Production Diary

Once we had decided on the narrative for our video and had found locations we wished to film at, we set about recording the raw footage of our music video. Unfortunately Natalie was only able to spend one day filming with us, so we had to shoot all of her scenes in one day. Thanks to some forward planning and a skilled team, we did manage to shoot all of the scenes involving her in the one day. We did, however, have a minor issue with tracking around Natalie, as we did not have the appropriate equipment at school or at home. We had to think on our feet and, after several attempts with various materials, we used paper under the rubber grips of the tripod to allow us to track easily around Natalie.

The second day of filming was largely uneventful, we had managed to get all our schedualed filming done, with not issues. We had, however, encountered other problems for continuing the filming, because of the snow that occured around the time of filming we had to wait several weeks for it to clear so as to not ruin the continuity of the video, and for it to be safe for Matthew to drive. Eventually the snow did clear and we were able to continue filming.

The third and final day of filming was the hardest, the weather was windy, wet and cold (more so then usual). We were running up and down the A46 trying to get all the footage we need, shooting from different angles. We also had a hard time trying to shoot the footage without other cars ruining the continuity. Furthermore we had to re-shoot footage at the lake as the origional footage was not up to our standards.

Editing the footage had begun the friday after we had filmed on the first day. At first we spent most the time looking through the footage and chopping it up into sections that could be used for different parts of the video. We looked through several shots of the car entering the street, and eventually had some footage we liked the look of. The next day of editing was difficult as we spent a long time trying to sync the start of the guitar playing in the music with the driver turning the radio on in the car. Eventually we cracked it and are very proud of the opening scene.

The next stage of editing involved editing together pieces of A46 footage. We did this stage next as it involved a great part of the video and we wanted to know that we had got it right. We cross referenced the information on the storyboard and the treatment, to select the right shots from the A46. However, we did skip doing part of the middle of the motor scene to edit the video at the chorus.

The next stage of editing we linked the first half of the A46 footage to the chorus footage, this involved a shot of Matthew looking into the rear view mirror, this offers an emotion insight into the driver, as he breaks the fourth wall and the audience can see straight into his eyes. Next involved an extened shot of Natalie crying over the break up with.

It was from this point that we started to devieate from the storyboard a little more as we found we had some interesting footage and decided to incorporate it into the video. For example a close up of the driver as he leans on his car was edited using a succsession of zooming screen shots to create a darker, more emotional effect, thus emphasizing the characters pain. A later effect we used, was to use a cut from a point of view shot of the driver walking away, then we slowed the cut down and place it slightly behind the origional shot to create a ghost effect, alluding to the dirvers fate.

The rest of the editing involved adding the last cuts and fades to the video, once we had all the footage together and the final fade to black complete we used Live Type to create a Copyright logo and put our Production company name at the end of the video, then we stuck to conventions within the industry and added to the bottom left corner of the opening sequence the band name and title of the song, this was set to fade up to be read and then fade down. After this we selected the flash back scenes and turned them black and white so as to seperate them from the events happening in chronological order. Next we added darker filters to some shots as we felt they were too bright and opposed the underlying emotion of the video far too much.

Finally we converted the file from a Final Cut Pro file to a Quicktime file so as to make it easier to distribute for feedback. We gathered a focus group, consisting of members of our target audience and reguested that they watch the music video. Once they had watched it we gave them a questionnaire and asked them to give us some feedback.