Video Production and Post Production

Video Production - Initial Photography
After storyboarding and creating a shooting schedule, the main aim was to stick to this schedule so that our time wasn't wasted and neither was the artists. We had set locations which were in Central London (London Bridge and Picadilly Circus), Valentines Park and in a Studio.
With the initial photography, we managed to capture shots from day and night and the ones which looked excellent were the night shots on London Bridge over looking the river. These shots were good because they had relevance to my CD digipak design with the whole idea of water being the symbol of calmness and serenity.
The shots we had issues with were the ones in Picadilly Circus as there was always a lot of people walking around and getting in the way of the camera so in order to tackle this we had to re-shoot and people were made more aware that we were recording after a while. (Permission from the council was received for us to film there).
When it came to editing and looking back at all of the footage, we decided that we needed something that looked professional and would wow the audience. Also we found that in the footage we already had, some parts of the song weren't sung well enough for us to sync when editing, which is where the studio footage came in. The use of our school's drama studio which had lighting, effects and a blacked out room was excellent as it made Abbie stand out in the footage.

Post Production
Editing is one of my strong points so to start with I didn't really have any troubles when editing my footage and creating a rough-cut. When it came to making sure all the singing was in sync with the track itself, this is when the task became a bit tedious. But after reshooting in the drama studio, this filled all the gaps and made editing a lot more easier.
The main effects I used in my production was a cross-fade and fade in-fade out. These were the only effects that had relevance to the type of song I was dealing with. If I were to use box transitions and sliding effects, this wouldn't work because the song is quite slow and calm. I used effects because they are a way of keeping the audience interested instead of just seeing cuts throughout the video. Also, it makes the video look more professional and shows the skills I have learnt and used as an editor.
The actual footage shot compared to the storyboard version is quite different. In the storyboards, we had all these ideas of Abbie waking up on a piano from the previous night of writing a song but the mis-en-scene wouldn't have worked because it would be obvious that it was filmed in a school hall using the school piano. Also these ideas seemed too familiar as those of Alicia Keys and we didn't want to simply copy those ideas as it was important to keep a unique element to the production. In the actual footage shot, we came up with more ideas which some came at the spur of the moment. In the end, whether or not those shots were used, the more footage, the better off we were.