Post Production Evaluation of our Music Video

Having finally finished the post production process, looking back on it I can now see where we went wrong and where we went right. It took us quite long to complete, but now I think we have gotten as much out of the video as we could have, in terms of the technical aspect during post production.

After our shoot day, we uploaded all the raw footage onto a computer and onto the Final Cut server to ensure that we had a backup to all of our work. From there on we started sorting all of our footage into bins, determining which shots could be used (and setting a marker onto the parts we were going to use), and labelling them so we could find them more easily when we were editing. This sped up the editing process dramatically. After we had 'logged' the shots we dragged the original soundtrack of the music onto the timeline of Final Cut, and started lypsynching all of the shots, which involved band members, in time to the music. We did this by picking up the two most prominent beats in the soundtrack and picking out the same ones in every shot. This helped us because it ensured that all of the band members were in time to the music and we could then cut our performance aspect. We did this by having all of the shots layered above one another and just picking out the parts of the shots which we wanted to use in each section and took out everything else.

After we finished cutting the performance aspect, we started adding in the narrative, in order to build up to the chorus and therefore the switch of the party. For the performance aspect we picked out the parts of the storyline which would sum up the first half of the video, since we had to find a good balance between the performance aspect and the narrative. We structured the video in a way that enabled us to feature the narrative enough in order for it to be understood, but still let us focus on the performance aspect and the band in general, which was important as it was their debut album. The dancers came in throughout the second half to underline the effect the kiss had on the party, and to feature them as symbols for the 'celebration' of the band. Both the dance aspect and the performance aspect, we cut in sequences, so we cut the sequences together as a seperate section and the just put certain bits of it into the video to punctuate the feel of the party.

After finishing the cut in FCP (Final Cut Pro) we converted the video to its original and much larger definition in order to be able to access it on after effects were we added the 'Tron' effect on the dancers and lowered the saturation of the beginning party. Once we had decided that we were going to adjust the video on After Effects we started physically ordering our shots to make the whole timeline a lot tidier and make the bumping up of the video a lot faster. We sorted them into three categories: 'Special Effects', 'Performance' and 'Narrative'. This also made it easier to see which shots needed to be edited in what way on After Effects which enabled us to finish our post production process a lot quicker.

Overall I am happy with our post production, since it was thorough and accurate, assuring that the video was as perfect as it could be with the material which we had gathered. I do however think that we were lacking narrative in the second half of the video, because the couple seems to pretty much disappear after the big change. I also think that we could have structured our process a little more clearly from the beginning, since we were slightly stuck at times and sometime the different members of our group seemed to work against each other, just because we couldn't make the same slots all the time, so communication would have really worked. Also in terms of structure, it took us a while when coming up with the idea to cut the different aspects as seperate sequences, if we had really thought about it, we might have realised that that was the smartest approach.