Saturday, 20 November 2010

Editing Diary: 5

In today's lesson, we finally finished editing the narrative string of our music video. We are not entirely finished yet, as we will spend then remaining few lessons making final additions and amendments, but at least now we have a full length, almost completed video. I feel this has provided our group with a massive confidence boost, as we were beginning to feel as it our video would never be finished.

We mostly spent this lesson editing the flashback scenes in the park. We did encounter a few problems - for example, we took two spinning shots of Oscar to create the playful flashback scene of the couple spinning around together in the park, and we realised that in the shot that turned out to be the more favorable of the two, a major continuity error was present in that he was wearing a jacket instead of just the vest - furthermore, this was the same jacket used in the unhappier modern day scenes, ruling this clip unusable if we did not wish to confuse the audience in departing from the basic visual themes we had established. Fortunately, we had the initiative to take a second shot for exactly this sort of purpose, which although involved a much closer angle than the original shot, was still usable and still created the same effect. We also realised that we had failed to take a long shot of the couple spinning together, in order to convey clearly what was actually happening in that section of the video. However, we felt that this did not create a major problem, as it was still fairly obvious what was occurring, and we tried to emphasise this further through the use of a shot-reverse-shot between the two, implying they were spinning at the same time, allowing the audience to decipher the meaning behind the portrayal.

Another issue we found was in the shots of them sitting on the bench in the park before running away. Whilst filming, we felt that the light in this scene was almost ideal, as it was bright and slightly silhouetted the characters, adding a sense of intimacy and closeness between the two characters, contrasting highly with the representation of their relationship in the modern day. However, when it came to editing these clips, we discovered that the direct sunlight actually created a full beam of light directly down the centre of the frame - while we felt this could work in our favour, as a manipulation of the common conventional feature of natural lighting in order to imply the impending sense of separation between the two that is to come, we eventually decided against using these clips in our final product, as we felt it would just be too visually disruptive.


Our video ends with a long shot of the couple coming together again, taking each others hands and 'disappearing into the sunset', in a classic romantic style. We have decided to leave this clip in at it's full length, allowing it to trail out, parallel with the ending of the song. We intend to later apply a conventional feature of a fade out to black, in order to heighten the sense of softness and fluidity that has been a common theme throughout our final video.

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