia taking on the solo artists because she understands Adobe Premier Pro the most. I had the task of editing Millie and the Floor Gang’s footage.
Before I started, I had to sync up the audio so that all of the video footage was in time. Due to the fact that we do not have the mixed audio yet the quality of the camera audio is not the best and sounds a little strange. This can be annoying to work with but knowing that the quality will improve greatly once you get the real audio recordings and that is helpful when you are editing as if it looks good you know it will be better with good quality audio.
Immediately, I came into a problem. During the band’s introduction, Millie (who was on keys at the time), says “Hi, I’m Millie.” However, the camera is angled down to her stomach and does not show her face. This made the video look really unprofessional because she is not in any other shot. If we are to do a live stream event in future, we should double-check all of the camera angles and make it clear to those operating them that you should only move the camera in order to pan and not change the angle. After speaking to Amelia because she set up all of the cameras. She told me that she had placed the camera at an angle that included both the hands on the keyboard and the backing vocals too. But once Kabeer got behind the camera, he adjusted the angle and rendered this clever introduction ineffective. Since then, I had to cut the introduction down to Thomas saying, “We’re the Floor Gang”. This was a little bit difficult to do as the line was supposed to follow on from Millie. I managed to do it and then relayed this information to Tom so that he could also cut this from the audio.
The next thing I struggled with was the physical size of the bass video. It was smaller than all of the others and was put on top of the drum video. I had to expand the video to make it match the size of the other videos. This meant I had to compromise on the video quality. I have decided to use this footage sparingly so that it is not a distraction from the good quality of all of the other videos. I am disappointed with the outcome of this as it was the camera that I had control of. However I think it was just a problem with that one video because all of the other bass footage is the correct size.
After these problems, I only struggled with minor problems such as awkward timing of transitions, strange or unprofessional looking cuts and lack of vocals in the chorus. These were solved quickly after every review of the video as this was mostly feedback given to me by both tutors and peers. However, one piece of advice I received was that the camera used to film Millie’s movement across the room was extremely overexposed. This was due to a combination of using the wrong settings on the camera and the positioning under the lighting. In future, we will both practice movement like this to see what will happen in terms of lighting and smooth transitions and check all of the camera settings too. I spent a large amount of time attempting to rectify this. It was difficult to do but I believe that I have improved it massively. These are the settings I used to improve this:
Now that the cuts and transitions were complete, I was able to move onto pans and zooms. I decided to use mostly Ken Burns inspired pans and zooms. Ken Burns is an American documentary director who is famous for the way he uses panning and zooming to emphasise still images in his films (Levin, 2020). I did not know how to carry this out on Adobe Premier Pro as it is not as easy to do there as it is on iMovie. That is because you have to do it manually. In order to learn how to do this, I first asked Amelia, as she was already aware of how to carry this out. She explained this very well but I was struggling to remember what to do. Due to this, I decided to do some further research as I believe that sometimes you can learn things by having it worded differently and I found that The Beat article (Pierce, 2013) helped me to do so. Once I transferred my new skills into the edit, I bounced the video which decreased the quality until I found out you can bounce it at a better quality. So, here is the final edit:
Editing Clocks:
After I had completed my edit, I started to go around the room to help the other editors. Firstly, I visited Michael. This is where the first major problem began. He explained that when he and Lewis had tried to add to the edit of clocks, something had gone wrong and the entire video was out of sync. I tried my best to rectify this but due to the fact that the edits had been saved and the project closed, It was almost impossible. I decided that it would be a better use of everyone’s time to take it home and restart the entire edit myself. This turned out to be an improvement on the original and did not highlight the failed harmonisation during the chorus of the song that could not be fixed in the audio post-production due to vocalists not coming to the overdub sessions and overspill on the mic.
Unfortunately, when I brought the edited project to college, it would not open because college’s version of Premiere Pro was an older version that the one I have at home and therefore would not open. This was frustrating because it meant that if anything were to go wrong we could only edit the final video as a whole. Thankfully nothing went wrong with it up to the initial screening. This is my final edit:
Bibliography:
Levin, B., 2020. Ken Burns | Biography, Documentaries, & Facts. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ken-Burns> [Accessed 11 November 2020].
Pierce, B., 2013. Creating A “Ken Burns” Pan And Zoom Effect In Premiere Pro. [online] The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat. Available at: <https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/ken-burns-effect-premiere-pro/> [Accessed 11 November 2020].