Video: Persuasion

To begin with we outlined and split up all the jobs we'd need to do for editing. Ruth: overall editing (pace/ timing/ combining audio with video using L/J cuts ect), colour correction, colour grading, visual effects, cropping/fixing source video. Jess: sourcing music, sound effects, cleaning audio, fixing volume, fern logo. Ruth: One of the first things I picked up from the comments of our presentation was the lack of flow between each video. So the first thing I did was cut back the excess time on each video. Then once I'd gotten the music from jess I overlaid this onto our video and began matching up the cuts and speech to match with the base notes in the music. It was at this point I started to feel the whole piece starting to come together and feel like we were getting somewhere. Image Editing/ Colour Correction/ Grading: Once I was feeling better with the pacing I swapped over to working on the colour correction. Basically what our main problem was, wa...

For the presentation on Tuesday we compiled all our footage into a video on Premier and roughly cut it so that our general persuasion and advertising was clear to the class and so we could get feedback to improve. The general feedback from the presentation was that the video and audio quality were quite good, but could be improved with more effects and editing, the video was funny but a little too relying on the jokes. With this feedback we are going to edit the video more using colour grading and colour correction as well as cropping. We are thinking of removing some of the jokes or  censoring some to make them less "out there" but still funny and coincides with the rest of the videos humour. This will also help with the pace and flow of the video which at this point is quite stuttery. With the persuasion we aim to put information at the end of the video but in an interesting way including a graphic etc to make sure that it's not boring and will actually be...

In class this friday we learned how to colour correct and colour grade and the importance of this as a persuasion technique in videos. I kept basic notes in my book of how to do this for Jess and I to refer back to, and the ideas of how I want to apply these techniques to our own work... At the end of class Jess and I got together and discussed a new rough plan for the next few weeks. We began allocating jobs and setting a loose time frame for when we needed them completed. This is in the pic of our workbook below.

With a limited time for shooting, we started early in the morning. It was a sunny day which was good for the equipment and actors but slightly annoying for the lighting. We hope we can fix this in post so it isn't too bright and shadowy. We had good luck with all the actors being available and managed to film the shots with no cars or other large background audio in it. On the main actor we used a lapel mic so that mainly his audio would be heard, and hopefully, clearly. We used a reflector to fix shadows outside and LED (China) lights to aid the shadows inside. After briefing the actor on the tone we were trying to achieve for the video, and being a professional actor he did a lot of visual and some audio ad-libbing to which we will put most of it in our final video because it just fit the humour of the script so well. Our biggest issue while filming was laughter... With all the shots filmed more than once, we'll begin choosing the ones we believe are the best and star...

So today we were testing out our gear (particularly sound) and getting a rough idea of how our shots are actually gonna form around our set. Clips below are a random assortment of us briefly going through our storyboard shot list as well as discussing changes we're going to make to the shots we'd planned. Sorry for the shitty quality of these mashups, Blogger limits the file size to shit all so any longer vids are gonna look like crap- but you can see the general idea of where our shots are heading compositionally.  This is a lil rough compilation of our storyboard plan stuck together (but not properly edited) This is us working out that a lapel mic combined with (white) reflectors will be the best lighting/sound combo for when we're shooting outside. We're gonna have to be aware of timing between our shots due to the sporadic traffic that passes the road behind where we're shooting. This evening we'll continue prepping our sets for tomo...

Storyboard with script: Animatic: Unfortunately we lost the original animatic video somewhere in the hollow abyss of Massey hard-drives... but we have a video of the video from messaging each other progress updates... Class notes on equipment ect...

Planning how we're going to organise ourselves over the next few weeks... In class we were shown all the different equipment we have access and can use, notes below are items we want to look into further for using in our shoots. Collaborating with Jess in class on our different storyboard ideas and where they're heading Map of where we plan to film outside...

In class today we learned how to use the basics of video cameras- specifically how to control lighting. We also had a good chat to Jason about our two ideas and in the end we concluded with the decision to actually try combine our ideas. This would follow the general idea that we'd start the video out by making it appear as another generic dating app commercial, but about mid way through when the product is usually named, we'd have a smart and funny tagline saying something like, "who needs friends when you can have ferns!" (we need to spend some more time coming up with better scripting.) And then the remainder of the video would consist of us briefly explaining the idea of saving native plants while showing the benefits of having a house plant. We plan of sprinkling humour throughout the entire video like our favourite research example video 'GiveUpAndSettle' . The next few days we'll begin hashing out some potential scene ideas and starting roughly ...