2. PRODUCTION LOG:
GUIDANCE
• This document is for you to track the progress of your
production – filming, editing and post-production.
• This is so you can track what you did and how you did it,
explaining and amendments and changes you made and
tracking the decisions that have shaped the practical
creation of your music video.
• The more detail you include about how you made your music
video, the better. The document is broken down in to two
sections, Filming and Editing, each of these is then made of
specific elements that occur in both.
• For each slide there is a prompt detailing what you should
include, delete the prompt after you have complete the slide.
• Remember, images often show what you’ve done more
effectively than words. Use text to explain an illustration.
3. FILMING
Explain what worked and didn’t work about your filming and how you
managed this covering the following areas:
• Technical – using the cameras and any technical equipment; this
could be how you did your lip sync, used the green screen, dealt
with problems with batteries, etc
• Logistical – did your locations work? Did you have any access
problems? Did it rain?
• Personnel – how were your cast/crew? Did anyone let you down?
How did you manage this?
• Planning – did your planning help? Do you think it could have
worked better? How?
• Next steps – do you need to re-film? Film more? Have you
changed your video? How/why?
4. TECHNICAL
I did not have access to any high-quality, or even lower-grade
cameras, no props and no equipment. For that reason my
music video was shot entirely on my smartphone, and I had
to employ a few work arounds to get some kind of substance
into the video.
The quality on my (Samsung) device is noticeably poor, but
as much of a hindrance as that was, there were actually one
or two aspects about that fact that played slightly in my
favour. I will refer to these later, but to quickly cover them on
the next slide...
5. TECHNICAL
As much as the intensive editing was my whole stratagem, I
did end up realising midway into production that some of the
features were above my skill level. As well as that, I was on
very limited time and had to cut a few corners, plus rush the
production in a few of the more tedious areas. The fact that
the camera was such abysmal quality actually helped to
cover up some of the visibly rushed content, in that there just
weren't enough pixels on the screen to attract attention to
them. These bits that had potential to ruin an entire scene
were, in a sense, saved by the low camera quality, even if the
overall quality of the video was lowered by it.
6. TECHNICAL
As well as this, it was also useful as having a very simple and
small (one piece) equipment set allowed me to get a little
creative with things such as my camera placement and using
a little ingenuity to create my own equipment.
Whilst it's pretty funny to look at, it was actually very useful
for me to have made a homemade tripod out of a cardboard
toilet roll, and stacked it on books and other random bits and
bobs around the house to allow me to get desired angles in
some scenes.
7. This little homemade tripod and my phone could fit in places that bigger,
bulkier equipment couldn’t.
8. LOGISTICAL
My video was filmed entirely in my house and a few scenes
on my street. This choice was made because I had very little
time to film, but it did the job just as well as the few other
places I had in mind. It helpful to be able to close the curtains
and maintain a constant level of light and an unchanging
background, which was essential for the special effects I
used in the video. If I had filmed outside, the changing light
levels and things like cars and people in the background
would ruin the effects of the rotoscoping that I used.
9. PERSONNEL
I was alone in filming and producing the video, as anyone
that could've helped was either unavailable or unwilling. It
was for this reason that I had to scrap my original plan and
create the one for the video I ended up making. Thankfully, I
had planned this video around the fact that I had nobody to
help, and as such it barely affected the video at all. The only
problem of note that the lack of staff created was that it
generally took a lot longer to film shots as I would have to
film each shot 1-5 times and having someone behind the
camera would have sped the process along by a substantial
amount.
10. PLANNING
In my opinion, the planning for the video was barely
necessary at all. Whilst my first idea took a vast amount of
shot planning and location scouting etc, this video was
entirely planned around the one aspect of the video I still had
control over. The editing. Not to say that I was 'saving it in
post,' just that given my situation, the only way I would be
able to give the video any substance would have to be
through the effects.
The biggest part of the planning phase was the process of
actually coming up with an idea that I could make work
completely by myself and on very limited time, as well as
making a shot list with 5 different parts for the same shot.
11. EDITING
The editing process for me was painstakingly long, tedious and
dull. Rotoscoping was the most used and definitely most time-
consuming part of the editing period. This is to be expected as it
was through Rotoscoping that I achieved the main feature of the
video, that being having 5 versions of myself in a single shot.
Unfortunately, this process turned out to take a lot more time
than I was expecting it to, and in order to even finish the video
at all, I was forced to shorten the song in places by cutting out a
verse near the end, and replacing some scenes with filler shots
of the street, or royalty free visuals from various websites such
as pixabay and youtube. Whilst this lowered the quality of the
video substantially, it was the preferable alternative to just
having blank footage, or submitting the project even later than it
already was.
12. I had to manually move each of these little dots every few frames, sometimes even one
frame at a time. I had to do this for every single version of me on the screen.
The longest this took was a total of about 8 hours on a single clip!
13. WHAT WENT WELL
[3 EXAMPLES]
The filming process went very smoothly, I had managed to get
all the shots I needed in one 7 hour period from 11PM to 6AM.
Aside from a few exceptions, all the footage was as planned and
no changes or reshoots needed to be made during production.
Whilst the editing process was both long and problematic, it
was very streamlined as, for the most part I relied on one
repeated editing feature (rotoscoping) to get the result I wanted.
For example, if I had used a blend of rotoscoping and other
effects, the matter of organising the editing part of the project
would have been much more long and difficult.
Relying on just a phone and a homemade tripod allowed me to
get shots that I may not have been able to get in my small,
cramped house with a big, bulky camera and film lights that I
was planning to use in my previous plan.
14. WHAT PROBLEMS DID
YOU HAVE? [3
EXAMPLES]
The editing process was much more than I had anticipated it to
be, whilst not an overly complicated effect, I still faced a few
'first time challenges' with rotoscoping, and the fact that having
to spend on average 30-90 minutes on every second of footage
left me with much less time to sleep and go about other basic
parts of my day than I had expected. In short, I had bitten off a
much bigger workload than I could chew by myself.
Another problem I had was that, even though I was in my own
home, it was still the middle of the night, so I had to be careful
not to make noise as to not wake up anyone sleeping upstairs,
or get noise complaints from the neighbours.
I also had problems with my editor as spending roughly 10-12
hours a day actively using my computer to edit was straining my
CPU, and towards the end of the project my editor would
frequently crash, causing me to lose lots of progress. I
combatted this by saving regularly.
15. NEXT STEPS…
The five biggest takeaways I've gotten from this project are that,
-It is essential to know exactly who is going to be working with you at the
start of the project, as a vast majority of the problems I encountered here
can be derived from failing to get a confirmed set of people to work with,
forcing me to scrap my original idea at the last minute.
-It may be better to make an idea based on what you know you can do,
rather than coming up with an idea and then acquiring the skills along the
way. I cannot stress enough how much rotoscoping ruined this project for
me.
-A simple idea done well will probably look better than a great concept
executed poorly.
-Taking on a workload that is bigger than you can handle will only result in
both yourself and the project coming out worse in the end. Going into the
project I imagined I would simply push through the work and find a way to
get it done by the deadline. In reality I ended up with several all-nighters,
failing hardware and a woefully insufficient project.
-Having a plan B from the beginning of the project is just as important as the
main project itself. When my first plan fell through, I had absolutely nothing
to go forward with, and spent two days that I could have spent preparing
and filming instead desperately trying to come up with a new idea.
