What I learnt from the lip-syncing exercise

When we got given our lip-syncing exercise the first thing we all agreed on was that we wanted an up beat song in the pop genre as we all listen to pop music and no doubt we would all know the song. We started our research by all going away and looking up different songs on YouTube that we could potentially use. After doing this individual research we all agreed on 'Girlfriend' by Avril Lavigne.

So, we had our song choice and now it was time to plan everything else including locations, artist/ performers, costumes, props and what shots we wanted. To begin, we decided to plan what we wanted in every shot. For accuracy, we used the music video and at every different shot we paused it and took a screenshot. Once this was done we turned our attention to everything else in the pre-production stage. 

The discussion started with location and it was pretty clear to all of us that our school would be the most effective location to use. We settled on a few locations within our school which were most like the ones in the Avril Lavigne music video. We chose our school not only for the convenience but some of the shots were of large groups of people in a canteen which we had at our school so we could match the shots accurately. We then had to make a decision on the actors for our video. Luckily we had a group of friends who were eager to help us and volunteered to perform in it! 

During the production stage of this exercise we showed the first 30 seconds of the music video to the actors to help them to see what our aim was to recreate that. We also broke it down for them into shots they were in at each different stage of the video. So, for example we showed Hannah (our Avril Lavigne) the first few seconds of the part of the music video we were shooting so she could focus doing what she saw and then we would do the next few seconds and so on. Whilst we were filming we played the song in the background so our actor knew what part of the song she was singing. In the music video, there is a boy and a girl, unfortunately due to filming schedules and issues we had to use two girls, which made the process slightly harder. However, we used the actors and props that were available to us at the time and made the most of it. 

One we had filmed all our shots we started to import it onto iMovie on the mac and exported it to final cut to start the editing process. Once we started this it was clear that we didn't have as many shots as we hoped and wanted which caused a bit of an issue as some of the shots became quite long. Also, this is the first time that we have had to lip-sync something so when we first started editing it was quite difficult to match the lyrics of the song and what our artist was singing. 

However, this was all a massive learning curve as it showed us the importance of planning and story boarding which we will do more effectively when we start our whole music video. I also think that it was quite difficult to film and edit as a group of 5 as everyone had differing ideas and opinions. I concentrated mainly on the filming and a bit of the editing during the making of this music video and I think that the bit I struggled with most was finding the right shots to film as we didn't plan it fully and clearly enough which I now realise and will act upon for our upcoming music video.