2. What have you learnt from participating in prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

Task 1 - The audition

Considering the emotion behind
each line was very important

Our first task of the project was to produce an audition video, which would determine which member of the band we would be. This was our first experience of acting in front of the camera, so we spent a lot of time planning out the actions we would perform during the song. We also incorporated various lip-syncing techniques to ensure that our performance looked as convincing as possible. Some of these techniques were obvious such as actually singing the song, but others required more attention, such as thinking about the way each lyric should be performed and the feeling behind each line. 

Whilst we were familiarising ourselves with the audition process, I realised that the actions that I should perform were actually much more complicated than I had assumed. As I was auditioning for the role of the lead guitarist or the bass guitarist, I decided to attune my performance to these roles. However, this obviously had its limitations. In the end, I decided to just perform a variety of moves so that the audition didn't seem too stale.

Task 2 - Practising the performance
In order to refine this performance, there were a couple of things I did to practice. I own an acoustic guitar at home, which allowed me to replicate the performance more closely. However, the majority of my practice time was spent listening to the song; specifically to the electric guitar. It was important for me to learn how each note was being played, how quickly or slowly the guitarist was strumming and so on. This later meant that it was easier to sync my playing to the track.

Task 3 - Costume, hair and make-up
By this point, we had started thinking about costume. I had been given the role of the lead guitarist, which meant that I need a black jacket, yellow t-shirt, red skinny jeans and black shoes. We were able to gather a lot of clothing for everyone's costume, but the bigger issue was finding clothing that was both similar to that worn in the video and comfortable for the performer. 


As for makeup, it was decided that I would have part of my hair sprayed orange. On top of t¬his, the general theme that we were aiming to achieve was that of a punk-rock band, so makeup was applied with this intention. 




Task 5 - The edit
After the shoot, we had one week to edit our footage. Our priority was to edit a sequence which was as close to the original music video as possible. However, this did not come at the cost of overall quality. If there was ever a shot missing or if there were any other problems, we would use the best possible shot; even if it weren't as accurate to the real video.

By using the method of laying a performance bed, we were able
to find the shots we needed for each setup quickly and easily.

Our approach to the editing phase was quite different to what we have done previously. Rather than just picking out clips from a take, we had to lay the whole take out into the timeline. From there, we synced the take to the real song and cut out the necessary clips from the take. This method is called "laying a performance bed", and it allowed us to deal with a large number of setups more easily, as well as being much quicker than finding, syncing and cutting each clip consecutively. With this method, we were able to finish editing our music video within the deadline.