Evaluation

Evaluation

1.      In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of existing media products

Our project for media was to create a full music promo and to conceive a full product ready for marketing. This would comprise of a full video for the band we chose, a CD/DVD digipak with fully created artwork and a magazine advert. These three parts of the product were integral in their own way to advertising the song and selling it to the consumer. This is ultimately the entire reason for their existence, to promote the band and get their name out there to sell records and make money. I feel that by knowing exactly what their job is, we were able to make each part of the product unique and more effective at doing it. As such we felt we should put a lot of effort into, ultimately coming to a lot of group decisions to decide on a number of things. We took every aspect into consideration, right down to the font design for the band.

 

We chose purposely to not challenge many conventions of the genre for the video and digipack because we felt it would mean we could draw on more inspiration and use other existing works in our design. For example, the completed digipack is a very minimalistic design with a stylised look and little colour, very much in the same vein as ‘The Killer’s’ albums which falls very close to the genre we were working with. At the same time, we were somewhat limited in what we were able to do because of how little information about ‘Scar’ as a band there is online. As such we somewhat based initial concepts around the only existing picture we could find of the band.

 

A music promo should aim to form a synergy with the music and band, the band should aim to advertise the video and the video should advertise the band lending each of them to profit off of each other. The video should be interesting to watch to give it some appeal to watch in the first place and potentially make the song more memorable by adding imagery to it. A lot of people remember the video for Thriller much better than the music itself, which was a huge reason for its success (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVx80xkim8 – if you’ve been living under a rock). It’s this reason that we wanted the video to match the song a much as possible, being light hearted and memorable. To achieve this; the video should be easy to relate to, to achieve THIS we wanted to keep it simple, utilizing well known stereotypes for our characters  so they seem familiar to the audience with very little to know about them. We drew on existing videos and ideas to get the costume and characterisation right for each character to ensure they locked onto the stereotype and were almost instantly recognizable as the stereotype they are. This essentially meant that modern culture and media has done half of our job for us, creating characters everyone knows without us having to use a word of dialogue or have any context whatsoever. This proved to be a very good idea as it did mean that the audience could understand the characters well even in such a short time span of 2 minutes 55 seconds. The narrative of our video itself is very contemporary of the genre as well, having an underlying serious tone while still being light hearted at its core. The video itself is designed to be funny, much in the style of a lot of pop-punk videos such as Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy, I think this shows through very well and the influence is definitely prominent, another thing that would help the audience to relate to the video. Pretty much everything about the video lines up with what is considered the ‘norm’ in the genre, the band is 4-piece, every member is unique and has their own personality and they perform in an upbeat and energetic manner. Below are still shots from Blink-182’s ‘All The Small Things’ and Fall Out Boy’s ‘Sugar, we’re going down’ to give an idea of non-serious videos.

 

 

 

 The second font shown here is the one we eventually used in our digipack and initial ideas for magazine advert; however for a very long time we used the one shown on the left. This goes to show how much thought has gone into the process of making the product appealing to the right demographic and getting the image just right.

 

 

 

 

A digipack is what the final product should be packaged in, as such it should give the general feel of what it is the album or single tells. Usually this is reflected in the artwork of the package itself and what is contained within it. For the artwork we wanted to tell the story of our video in 6 frames, a fairly typical convention for digipacks. We didn’t do anything stylish or artistic on purpose but we wanted show the connection between the two main character’s so we put them on the inside facing each other yet with the separation in the middle of them in the form of the CD. The entire Digipack itself is bathed in dulled, darkened beige to connect all the pictures to each other. It’s important to have a link between all the pictures and to make a general theme between them otherwise it comes off as disjointed and doesn’t look pleasant. The Digipack should also have the job of promoting the video while still being eye catching so that people might want to pick it up off the shelf in a store and listen to it. As such I feel we did a good job in making the album look distinguished from a lot of other albums of the genre, although it’s not bright and colourful like some other pop punk albums, its difference is what would make it noticeable on the shelf, and from there the digipack shows what is to be expected from the song and video while leaving a lot of open ended questions about what it could be about. The shots also have a professional look about them, especially the stage shots of the bare stage and drum kit this will give the band some credibility to those who just pick up the digipack thinking it could just be some amateur band not worth their time. Overall I think the digipack does a good job of being both eye catching and promoting the song and video at the same time. If we were to go back and redo some things I would choose to take some more specialised shots thinking more carefully about what we want from the digipack in terms of themes.

 

 Inspiration for the Digipak came from multiple sources. As stated the minimalism of albums like ‘Sam’s town’ by The Killers and Emery’s ‘The question’ brought on the general look of the digipak but the idea of consistency throughout all of the panels came from Deaf Havana’s ‘Old Souls’ digipak which is incredibly simple and consistent throughout its colour schemes and imagery. This lends itself very well to our digipack because it’s of the same genre.

 

                                                                       

 

Existing video

 
 
 

 

 

 

 



our video



 

 

 

 

 

Existing Video

Our video

Exisiting video
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

our video

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Existing video



Our video

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
On the left are all shots from other music videos compared to ones we used, showing how many influences we have had. These influences strongly changed how we would portray and develop the video into the final product. Everything from the costume to the framing of the shots was inspired from videos that already existed. We tried to mimic existing videos while keeping our style of video making, essentially trying to put a new spin on existing works. We hoped this would make the video feel familiar to people as they would have seen the shots somewhere before and would remind them of these other videos. If anything it should make the viewer feel comfortable and reduce the amount of information they’d have to process to understand the video fully, making the viewing experience nicer, also perhaps allowing them to think more about the music itself. This is bordering on intertextuality in a way. We’re not paying homage to famous imagery, but we keep the familiar feeling of other videos while keeping the atmosphere of the video our own.

 

In terms of set, originally we weren’t going to do too much for the band to look defined; simply opting for the harsh contrast rather than extravagance but with the opportunity presented to us we couldn’t refuse so we used a large stage that is capable of seating a few hundred. This actually accidently made our video even more conventional, even though we didn’t mean to. The fact that we ended up performing on a large stage almost links it to earlier rock and metal videos from the 80’s and 90’s where this type of set was considered the standard. A good example of this is Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks like a Lady’ (pictured below).
 

 

 

 
 

 
  The set is also somewhat reminiscent of Paramore’s ‘Decode’ video, with the green colouration and the setting of the woods behind. Our song is a little more light hearted than Decode and the lighting reflects this, with a lot more natural light shining through on every band shot. That being said Paramore only has the dark tone to the video because it was made to coincide with the release of the second Twilight movie, so the video had to match the theme of that movie. Nonetheless I feel that we made a good decision on set, it certainly looks the part and definitely matches the genre and atmosphere of the story we were trying to tell.

The size of the set we had to work with was definitely the biggest asset for us as it allowed us to move freely around the band and get shot angles from anywhere we wanted, leading to very interesting and varied shots. I don’t think this would have been possible if we had simply used the white room as intended, I feel the cramped environment would have stifled the creativity we displayed in camera work and composition, leading to a much staler video with fewer interesting shots. This would have in turn stifled the creativity in the editing because there would have been less to work with down the line. A lot of the more interesting edits in the video came from the movement of the people on the screen and how they interact with the other shots. It’s the juxtaposition that spurred a lot of the momentum. So ultimately you could say the set did quite a bit for the video in general.

 

 

 

 

The editing was fairly fast paced throughout the entire video; some of the more notable edits are in the form of the wavey dream sequence transitions. These pay homage to Scrubs once again as every time JD has a dream sequence it uses this exact transition, so much that most people associate it with a dream sequence straight away, which is exactly what we are aiming for. This works in our favour because we don’t want people to think what is happening on screen is actually what the characters are doing in a literal sense. The quicker they realise that it’s not actually happening the sooner the actual plot of the story can come to light, that the characters are only imagining it. We also kept it in every single transition to a dream sequence and becomes something of a motif

The editing was fairly fast paced throughout the entire video; some of the more notable edits are in the form of the wavey dream sequence transitions. These pay homage to Scrubs once again as every time JD has a dream sequence it uses this exact transition, so much that most people associate it with a dream sequence straight away, which is exactly what we are aiming for. This works in our favour because we don’t want people to think what is happening on screen is actually what the characters are doing in a literal sense. The quicker they realise that it’s not actually happening the sooner the actual plot of the story can come to light, that the characters are only imagining it. We also kept it in every single transition to a dream sequence and becomes something of a motif.

The camera work used is developed from ideas used in more popular videos as the camera is rarely stationary for the band shots, instead almost acting like a 5^th member of the band moving about the stage with the musicians. This wouldn’t be so prominent in a mellower genre of music but for the style we are doing it is a very notable feature that helps accentuate the pace of the song. The very first band shot that Elliott is a part of after the band kicks in has the camera track him with a very human movement to it, this makes the audience feel more part of the band as if they were watching them themselves rather than just watching a stationary camera on them. We were aware that this was at risk of having a ‘Shaky-cam’ complaint, the likes of which films like District 9 and Cloverfield have in which the camera moves around so much it’s disorientating. We used this camera technique in a tasteful fashion so we didn’t have this problem in the final product, balancing out the still shots and moving shots to add as much variety as possible. This was definitely something we had learned from last year’s thriller video as almost all the shots in that were stationary and the whole finished thing came off as very stale. By varying up the way the shots move and are framed in the way we have it has pretty much ensured that no two shots are too similar and keeps people watching throughout.

 

We handled costume and mise-en-scene in a very proficient manner. We thought very hard about what each character was to wear based around the stereotype that they belong to and found the clothing accordingly. We made sure before the shoot that clothing fit, looked good and was practical for the camera. We then stored the costumes until the shoot to ensure they were in good condition. Costume itself was inspired by the cultural stereotypes already given. If you were to go on to Google images and type ‘Nerd’ you would find on the first page, dozens of characters wearing almost identical attire to what we had Elliott wear. Same goes for the punk look. We also thought about the stereotype of white equals good and black equals bad so that audiences would quickly identify these characters. I feel that we handled this in a very professional and efficient manner.

 

 

This is a screenshot of the first page of Google images searching ‘Nerd’ to prove my point.

 

And here's one we prepared earlier!

We looked at the defining characteristics of these stereotypes and mimicked them as much as possible. The greasy hair, glasses, braces, bracers and bow tie all contribute to the stereotype’s image so naturally, we took them. We could have challenged the stereotype and convention by making him a little bit more unique but this would have only worked against the relatable image we were going for. This was the same with the punk character, looking for the most relatable stereotypical aspects to latch onto the audience pre conceived images of a punk.

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

We thought about lighting a lot, making sure to hire the right lights for the shoot to make sure the set used was appropriately illuminated. We even ended up going as to far to build one of our sets so everything we might want to do is completely customisable and to our liking. This proved to be a huge asset as it created some of the nicest shots in the entire video and brought a whole new aspect of mise-en-scene to the table. Looking at other rock videos, dark colour schemes tended to be the norm, so in this respect we did challenge the convention as our video features almost entirely pastel colours in our video, giving it a very light and warm feel rather than the moody thoughtful looks that a lot of modern video tend to look like. We feature a lot of blacks, whites, creams and light blues. In comparison to say ‘Starlight’ By Muse, this features deep reds and greys to give it a moody look. This reflects well in our video anyway because the lyrics aren’t anything deep, nor is the storyline, its light hearted, and so is the colour scheme.

 

We decided to use a mixture of Illustration and disjuncture for our video because we had enough of the lyrics to work out a decent plot around them but we wanted to flesh it out with some other scenes for comedic value. The illustration scenes are where the main character and the woman are talking and having relationship problems. This was illustrated more in the lyrics analysis post on the blog but on certain key lines we made sure to add a specific shot to illustrate what being said. For example in the picture shown we wanted Eddie push Luke away on the line ‘If you tell me to go’.

This accentuates the line and the scene and makes it clearer to the audience in what’s happening. We thought at first that we should make shots line up with the lyrics on as many shots as possible but we felt they lost meaning nearer the end so we decided to only use it on a few specific shots to make them work better. The disjuncture comes from the comedic scenes that have nothing to do with lyrics. These add variety to the performance and gave us a little artistic freedom in what we wanted to show on screen. We also decided to have a fine balance of narrative to performance, for a 3 minute video we have 1:44 seconds of band shots, but the distribution of the shots was made so that there is more narrative towards the end of the video to make the ending a little more noteworthy. By having more narrative towards the end it makes the audience think about the girl and ultimately, care a little for the outcome of the plot.

 

We made the pacing of the video match that of the song. As a rule, every single edit was put directly on the beat so that the video and the song had a synergetic link toward one another. As the music got faster and more intense, the edits became more frequent, complimenting one another. This is most evident towards the end with the match cuts going from the boy to the girl in quick succession building to the climax of the two getting back together. This is something that we had improved since last year’s thriller. We realise now that while we tried to get the pacing of the edits right building up and slowing down in the right places, we didn’t have the context to put it in so the effect didn’t work. By this I mean that while the technique was there we didn’t have any material to put it to, it was just a man walking around in a church with no coherent story. Now we actually have a plot that we can follow and have characters we can relate to, this means that the pacing actually has something to relate to rather than just being there for the sake of being there. Now we were able to think a lot more clearly about when and why we wanted the pace of the edits to quicken or slow down and then justify them to a tasteful degree.

 

Putting these two promotional posters side by side you can really see how one is definitely influenced by the other, this was something we tried to achieve in the earlier designs for the poster. The poster should aim to promote the band and represent the band in the light they want to be presented in. This medium is pretty tricky for this since there is a distinct lack of space for writing and you only get one page. The poster should say everything it needs to say at a glance. To do this it should be eye catching, easy to read and be as clear as possible. This is what we tried to achieve in this first poster by putting the writing on the darker portion of the photo. We also tried to frame the photo with the text making the writing lead into the picture and vice versa. Ultimately we chose not to use this poster though because it simply wasn’t eye catching enough. While it did stick with the theme of the digipack and compliment both that and the video nicely, it simply did not tell enough information, nor was it interesting to look at so we went with this one instead:

 

 

 

This cover still remains true to the original theme of the video while creating its own unique look. It’s superbly minimal and tells the audience everything they might need to know without being obnoxious about the way it tells the audience this information.

 

2.  How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 

The product we had to make eventually came in three parts; the digipak, the poster and the promo itself. These three parts of the product should aim to work together in a way that each one will promote the other two and be promoted by the other two. We aimed to achieve this in our own stylistic way by linking them together visually. We drew on inspiration from other band’s posters, album artwork and promos to make all of them look professional. As a whole every single one of these pieces of the product works well with the other two and all three of them look similar. If someone were to see say the poster in the street, even before they saw that it was promoting Scar they would probably make the link to the video or digipak (Should they have seen it prior).

 

Here you can clearly see the shared imagery between the poster and the digipak. We kept the imagery as a link between them because it is the most obvious and noticeable link that an audience would make between the two. Even if the viewer hadn’t looked at the picture carefully it would still be in their head subliminally. This means one will definitely promote the other. Obviously the digipak and poster come from still shots of the promo itself so those two link together in their imagery.

Usually the posters would be displayed around town in shop windows and such so the idea is that hopefully people will be walking around town and will see the posters, be reminded of that great music video they saw on the television or on Youtube and will be conveniently in town to be able to go and buy it in a moment’s notice with very little hassle. This is the way in which the products should aim to work synergistically with one another to get the product advertised to as many people as possible. We aim to advertise the video also through mediums such as Youtube, allowing people to both listen to the song and watch the video for free, but only on Youtube. This means if the listener or viewer wants the convenience of having the song on their Itunes or mp3 player itself they would have to buy the album. Youtube provides a great opportunity to allow people to see the video for no cost and on demand, essentially advertising the video and letting people enjoy it at no cost to anyone. If we were a more professional music video making company we would think about getting in contact with a music channel to negotiate air time on television to play the video. Due to the genre of the music we would try and get the video onto Kerrang! This is where most rock artists strive to get their videos as it will get the band name across the country exceptionally quickly. Not only that but it should provide some funding for the band due to being paid in royalties. Simply by being on a TV music channel, the band will gain credibility (Despite the relative ease of the task itself nowadays) and it should represent the band in a very positive ways; especially if the video is reviewed well.

 3.  What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the making of our media product we went through a number of different stages of audience feedback to try and figure out what would be the best ideas for our video as we went along. These pieces of audience feedback proved very helpful in the long run as it made our decision making easier, due to the fact the audience was answering our questions for us in essence. We started with a questionnaire which we composed prior to even deciding on the theme for our video. In this questionnaire we had people of several age ranges answer what their favourite genre of music is, why and what videos they expect to see in a video of that genre. We also asked what kind of medium they tend to watch music videos on (If any) to get an idea of how would distribute the video and market it. Finally we asked them to listen to an MP3 of ‘As Long As You Know’ by Scar and comment on what genre they would classify them as and what kind of themes they would expect to see in the video based on how it sounds. The results helped us think about what the audience would expect to see from the video. By having them identify the genre for us we would use the conventions of the genre they said in our video, hopefully making it seem relatable. I would say this was a huge help to us as a group because it gave us a solid starting point on where to take our video thematically and plot wise, we agreed that we wanted a more comedic video rather than a serious one.

 

A few weeks before filming a woman came in who worked for BMG records, being a promoter for bands such as Deaf Havana. She works with new music videos every day, so, not missing an opportunity I got the privilege of talking to her about our video premise and get her feedback on it. She said she liked the idea and gave a few ideas of her own to help us along and make the video look more professional. We took her advice very seriously as she has had a large role in the success of a number of commercially successful bands through marketing. This means she has had a lot of experience promoting videos as well and she knows exactly what works well for a number of genres and demographics. We took notes on all her thoughts about the video premise and made a point of incorporating her advice into the video. Namely, she talked about how mise-en-scene can relate to a genre, a band say, Slipknot will use dark colours due to their heaviness while Green Day will use bright colours. As such we should aim to use bright colours to emphasize the comedic elements in the video rather than the serious ones.

If we could redo the process I think we would choose to have more questionnaires throughout the creation of the video, pausing the editing to ask around the demographic what was going well or badly in it so far. Whether it was going where they’d expect it to, as in if the plot’s doing what they thought it would, where they think the plot’s going to go, as well as if the technical elements are what they’d expect from a video of that genre. I feel that if we had done this then we might have been able to get over some of the feelings of creative blockage that brought us to a standstill in the video. We’d have been able to utilise their ideas in our video and draw inspiration, making it much easier for us.

After we had finished the video itself we decided to post it to a number of websites that allowed us to get our video to a wide audience and gain feedback from everyone in an open medium, allowing discussion about the video, as well as reaching people outside of our demographic. The sites we decided to use were Youtube and Facebook. Facebook proved to be very helpful in finding feedback about the final product as it allowed us to make one large universal post, containing the video and all information needed about it. Then in the comments section people can discuss what they liked about the video, what they didn’t, what they thought worked well, what they thought didn’t. This universal post would be viewable by anyone on our friends list (Unless we chose otherwise) this would include people inside and outside our target demographic, allowing for a range of responses. It also included people who didn’t even know we were making a video, so we had a completely unaltered opinion. I think this helped a lot as it allowed us to understand what we got right, whether we catered to our target audience well or not, and how it looks to completely fresh eyes.

 

4.  How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

 

The main point about the task we had undertaken was the fact that we should aim to use unsigned bands to try and avoid any kind of copyright issues. If we had used a signed band we would run the risk of not being able to upload it to any kind of public medium since the publisher of the band is technically well within their right to forcefully take the video or mute it. Unless of course we were to contact that publisher and go through all the mandatory  procedures to allow us to use the song legally, which would have probably involved contacting the publisher, pay royalties to them and the band or simply agree to certain terms and conditions to make sure that we don’t profit from the video. To get around any kind of legal issue we simply used www.unsigned.com to allow us to easily browse through an array of unsigned artists to find the band that we would want to make a video from their music. Obviously we ended up choosing Scar but, as outlined on the blog, we went through a number of bands and browsed a lot of music thoroughly before deciding on a band for good.

 

 Unsigned.com provides a very nice and easy to use embedded mp3 player on the band page so listening to the band’s music is very quick and easy to do, which sped up the process of choosing the band we wanted. 

 

 

 The alternative to this whole site would have been browsing websites or looking around locally to find a band we liked and then somehow getting a useable mp3 of the song we wanted to use. This would have been much harder as finding unsigned bands is pretty tricky in itself, let alone getting an Mp3 file off them and then getting their permission to make a video from it. Using Unsigned.com sped the process up by maybe a few hours.

 Youtube was also a fantastic tool to research existing music videos that we could have drawn inspiration from. Almost every music video worth watching ever made has been uploaded to Youtube at one point or another, giving us a near infinite resource of videos to browse through and analyse as much as we want. This was a very strong resource in the long run as evidenced earlier in this evaluation with the number of screengrabs we took to analyse. This is also shown in my blog where you can see a number of videos that I did almost a shot by shot analysis. I can safely say I wouldn’t have been able to scrutinize my own work in such detail if I hadn’t looked at these videos and seen how the professionals make videos and attempt to emulate them.

Blogger proved to be a very useful resource in the creation of the music video as it allowed us to retroactively see our progress over time as the video was conceived and then created. It almost works as a timeline, showing us the beginning stages of our research to when we began story boarding and getting themes and ideas collected before finally getting out and filming. This ability to reflect on how far we’d come gave us motivation to keep going, alongside keeping our minds focussed on what our video was about and what we wanted to include. If we had done everything on paper between the group; inevitably we would have lost at least some of the ideas that we had written down at some point during the process, it would have also probably been harder to access, should we have needed to reference anything later on. Having everything all in one place, time stamped simply proved to be very beneficial to the group as a whole. Blogger also served as a surprisingly good way of communicating in the group sine each of us could easily get on to other group member’s blog and see what they had done, what they needed to do and what they could contribute. While most of the ideas in the group were expressed in person during group meetings in class having access to each of our bloggers was still very effective.

 This was the very first time in a project that I had ever given match cutting a try. Obviously since it’s a fairly niche shot we tried to use it tastefully. A match cut is usually an edit that is used to show the similarities of two characters by having them in the same general place when the edit happens, making people draw a connection between them. Near the end of the video we decided to use a match cut to show how the two main characters were on the same train of thought and were about to make the same decision. Sadly this almost worked against our favour since the match cut TECHNICALLY broke the 180° rule, however we decided to use it anyway since we wanted the message of the edit more than we wanted to be technically sound.

 While the solution to this problem was pretty simple, we still kept it as it was. The solution would have been to mirror one of the shots; probably the one with Eddie in and then it would abide by the 180° rule. We found this looked more disorienting than breaking the rule and took away the meaning of the shot, so we kept it.

 See my blogger for more information on this shot.

Another large problem we faced during the editing stages of the video was the problem of audio bleed. Although we had taken the time to mute every video clip we didn’t want with its source audio (Even going as far to completely take the audio off the file) some shots still had the audio bleed through, making it audible over the song and detracting from the video. We suspect this was inevitably a RAM problem with the IMacs we were editing on and even after exporting the video with everything muted the audio kept bleeding through in the final AVI file. The solution to this problem came down to exporting the video as an AVI, re adding that new file (With the bled audio bolted onto the video) muting it and then re syncing the music to the single long video, making sure that everything had remained in time by starting the music at exactly the same time as it would have before, right down to the millisecond.

This caused a second problem with the video, since the video has now been exported twice into an AVI, with no two ways about it, the video quality was slightly altered. It’s a shame that this happened but we put the priority of not having the song ruined above the video quality itself. This is evident in the final video in shots with black or dark backgrounds as some for the colours come off as over saturated and creates a nasty pixelated look. Sadly this was entirely a problem caused by the equipment we were given rather than something we could alter so we simply had to make the best workaround possible.

Here is clear evidence of the pixilation that occurs because of the exporting.

 

 Below is an example of what I learned about photoshop through making the ancillary tasks such as the digipak and poster. Photoshop is something I have used fairly extensively in the past so there wasn’t much for me to learn however I still feel that I there were techniques that I had expanded upon this year that I’ve never explored fully before.

 Imovie was the program of choice we used to edit the video and put the music to it. The program itself was easy and user friendly to use, utilizing a drag and drop graphical user interface to allow the user to quickly see and make edits to any clip at any time. Due to last year’s assignment and the prelim I got to know Imovie very well before even starting this project, which streamlined a lot of the work I was doing and saved us a lot of time overall. This did however mean that I didn’t learn that much this year outside of learning to do everything on the program faster than before. I picked up on a lot of the shortcuts of the program that allow for quicker cuts at specific times and placing files in places faster than before.

Because now we were working with audio files much more than before and the video had to have a synergy with the audio that we didn’t have to worry about in the thriller last year we had to accommodate for the changes and think carefully about the relationship between the video and audio.

  This meant we had to make more specific cuts, to edit precisely on the beat itself. Sometimes this meant that we would have to manually speed up or slow down the clips to make sure they are the right length. We tried to use this tastefully, making it unnoticeable in most shots but in those that are absolutely impossible to hide we would make it a theme, slowing down correlated clips. For example when Eddie and Luke are arguing, the entire sequence became slow motion to help along one clip that needed to be slowed. We also needed to think about how changing one clip in the video impacted the rest of the clips. For example, cutting one clip by .1 of a second means that all subsequent clips now play out .1 of a second faster, which although small, is enough to desync the video and audio and disconnect the viewer from the video.