Filming - Table Scene

Before filming this scene of Gideon singing at a table, we wanted to make it look like girls had been sat there before.  To make it look like this, I persuaded Tom to put on some lipstick and drink out of the glass. This gave the scene a better effect, and so that it didn't look too set up or fake. Also, we associate the hip hop genre to involve some 'hot' girls or touches to their music videos.

This is the image that it gave us after setting up the scene. We then proceeded to film. This scene consisted of Gideon singing the whole song so that we could cut the bits out that we wish to use. The champagne connotes Hip Hop perfectly. In a lot of Hip Hop videos, we see the artists drinking the champagne. Also the location works well because of the lighting being quite golden and rich looking. 

Feedback

So far we have fully done one minute ten seconds of our music video. We got some feedback from the rest of the group on what we've done so far after we showed them the video. Most things they spotted and wanted to see a bit differently were things we agreed with.

What was first said was the lighting was really good. Especially the shots of Gideon in a spotlight. Also the variety of shots were good as there were many in the first minute. This image below is of the class watching what we have done so far.

The following things are what we need to improve on:
 Even though the use of performance shots were good, they need to be mixed up so that were not watching the same thing for too long for it to get boring.
The short clips of the champagne bottle and glass could be alot better as there is a plug socket in the background which distracts us. The subject isn't very clear either.
We added some text at the end of the one minute saying 'They Know' at the same time as the music, we weren't sure about this ourselves and neither were the rest of the people we got feedback from. It either needs different transitions and colours, or we shouldn't use it at all.
The split screen was a good idea but could be much more effective rather than the two different shots split.
How we are going to make these things better:
To improve the effectiveness of the variety of shots, we are going to move the clips around showing urban areas to stage performances without them being all together and long. Making them shorter clips will also meet the conventions of the Hip Hop genre.
The champagne nd glass shots are already poor. We are going to refilm this clip using a small studio set up so that there is no background clutter. This will then look more professional and meet the conventions of our chosen genre alot more.
The text we added to match the lyrics did not work like we wanted it to. However we are going to play about with the different transitions and effects you can put on the text to make this look more professional. If this still doesn't work, we won't include any text if we can not pull it off.
The split screen at the begining is quite amateur at the moment. We are hoping to put three clips in a split screen, pausing each of them as he sings a line, so that eventually they're all paused to move on to the next clip.

This feedback we got from the rest of the group was very useful an we hope to get feedback again when we think we're almost done.

Editing

We have now started editing the clips together from filming on Sony Vegas editing software. So far, as you can see from the screen shot above, we have lots of gaps to fill in. We think that it will be best to go out filming again too so that we have more variety of shots. The establishing shot on the right is at the beginning of the video. We have flickered another clip of the actor (Gideon) in between establishing shots so they quickly go from one to another to the same speed as the music does.
Another thing we have editing at this stage, is the clips we filmed with a strobe spotlight. We had to make these perfectly in sync so that the editing didn't lag behind the time of the music.
We had to edit the following shot types together making them more interesting from the viewers point of view. This is also a convention of any music video so that the actors singing the same line from other angles keeps us wanting to watch the video.