Music Video Evaluation.

Music Video Evaluation.
For my music video project i worked with an artist called T-nay, he used to be in a hip-pop band but went to pursue a solo career in the pop genre. This was a good challenge for me because i believe the approach i was going to take was going to be different from the one i would have if i had worked with a hip-pop artist.
During my planning for the video project I went on one of the most popular social network sites on the web. I used facebook to search for my artist, this was easy for me because it allowed me to see what type music he had done and whom his target market was. Although i had worked with him in the past, i was not aware of the new material he had been involved in. After we set up numerous amounts of meetings i decided he was the artist i was going to work with because we had very similar ideas to each other, which made the storyboarding for the video very easy for me.
During the planning of the video i had very clear ideas for what the project would look like. For example my initial thought was to have my artist sing on his own with other people featuring in the video; but once i realised that i was going to be working on my own for the video i decided to not feature other people in the video because i was not sure if other people would be as reliable as it would be working with one individual. Once the video was underway we began filming for a period of 2 weeks, this is because we were met with so many challenges which is why it took some time to get started. Once my artist was comfortable with being in front of the camera the video was shot in one day, and all the clips i needed to start editing the video where now there.
My video has a consistent house style that flows right through to my digipak designs. Everything I have designed has been based on a black and white theme which I thought would be different from other videos and digipaks that tend to use more natural images. I wanted to give my video a slight difference and I believe I achieved that. The main aim for my video was for my artist to be the main focus of the video which is why we did not include props like dancers and cameos from other people. I wanted it to be obvious that it was a new path my artist was taking and I wanted it to be different from the previous projects he had done before. The video shows his new style of music, and the way the video is presented accompanies this. The main reason why the video looks the way it does was because we both wanted to move away from the stereotypical hip-pop scene we wanted to produce something that was a bit more positive; something that didn't included a crowd of people performing in front of the camera in their own way and most importantly it would have been difficult for me manage the artist and other people at the same time because each person would want to voice their own opinion that might not have coincided with what I had in mind.

Editing was a challenge only because it was so time consuming, but because i had a storyboard it made it that much easier. The ideas for the video where very simple, i wanted the entire project to highlight the fact that my artist was working solo therefore most of the shots that can be seen in the video are close ups and medium close up shots. The images that can be seen on my digipak are very empowering shots and that is the same thing i wanted to reflect in my video, everything that is in my video links well with my digipak, the house style for my entire project is black and white. To also make the video interesting i used a lot of special effects, the video relies heavily on the tempo of the beat everything relies on the dancing, the lip syncing, the beat and the special effects. We filmed the whole video in the Norwich city college studio we decided that we were not going to use any outside location because we wanted to achieve a certain look e.g. a look that you can see in various artists’ videos like Tinchy Stryder, Neyo, and Justin Timberlake etc. I like the idea of a studio based video because based on the videos we took a look at during planning they tend to look more polished and smooth so during planning I used a still camera and a HD camera to film the location we were going to use for the video. Soon after that I decided that the video was going to be filmed against black, blue and white screen. Each time I took some test footage I would capture all the work then import it straight to Adobe premiere; this is because I found it easier to assemble the footage in order of the clips that where most likely to be used in the final editing of the video.

T-nay was the artist I was going to be working with, it was easy to work with him because I had done a few projects with him in the past. So for the next upcoming weeks my duties involved booking the studio twice a week to film the video. We shot most of film against blue and black screen and white screen; we were going for the smooth RnB stylish videos that artists like Ne yo, Justin Timberlake tends to do. So we used google images to do our research, we based our ideas on singers like Robbie Williams, Jennifer Hudson, Ne yo, Keisha Cole etc. So for every scene we shot I would upload it all to adobe premier where I organized the clips I was going to use for the main project. Adobe premier was an important tool because of course it had everything I was going to use for my video editing e.g. brightness and contrast was one of the main effects I used the first step I took for example when editing the first scene was; I would change the clip into a black and white shot, then go to brightness and contrast to adjust the color of the shot, then to make the scene look interesting I also used the effect called “roll” which can be seen in the first scene of the video which is the introduction of the video.
While I was using adobe premier I had to think of the link between the music and the video; the editing of the video is driven by the tempo of the track which in turn helps to emphasis certain parts of the song for example the part where my artist sings “I can go” that part is emphasized in the video when is shows my artist working away from the camera, which also helps to high certain instruments like the drums or the keyboard. Adobe premier helped me with the tempo of the song because while I was editing the video I had to listen to the beat a lot and I had to edit around that, which meant I had to do a lot of fast paced editing just to make the video link into the beat the tempo etc. and most importantly to make the visual aspect of the video interesting because the video is a solo project which means my artist does not share the stage with anyone else it's just him alone. The sequencing of the video was very important for my video which is one of the things I learnt while using Adobe premier, I had to arrange the clips that I wanted to use and It proved challenging because it I had to look through a lot of clips that could go on for a least a minute or more then I would have to find clips that would help the narrative of the video, for this I used effects like cropping, you can see an example of this can be seen on the third part of the video when it shows my artist in three different screen shots all playing at the same time.

Getting started with adobe premier was not that hard because I had used it before, to begin with I had to capture all my material into adobe premier I had to run all my material onto a firewire from a video camera but when I was filming I backed up all my material onto a video tape then I had to capture all the video clips we had shot. After I had finished capturing all my work I took all the rushes and started to work on them. The first thing I had to do was to arrange the clips in order of the ones I was most likely to use, then I had to rough cut of the first half of the video then once I got used to the features on adobe premier I finally started to assemble my work in order of the clips that I wanted to use for the final cut.

Once I had got everything into sequence I picked the relevant parts of the clips that I knew would drive the tempo of the beat e.g. we can see my artist dancing in the second scene of the video which is in juxtaposition to the beat. Everything was cut to the dominate parts of the video because the video was quite fast paced which was an important feature to my project. My artist done a lot of acting every move he made was practically in sync with the video so it was very easy to cut the video clips to the video. The cuts and transitions where a good way of keeping the audience focused on the video, which is why every scene cuts to the next very quickly which is a common feature in most music videos.
This effect helps to emphasis the lyrics and the narrative of the video, like most artists videos close ups are a very important element in a video because they just show the artist star power and for my video I wanted to adopt the similar conventions, lyrics help establish a general feeling or meaning to the video and the audience watching it which is what I tried to do throughout my own video.

I used a very fast paced approach to my video because as you can see in the video there is a lot of moving and dancing so I the camera movement had to accompany his performance and during the editing I had to also had to cut from one scene I didn't want one scene to last to long so each scene lasts for at least 5 seconds all of cause accompanied by smooth transitions, which is important for many solo artist. To emphasis this I did a lot of special effects which made kept the video interesting at all times e.g. split screens, changing colorization from color to black and white, and the use of cross dissolve. I thought that using adobe premiere was very easy after using it over a long period of time the part I found intimidating was the time line because it showed two video and 2 audio therefore at times I didn't know whether I was editing the right parts of the video and at times the audio would not play which meant I had to keep importing the track on to the timeline and at times I would lose some of my work. But once I got used to the way the timeline worked adobe premier got easier to use.

When it came to the actual construction of the video we meet up with a lot of challenges. I was the director of the project which meant I took on a lot of responsibility for example organising the dates for filming, arranging meetings for the ideas we would incorporate in the video and how the video was going to be filmed etc. The most challenging the aspect of the whole project other than the editing process was the filming because at times my artist would follow the plan to technically which meant that his performance in front of the camera at times looked very unnatural. So I had to continuously let him know that he had to change his body language because it was coming across as to stiff or the emotions he was supposed to be conveying where not the right ones. But once I told him that he did have to follow the storyboard, but he did not have to follow right down to every detail, he had to do a natural convincing performance and after several test shots we were ready to continue filming.

We used artificial lighting because as I mentioned before we were filming in a studio so we had to get as much light as possible in the room. Using the camera was not much of a challenge because I have had plenty of experience over the few years I have studied media. I a professional camera for filming for the video which in turn made the video come out in very good quality. As I mentioned before I filmed against black, blue and white screen for the filming; the challenges lay in the white screen background because to get the colour as white as possible we had to rearrange the lighting and the we had to add additional material to make the background as smooth and as polished as possible. The process to filming was very straight forward for instant we had to film the first shot at a medium shot angle then the second time we would film at a long shot angle then for the third time we filmed at a close up angle. We repeated this sequence each time for the different backgrounds we filmed against. I did this so that when it came to editing the film it would become much easier to have different scenes that would cut to different parts of the beat etc. I believe having different types of angles gives the video some variety and because I was working with a solo artist it was important that I had different angles that symbolised different types of emotions e.g. close ups and medium closes, it was all about the artist I wanted him to appear powerful and in control. I achieved this because throughout the video you can see a variety of angles that engages the artist and the audience and I believe that my video is memorable because the main focus is all on the artist, we planned this when I was putting together the storyboard and we stuck to it and it worked very well and it shows throughout the video.