Adding Black Syndi-Conga To The Video

On the digipak and website there is the slogan, join the black syndi-conga, but it wasn't on the music video. I wanted it to become a thing associated with the band, a memorable saying for the band. However I realised it wasn't on the music video, and it didn't work continuity wise. It made no sense for it to be on both the digipak and website but not the music video.

It was important to me that I keep the fonts consistant, so I needed to learn how to import a font into Final Cut Pro. Following a YouTube video I found online I learnt how to import the fonts.

Not only did I keep the font the same, I also wanted the colour of the font to be the same, so made it the same dark red. I wanted the focus to be on the slogan, so I then inserted the website below, but smaller, so you can read it but its not the focus. I just added it at the end of the video after the production company, as an extra advertisement.

Fonts

I had to consider the fonts for my website and Digipak very carefully. I wanted the font to follow the style of music, hard, grundgy, and rock feel to it. But I needed to be legible to read. I needed a font for the website titles, body text, and then font for the song titles and lyrics in the linear notes and finally a font for the track list. But I also wanted the products to have a link between them and work continuity wise, so wanted to use two or three fonts across the products.

Knife Fight was a font that really took my eye from the start of researching fonts. It looked ideal for a title

Website Development

When I inserted the picture into the website, although I thought I had saved it as a transparent picture with no background, it still saved in a white box, so I needed to fix it. So I did some research online to try and find out how to save it transparent. 

http://www.webdesign.org/photoshop/photoshop-basics/saving-a-file-with-transparent-background.6877.html

Following the simple instructions that I found online, I saved the image and uploaded it to my website.  However this time it was in a blue boxed background.

Upon investigating the issue I came across the 'Change Style' box for the photograph, it was selected on no frame but I also tried the 'Default' box and this removed the blue box and created the transparent background. 

Initial Final Version

Following my colour correction edits on my product, I have recently finished what I see as my first final version of the footage. I have posted a link to my Instagram and added a link on my Facebook asking them to watch the film and fill in my questionnaire of feedback incase there were things about the production they didn't like or felt that needed to be improved.

My initial final version;

morrighan media first final rough cut from morrighan humpleby on Vimeo.


https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7HK578P

Reviews of Zombie discovery scene

During my feedback session, they agreed that the scene where the band stopped playing to listen to the noise outside and investigate was a little awkward and clumsy. The felt like one of the reasons they felt this was because the music completely stopped for the whole scene until the drummer and base player open the door, which is very unconventional for a music video. I agreed that maybe the stop of music for the whole of the scene is unnecessary but it did need to stop at least once as the band stop playing to hear the noise. So what I did was stop the music but only for a few seconds, and ease it back in once the drummer and base player leave to see to the noise. 

Upon further consideration I thought one issue might also be that its just a static shot through the whole scene. In retrospect, it would be ideal if another camera angle of this scene, however turns out this was the only shot I had of the scene, so had to work with what I had.first three changes

As I said, original the shot was static with no change of angle or anything.

second/final change

So what I did was as the music stopped, cropped the image closer to the band, then do  jump cut further back to show a long stop of the band. In all honesty, I am not happy with the outcome of this section, but this is the best I can do at the moment, and will look into other ways of improving it.

Music in Sync

Sam Shepard, the lead singer of the band is in my media studies class, so I used him to double check the sync of my video. He expressed in the feedback session that some of the drums and riffs are out of time, so needed to fix them. I did to the best of my ability but got him to check it for me, seeing as he plays in the band.

He only pointed out two sections, one the close up on him playing it was a riff behind and on the solo of Sam Betts when they play as Zombies, it is a riff ahead.

Studio/Production/Distribution Logo- Conventional?

Throughout the time of editing my production I have been toying between whether to put these logos into the video, I was just unsure as to whether this was conventional or not. So I decided to do some research into whether is was conventional or not.Using Vimeo as my platform I search a vary of songs, but focused mainly on the music videos in a similar convention to my own client. I searched lots of videos for lots of artists and only came across a few who mentioned any legalities or companies. Two being Biffy Clyro and Slipknot. And even then it wasn't an image just a company name and who the rights are reserved too, 

So for my own work I decided to add a fade out to a black screen with just a line that says 'all rights reserved by Phantascope Studios'. I felt like it was important for the copy right symbol to before the All rights reserved as this is convention and I believe legality if all rights reserved is stated.  To the left is a web page discussion I found on how to insert a copy right symbol into final cut. And below is me inserting the symbol. 














As I said I decided to add a fade into the end of the product, but to make it more interesting, I made the text appear in the last few seconds of the video and it stays on screen as the music video fades to black it stays on the screen. I feel like this made the production look more professional and ends it nicely.

Following my research, I have come to the conclusion that there is sometimes the Studio logo, but not the other logos as these aren't particularly conventional.

Issues With The Footage

 When editing the footage I noticed that the footage from a certain camera was very lined and low quality. I first assumed I would have to disregard the footage on this camera so didn't use the clips, however upon upload to Vimeo, I noticed that clip wasn't lined like it was when editing, so assumed it was an issue just with the footage streamed through Final Cut Pro. I also noticed to clip on Vimeo wasn't in HD so selected the HD button and instantly it was back to the lined footage, so when it was played in HD it was lined, if it was no HD it was much better quality, as seen below.

Although hard to see in the picture, this is the footage in HD with the lines.

This is the footage not in HD so much smoother overall. 

Vimeo 

Final Cut Pro

The difference in quality is easier to see here, you can see just how lined the footage is in the picture directly from Final Cut Pro. Overall there is a slight improvement on quality from HD upload from Final Cut to Vimeo either way, but its only when the footage is played in Vimeo, not in HD that the footage is in the best quality.










I considered the cause of this and decided what probably happened, was the camera with this issue might have been filmed not in HD so when trying to play it in HD it isn't compatible with a HD stream, so when played not in HD do you see the accurate representation of the camera quality.

Colour Correction

Using colour balance setting I changed the
exposure, brightness, contrast and colour
tones to the footage. I saved this 'present' so
I could later apply it to all of the clips. 

The original footage was quite lit and bright, which isn't conventional of
music video for a heavy metal band. 

I had to basically match the colour of the footage to the colour of the worst quality camera. The worst camera had a kind of green tone to the footage, I did actually quite like this look as it further added to the dystopian effect I was looking for. This was want my final set 'present' looks like on one clip. 

Although I added the same 'Present' to all the clips, due to changes in light and camera quality and other factors I couldn't control it didn't always look the same across all footage. 

So using the colour balance tool again I made slight changes to the 'present'. You can see on this footage of the drummer, is very, very green once the present was added to it. 

So to counteract the green tones on the original footage, I added some pink tones as they are opposites on the colour wheel, so counter balance the green tones. 

I originally wanted to keep the scenes outside the original colours and brightness, however after watching the footage with the inside of the 'studio' matched with the scenes outside it was too much of change in colour. So reduced the exposure and brightness of the clips, so it was still lighter than inside the studio but not as light as the original.

The footage inside the studio gets steadily darker as well, as I wanted to impose the idea of the zombies bringing in the darkness so for that idea to be consistent, the zombies need to have the darkness outside which they bring in with them as they enter the studio.

Equipment Update

I have recently bought a new £700 camera, that also has a filming function on it. It is a 20.2 mega pixel camera, with the ability to film in full HD 1080p quality.

http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Cameras/Digital_SLR/EOS_70D/

When it comes to filming my product the main camera I use will be with my own camera due to the high quality. I can also attach a microphone to make the audio quality better. http://www.amazon.com/Stereo-Video-Shotgun-Microphone-Pentax/dp/B003TTMFM0
However this isn't massively necessary as I will probably remove the sound from the footage and add the song in later, as they quality won't be perfect, but I will also been directing and probably talking over the filming of the footage.

When I bought the camera it also came with two lens adapters to add to the end; a telephone adapter and a wide angle lens adapter. The wide angle lens is used a lot in music videos, particularly heavy rock or punk music videos where the singer often leads close into the camera.

As you can see from the screenshots of Blink 182's music video First Date. You can see if also adds a small level of distortion to the image, it gives it almost a slight fish eye effect to the video; which is also an effect I can achieve built into my camera. 

The standard shooting setting on my camera gives and image that looks like this, you can see it isn't distorted at all.     

As I said, my camera comes with a fish eye setting and this is a photograph taken on the weakest level of fish eye. As you can see there is some level of distortion but not a huge amount, just has a slight bend on the walls if you look closely. 

The is the camera set to medium fish eye. As you can see it is much stronger and has a fairly high level of distortion. 

The is the camera on the highest fish eye setting and you can see it has a really high level of distortion to the image.

I also got a wide angle lens adapter for my camera. When it is zoomed in the distortion isn't that high, similar to that of the fish eye setting on the lowest setting- there is only a small bend on the edge of the walls and door frames. 

You can see when the camera is zoomed out the distortion is much stronger and adds a kind of fish eye effect to the view. But does also result in a vignette effect over the photograph. 

Further Problems with iMovie

Our school technician has spent a lot of time recently trying to get our versions of Final Cut to work. When we started our lesson this week, we believed that the version was working as I was no able to import my files. However, upon playing back the video I had put together I discovered it wasn't working.

For some files, when I play the videos there is video but not proper audio; only a beeping sound. And other file types would also have a beeping as the audio and just display an image in place of the actually visuals, saying 'unrendered'.

We got the technical to come and have a look at the program to see if they could help, he said that there was an issue with the program and the files were not being sorted in the correct folders from the program, so until he can fix this issue, the program wont work.

However, the school is considering getting the new version of Final Cut bought and installed onto the Macs.

Update on Final Cut Express Progress

For about three weeks I have been tying to upload videos to Final Cut Express, but was facing problems at very stage. From actually having a lincese on a working Mac, to actually get the clips into the software. The manual and everything I read online stated that the clips should be added though the Log And Transfer window, in a MOV or MP4 format, however it wouldn't let me upload a video on that format, or any formats at that. 

So in todays lesson, I looked at it in a different angle. So tried to convert it in a software called MPEG Streamclip, a software I has seen used in some videos or articles about uploading to Final Cut Express. But even when I tried to add the video though the 'Log and Transfer' tab it just didn't work. So looking at more videos, I came across someone who uploaded it through the import file tab on the file tab. Before this hadn't accepted any of my file types, however after converting one of my clips to evey single file type available to convert to on MPEG Streamclip, there were four it let me open; DV, AVI, WMV and MP4. However as you can see from below, when I actually added the clips to my timeline, it wouldn't let me play them but instead display an image reading unrendered. When I googled this error message it was hard to follow the issue, 

In the end I discovered that the DV file didn't didn't display this message, as you can see here. 

Upon further research when I got home from Sixth Form and wasn't faced with any blocked websites, I came across this answer and advice explaining the error message; 'any time you edit your movie, you need to re render it, it does take a long time to do for the first time, but as you make only minor changes in your video, you can render it faster, but to render the audio and video, you need to press "alt+R". For more detail just look in the sequence menu on the bar on the top of the screen.' So when I'm back at Sixth Form and on the Macs I will try this,