Preliminary Evaluation

1. Did you enjoy the workshop day? What were your best bits and why?

I thought that the workshop day was a really fun learning experience.  It was only when I arrived at the shoot in the seward studio hhen I realised how professional it would be.  It was great to see the 5D mark II camera in action on the jib and the dolly.  I thought having the original playing on the mac computer alongside the cue sheet so it was easer to duplicate the Jessie J video as well as possible. I would say the best part of the day was watching the performances of the group, as they were both entertaining and very good, and would even say Tasha did as good a job as Jessie J in her performance.  It was also interesting to see how close to schedule you have to plan the day, as it seemed it would be very hard to fit an entire shoot into one days filming.

2. What did you learn from participating in the workshop?

I have learnt that thorough and thought out planning is essential for a succesful shoot.  I think that if we hadn't have done lipsync tutorials and studied the Jessie J price tag video prior to the shoot, we wouldn't have had a strong understanding of how we should shoot the video so it was as similar to the original as possible.  I have also learnt how time is essential when filming the video.  Through our lessons we have learnt that in the industry today, music videos are shot in such short periods of time, often one or two days, and so I thought it was great that we could also shoot our footage within such time constraints.

3. Are you pleased with the footage and your edit? Is it how you expected it to look?

I am really pleased with the footage we got from our shoot.  The shots we have are near duplications of the original, and where they aren't, I believe we did the best we could to make the shots look as close to the original as we could.  Obviously working on a smaller budget than the original was made on, there are some differences in our shots. For instance, instead of using a model car we used a 'little tikes' kids car, although we I do think it adds some humour to the video.  I am also pleased with our edit of the video.  We ensured that cut for cut it was the same as the original video, and to ensure this we constantly were referring to the original video as much as possible.  The edit wasn't as easy as I first thought it'd be however, I underestimated just how many shots there were, many only a few frames long, and so it was a great relief to have it finished in time for sign off. 

4. How do you think your workshop experiences will impact on your approach to next term's music video coursework?

I think my experience of the workshop will impact greatly on my tapproach to our next music video.  I know that I will make sure we plan even more for it so that our days filming go as well and it'll be essential to use our time efficiently.  I also think that we should use the skills and capabilities of our group members as much as possible, like we did for the preliminary.  I hope to use Tashas skills as a dancer and choreographer to perhaps create a successful performance based video, and Jeng and Francis' creative imput will prove invaluable.  From editing the preliminary video, I have also learnt that layering our footage and then cutting what we don't need in the timeline will be the most efficient way to edit the video, rather than simply editing each shot individually.