Professional Practice
Behind the scenes photos by Lucy Wootton
Editing
Since I feel that my main strength within media is editing, I wanted the edit to be the best thing about my project. I decided to cut between shots to the song's beat to make the sequence flow better.
I decided to tell the story of this video partially using colour grading. Since my character Jack is only alive/present in half of the video, I decided to add warmer tones to the shots that he is in, and cooler tones to the shots he is not in. I thought that this emphasised how everything seemed brighter and happier for Laura when she had him around, and him leaving left her with a sort of emptiness. Despite this colour change being subtle, it really stands out in the shots that are cross-faded, and it acts as if to say that when Jack fades away, so does Laura's happiness.
I used the cross-fade effect twice within my edit, one was to fade Jack into the scene and one to fade him out. I struggled a bit while figuring out which effect to use for this, however after getting some help, I was able to play around with it and add it to the correct scenes.
As well as focusing a lot on the colour grading of my project, I also had to find a good place to crop my song, since the song is originally 6 minutes long and I only wanted to use around 3 minutes and 30 seconds of it. I did this by editing all of my footage in up until roughly 3:30, and then added a fade out (Constant Power) to the audio at around 3:10, so that the song would fade out entirely just as my video ends.
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When editing my bench scene, I realised that Hannah had moved slightly from the position she was in next to Josh. This meant that when he faded out, there was a slightly noticeable cut in her position. I tried to move the cross fade around to make it as least noticeable as possible however the slight jump did make it into my final cut.
Finished Project
Commentary
"Hi I'm Eloise, the creator of the When You Leave music video, and I'm going to be talking a bit about my project. Based on the availability of my actors, we didn't film the scenes in the correct order, so our first filming day was at West Bay, despite that scene being almost at the end. Filming the footage itself actually took a lot longer than expected, but my friend Lucy joined us for that session to take behind the scenes photos, and to help me with anything I may have needed, which sped up the process quite a bit. Since it was the first day of filming, Hannah and Josh did feel a little uncomfortable when filming, so I did have to do a lot of retakes, however they soon became used to it, after reassuring them that they were doing a great job. For this bench scene, I planned to fade Josh out of the frame to just Hannah sat alone, so to do this I had Josh get up and walk away while Hannah remained in the exact same position as she was when he was there. I was a little worried about not having enough footage, so the drive back was a perfect opportunity for me to film some b roll that I included in my final edit.
The second day started off at mine and my friend Bella's house for some very quick scenes. For this bathtub scene, I had to stand over her holding my camera which made it very difficult for us not to laugh. At Bella's, we were filming around the fireplace, which seemed a little dangerous because of the wind, so we had to wait for the fire to die down before we got close to it. After that we went filming on the road, which gave me another opportunity for b roll footage. For this scene, Hannah was unable to make herself cry, so we tipped some water on her face to give the illusion of tears, which actually worked surprisingly well.
The last lot of filming was mostly on this field that we found around by Hannah's house. It was supposed to look a lot different, however the weather wasn't what we expected, making it a little more difficult. This scene of Hannah and Josh running around the tree looked a lot cuter in my head, however filming it was very awkward for everyone involved, and even after instructing them of what to do, they still found it very difficult to do without laughing, so although it wasn't quite what I had in mind at first, I actually kept it in, because it appeared as a sort of cute candid moment.
One final thing I didn't realise, was in this scene, which was not scripted at all, you can see Hannah holding a tripod, which in a way breaks the forth wall. I didn't see it as a massive issue at first, but if I had the option to refilm everything, I would make sure it was out of sight."
I started off editing my commentary on Windows Video Editor, by adding the footage from my filming days and doing a voice over following the above script. Once I had put all of the content together, for some reason the voice overs would not work, and every time I tried to add it it would just play without sound, or overlap an already placed voice note. Despite trying very hard to get it to work, I ended up saving the audio and the video as two separate files, and instead brought the footage to college to edit it on Premiere Pro, which worked instantly.
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