Practise Music Video Evaluation

For our preliminary task, we were told to get into groups of three to four and create a 40 second music video to any song of our choice. In order to create our music video we had to plan, film and edit.The reason we done a practice music video is so that we could get an idea on how it will be when making our real music video. This practice allowed us to develop our skills when using both the camera for shots and Premiere Pro for editing.

Although we as a group had a brief planning session, I think having the opportunity to be able to pitch our ideas to one another gave us a chance to gain a variety of new and different ideas. In doing so we combined our ideas to create one group idea. This resulted in us creating an opening sequence to the song 'No Frauds' by Nicki Minaj. However, as we did not have masses of time to plan, we did not decided on any set locations to film in and instead decided on the day we filmed.. Due to the lack of organisation, less time was spent on filming and therefore our music video footage was limited when it came to editing. Furthermore, the fact that we could only film within the college premises was very limiting and distracting as we were interrupted by other students and staff.

In the video we have used a variety of different camera shots and movements including close-ups, long-shots, tilt, tracking, mid shot and match shot. This provided a variation of viewpoint in which we thought would keep viewers more interested. Nevertheless, during the filming process what i found difficult was adjusting the colour balance on the camera. The colour balance is  the adjustment of the intensities of colours and in this case i needed to adjust the white balance depending on the lighting within the room. A lot of the time the footage came out quite orange which meant that minor adjustments had to be made involving the brightness, colour and contrast of the footage (editing process). Nevertheless, we used a DLSR camera to film and the camera movement was handheld throughout as we were not given a tripod. Therefore, our footage looked slightly unstable and shaky.

During the filming process we decided to split our music video into section according to the number of locations used (three location = three sections). In doing so for each section (scene) we decided to film the same scene numerous of time using different angles and shots each time. This allowed us to have various shot type and angles.

Editing for me was the most difficult part of the video process as we had to synchronise the official song to the different video footage. This required a lot of patience and accuracy to get it right. Also, due to the fact that Premiere Pro was a new software for most, we did not know how to fully use it which was quite time consuming and fraustrating because we spend a majority of own time trying to find out how to do one technique after another.

In conclusion, I believe that this preliminary task was a very instructive and informative process, in which will help me a lot when crating my real music video. This process has allowed to find out my own strengths and weaknesses as well as provide a good idea of how to work on my actual music video. It will ensure success and major improvement as I now know all the conventions and techniques required to make a good music video. overall, the video did not come out as wanted and was not of high standards, however, I would say that we had good team-working skills as we were all very co-operative and open to each others ideas.