http://www.danielbmedia.wordpress.com

It has been a pleasure blogging to you all, I wish you all the best for your future.

see you soon, peace out.

During summer most people waste away many hours in the day doing nothing, I decided I would make a music video for a song Matt and I wrote, the song is entitled ‘Your Own Mistakes.’ I did not have a recording of the song so I decided I would use live sound and mix the video together over one of the audio tracks. Here is a detailed version of the process in which I made the video.

1) People – I knew I only needed Matt and a guitar, so I asked him and made sure he was free on the day of recording.

2) Location – Matt has a wicked garage, so I asked if we could use that as the location and he agreed.

3) Camera – I took one camera that I borrowed from school, and filmed several times so that I got a variety of footage, my girlfriend Joanne helped with the filming and got some awesome shots.

4) Soundtrack – I got Matt to sing the song several times and to keep tempo so that he wouldnt sing faster in one of the clips.

5) From Camera to Computer – This part took FOREVER! I couldnt find a lead for my computer as there were none in school, I asked everybody I knew and nobody had one, I finally found a lead that worked to a mac. I went to my mums workplace and used the mac there to export on my footage. I then had to upload the 35 minutes of footage to the internet, and download it back off the internet at home.

6) Mixing the soundtrack – Matt did well, but there were wrong notes etc in parts, I spent a day or two finding different takes of the song, and mixing the audio together thus making a flawless track, it’s almost unnoticeable that I switched between different takes of the recording, once I had made the audio (on Adobe Premiere) I exported it as a mp3 file and imported it onto a new project.

7) Editing – Editing isn’t necessarily hard, just time consuming. I spent 2 days editing, putting the clips together, at some parts Matt was out of time with the video so I changed the play speed to make sure it all was in sync. Once edited I changed the overall size of the video so it was bigger and I could make a border without effecting it too much.

8 ) After Effects – I imported the project onto Adobe After Effects, I wanted to create a Super8 Film effect, a sort of old camera effect. I didn’t want to use a preset so I made a Red, Blue and Green solid on the video to act as a filter, as well as a blur. Furthermore I changed the contrast and brightness. Once I had done all of this and created the effect I wanted, I added a border with rounded edges to make it like an authentic Super8 Camera.

9) Exporting2 – I exported the video, again, and it came out at 8.8GB, way too big for youtube! I had to find a way of getting it online to show my blog followers the fruits of my work.

10) Windows Movie Maker – This program saved me, I imported my video onto it, and clicked the upload to youtube button, it uploaded it in less than 10 minutes, and bam! here it is.

The whole process was more complex than I just explained and I worked really hard on this video, but I am so happy with it, and would love to know your opinions on both the song, and the video.

I got the tube up to London with all the stereotypical bankers, those who I believed were usually extremely unhappy (upon inspection) and felt quite surprised to adopt the usual miserable expression upon my face on the train, but what can you expect when you’re standing for the whole journey at 8 o’ clock in the morning stuck between two sweaty men in suits with hardly any room to breathe.

Nevertheless I arrived at Goodge Street and jumped on the escalator and walked out into London, for the first time in a while I enjoyed the cultural beauty as I walked down Totenham Court Road, there were some gorgeous works of art on the walls, and I sat on a bench, took out my book, and read a chapter before embarking into the Silver River office.

I went up an escalator to floor 4 and arrived at Silver River, the corridor towards the main entrance had photos of celebrities and shows in which they had been involved and I got a little feeling inside of me, a feeling of anticipation that was quite thrilling. I walked into the office and was greeted by a woman named Chris, she was extremely kind and told me to sit down and await somebodies arrival. So I sat, and was then introduced to another woman, named Lindsay. The only word I can use to describe her is bubbly, she was so friendly and gave me a tour of the office, I got to know where everything was, and then got told that I would be logging. Logging involves going through footage, and scripting everything that happens and the time in which it happens. I sat down at my computer and introduced myself to the developing team (where I was based.) Sam Lawrence came and said a friendly hello and explained she was happy for me to be there, instantly I felt at home. Emma was a lovely redheaded woman who sat next to me and Josephine was another very welcoming person sat opposite to myself. Sarah and Tom were 2 more characters in the team I met and the head of development Deborah also introduced herself. I logged footage of a man named Tanwar for a new show entitled ‘Call Yourself..’ about Indian cuisine, and did a lot of research for Emma on the internet for Indian communities around Birmingham. After logging for a few hours I was told about a new show for ITV which involved meeting interesting characters who weren’t famous, I had to go through all the papers from the weekend, and find interesting people, after finding them I gave my findings to Deborah and was allowed to go, it was 6 ocklock and I went home and slept.
After waking up revitalized I headed back to Silver River on Tuesday. Deborah told me that I would be trying to contact the people I found in the papers, I spent the whole day looking up papers editors or finding people’s addresses to contact the characters I found in the papers, I got the phone numbers from the people I wanted and was extremely proud of myself. Furthermore I talked to the people in my office properly and got to know everybody quite well.

On Wednesday I had to leave early, but I spent most of my day logging footage of Andy Law and Laura Riches, 2 people who had led very interesting lives, the logging seemed to take forever but I was appreciating the media world in which I was being able to experience.

On Thursday I did some research for Emma on Indian clothes shops, Indian community centres and finding Indian people in Birmingham who knew about food, and finding promotional videos of Pakistan on youtube for Emma, it sounds like nothing, but all of this took quite a while, by the end of the day I was shattered.
On my final day I logged another video and then, after finishing it relaxed, made everybody tea, and went into the editing room to see how the editing worked, I then did some more research, talked to the people there about working in the industry, and finished at 6. Upon leaving I felt extremely sad, i’d had such a fun week and wished that I could of spent more time there, they said they had enjoyed having me and it really meant a lot to me that they had accepted me into their community. I was privileged that I was given a chance to spend time at Silver River and would love to work in the media world in the future.

Those who have followed my media related life this last year,I and my partner Joanne are so proud to have reached this point with our coursework.  I present to you now, the piece de resistance of AS level media, this thrilling introduction sequence is guaranteed to leave you wanting more. This my com-pardres, is Captured….

The first thing we changed from our rough cut was a tip blip of sound at the very start of our piece that wasn’t meant to be there, but due to our crappy editing software we had never heard it before.

We then added titles in between and over video footage to give the feel of an introduction to the story. We removed our first shot of an  odd gardening tool with blood dripping from it, as it was unclear exactly what it was. We also reintroduced the fast editing effect of the photos before. We however did not remove the slower editing, as suggested in our feedback, as we wanted the viewer to focus in on Annabelle’s face.

We added the sound effects to when Annabelle opens her eyes. We made all the non diegetic sound more continuous and less jumpy and distracting. When Annabelle is looking at the pictures we added the camera shutter noise to give it more of an edge. We sorted out the sound recorded with the video as it includes lots of different chunks which needed to sound continuous. I also added another side view shot of Aaron taking the photo that can hardly be seen, but creates a flickering effect to match th camera shutter sound.

Expect the finished product to be viewable in the next few days….

We arranged the date and location for our thriller that our group and our actors could attend, making sure we were organised so we could get straight into filming as soon as we were there.

During our filming, we used two cameras. One we used mainly for handheld capturing, and the other we put on a tripod for more steady framing of shots. This worked well as we needed to take less shots of one piece of action, and the continuity was spot on as it was filmed together.

Annabelle who was playing the protagonist started to get cold halfway through us filming her section where she is taped up on the floor, so we didn’t get as much footage as we would have hoped to. We overcame this problem, however, later on in the editing process by using closeups within the same shot to extend the action.

We came across the problem of clutter within the garage, but having a look at it we felt that it added to the mise en scene of a disused garage where the antagonist hides away.

During our filming, we thought of a wider range of camera angles to use than originally in our story board, such as the point of view shot of the protagonist looking down on the desk, which I achieved by standing on a chair and keeping the camera at a level angle directly above the able, also creating the effect of a close, ariel view.

Overall, our filming experince was successful, with no major problems to overcome, due to planning in advance and organisation.