Final Evaluation

Final Evaluation

Today I am writing about my final evaluation of my music video project, what I did well, and how I can improve in the future.

I will start by talking about the past, in my last college project, which was a film trailer (called ‘The Key to Life’). I rushed this project and looking back, I had let the stress get to me, and I passed it onto my teammates. We ended up with a project that was admittedly rushed and to be honest, I never really felt passionate about the whole idea, it just felt to complex.

I have undoubtedly learnt from my past experience, with the help of my new team, which included Kasha Wheat, Archie Settle and Bence Sandor; I was with people who I could trust and work with as a team. From the very first day, things just felt more relaxed compared to my last project, and I could tell right from the beginning if I pushed myself and always put in 200% in, it would be tough to bring me down. After every lesson, the day after or a few days later, I had written up about them and not just quickly rushing through my write-ups, I did so thoroughly, this way I would not be left to the last day fixing my write-ups, they were done and they were done right away. This trait that I must get things done right away comes to from my Nanny who looked after me while my Mum was at work until I was 15. My Nanny taught me to get things done as soon as you are told to do them and then when it comes to let's say a hand in date you are not at all stressed and you can relax later, sort of like looking after your future self. My Nanny also taught me to finish my life projects, even if it began with her not letting me leave the table before I had finished eating my dinner, this transformed me. When it came to my GCSE’s with my DT project, things started to go wrong, but I would never give up, never, and I completed the project at a very high standard. Now I never give up when it comes to college. Not like the last project, I could have quickly given up with three days left; I didn’t, I cracked on and completed the job. Now I find that this trait is linked to my perfectionism, which has lead to many takes of the same shot in this music video one of them being the dolly pull shot, which I spent half an hour trying to perfect before I got a shot I was happy with.

This project has been an eye-opener for me. I have learnt so many new things and been able to experiment when It came to the filming, which was great! In the woods scene of the project when Joel and Archie were pretending to take drugs, I used a glass prism, moving it over my 42.5mm lens to split white light and make the image seem like all the colours were bleeding out. Other than this being experimental, I remembered a few people saying, ‘that’s cool editing, how did you do that’. This felt great to me, as then I could explain how I researched and got the shots, which was with the glass prism.

Next thing I want to talk about was how my group have worked as a team since day one and despite our many ideas at the beginning, we all came to an agreement on day one of what music video we wanted to do, a complex song with many meanings, it would have been a struggle to plan, but we had Kasha as our producer. The idea was possible but also tricky; things could have gone wrong. We were too reliant on trying to tie in many things, such as getting the locations we wanted to film at, also, props like the Morgan, at the time of planning it wasn’t even road legal, including my Grandma’s house and most importantly our actors and the actual weather, which we had no control over what so ever.

There have been many highs in our group, but also a low when it came to a few days before the screening of our film; I accidentally published the whole music video four days before the screening without any knowledge at all. I awoke on Monday (the video was posted on Sunday) to find that I had received many messages, on my public Facebook, which was my team stating how selfish it was of me to publish the film early. However, I did not release the movie on purpose, it was on a schedule, to post on the following Wednesday (screening day). The reason the video was posted on Sunday, was that I used to upload fun YouTube videos every Sunday with my cousin and the publishing software I used for some reason did not update itself (when I programmed it) to publish on Wednesday the 22nd of May. That’s why the video went up early. However, my group, despite being slightly annoyed, understood my apology, and we all shook hands about it and looked forward to our actual screening on the 22nd of May.

Overall though the whole pre-production and Post-production flew by for our group, especially for me, as I had no other write-ups to complete during these stages (personal research) as I was getting things done right away and not leaving them to the last minute, Kasha worked hard on our pre-production folder. This, in turn, freed me up to think about shot ideas for the production and freed Archie up to work on the script, and other write-ups. Another thing we worked well on, was communication between us, I think we were all very transparent about our feelings in the group as well as ideas we had and wanted to include in the final film such as many transition ideas like the red spray paint over the camera lens, an idea of mine.

All the process and techniques we had chosen to use in our music video are present in my previous blogs, and that brings me to my next point, reflections and evaluations, which I am now going to evaluate. I began this website three years ago; this took about a year to get the understanding of how Wix works and all its features particularly the blog page, which I now use to upload all my college work. I chose Wix mainly because of their active ad campaign that seemed to be everywhere four years ago. Then I began my website, which was initially a little unorganised, until about a year ago when I joined college and then I modernised the whole site to make it easy to use for everyone. I would use the Blog page rather than website pages, because of one main reason, ease of use, if I had many pages on one site, as I did for my GCSE’s, it is like looking through a maze to find all my work. Please feel free to have a look; this way; you can see how the website used to work, as all these pages are still public. The blog page where I post now is in a chronological timeline, where posts are time-stamped, and you can quickly scroll through to find where my first project was. Compared to how it used to be, where it was like a maze to see my work! The blog page is also more accessible for me to manage posts and update them if needed.

I chose for this project to update my website more than ever; I have written weekly update blogs, going over the struggles of our group as well as a blog for every day of the production of our music video. This has been good for me as when I was writing these reflections; I was able to pick up on mistakes which were edited out during post-production, for example, some of the night shots, I remembered that on a few where we were filming the Morgan driving out of the garage. We could not use one of the Morgan shots as in the background there was a modern piece of equipment, I think it was just the tripod bag, but it was only just in the frame, so we just cropped the frame a little. However, I have got to say blogging the whole process has been a pleasure and it is a great feeling when I have almost written 40 over 1k word posts in this section alone, a lot of detail!

Finally, I want to talk about our project screening where very few issues were brought up, but I want to go over them first. The first issue that was brought up was the fact the money in a few shots looked fake, which was denied by our teachers, but it is accurate, in one shot of Joel fanning the fake money, you can see that one of the notes face is half missing. To combat the fake looking money, we should have re-shot the scene, but it was only picked up by us a few days before screening. In the future we should have spent some more time selecting the notes we wanted Joel to use when he fanned the money out, this was because we had a pile of perfect looking money and one where we only tea stained the edges, not the whole note as this would have been a waste of tea and time! The next issue that was pointed out to us was the café location, which was the white scene that we purposely overexposed for dramatic effect. Chris, the media technician, pointed out to us that we could have possibly used a different location, as he said, the brightness, took something away from the story. I disagree about what Chris said and liked the site but I am always open to criticism, and in the future, we could have possibly used a different café, but the other one we wanted to film at asked us for £7000, so in my opinion, this little issue would not have been worth £7000 to fix!

When it came to our teacher’s time to point out criticism, they couldn’t find anything, that wowed me a little, I must admit as Dan always seems to find something, not this time though. I guess the fact that the teachers could not find anything proves the fact that we really did research and plan so hard for this project and then when it came to editing, I was relentless with my clip selections, I would allow no shake at all. In all honesty though, I was just amazed, stunned.

What did we did do well that people pointed out to us, which led to our music video being what it was? To begin with, the people loved out transitions, especially the red spray paint one, this was worth sacrificing my table top glass for! Next people liked the old newspaper prop that Kasha made for the second last scene, I know she spent many hours perfecting and researching 70s newspapers! People also really liked the vibrant drone shots that fitted well into the timeline of the music videos story. People also applauded our Actors for good acting, I have since told Joel about this, and was very appreciative of the compliment. People also liked the Posters we used when we spray painted on the wall, which was as well as a reference to the Pink Floyd song, Another Brick in the Wall, a reference to politics at the time and how broken they were. The poster took us a while to find then we tea stained it slightly to make it look like it had been on the wall for a long time, then blue tacked it onto the wall, this seemed like a nice shot! The audience also really appreciated our attention to detail in all our shots and planning in general, as well as the fact people guessed the exact period, we were going for, which was the 1970s. Another thing the audience spotted was our hidden message of dementia awareness, also someone said, beautiful camera angles at the fire scene where Archie and Joel were playing cards as well as the fantastic lighting, cheers to Kasha for holding the bi-colour lights! But most importantly to me was the fact people pointed out that you could see we were all very passionate about this project and it looked like a professional film, flowing from scene to scene without a hitch.

I will miss working with my group in the next projects; Bence, Archie and Kasha they have all been amazing friends to me, and we have all helped each other throughout the whole project from start to finish, I'm going to miss them. We all just found our roles and stuck to them and ended up making a music video that we could all be proud of. This is our best work yet. Now, all we can do is explore and try more, push ourselves harder, and accomplish much more; that’s it for this project, it has been a blast.