Prelim Evaluation Question 2: What have you learnt from participating in each of prelim tasks?

From each of the four prelim tasks, I gained skills that will benefit me for the following year during the A2 course of the next music video.

Audition

The lip sync audition videos were helpful for all of us, as it taught us how to convincingly lip sync and act comfortably in front of the camera, which was transferrable to the shoot day for everyone, as everyone had an acting part.
Also it helped to prepare us for editing and syncing the music to our lips, which we would have had to for the final remake.

Costume

When I chose my costume, I had to take into account what the actor was wearing in the video but also what I was comfortable with wearing on the set. I had to wear something I was comfortable in to ensure I was comfortable on set so I could give my best performance.

Me practicing my part on set

On the day we were choosing costumes, I found it useful to bring in many different combinations of clothes and ask others for their opinions. Also a number of people needed to borrow items of their costumes from other people, which is probably what will happen during our music videos.

Shoot

The shoot day was very different to any filming I had done before, because I'm used to being in a small group and all being in charge of the shoot. On the day there was a camera crew, lighting crew, director and runners, so the set was full of people. I saw how the crew worked together and from this learnt how to work productively as a large team.

The view of the set from the lighting section

Secondly, I gained knowledge on how to stick to the schedule. To help us, we had a printed out a shoot schedule stuck up on the walls, with the shot number and time next to it, then we crossed out each shot once we had completed it. Any shots we hadn't completed in time, we pushed to the end of the day. This method was really effective, also our director and assistant director were good at pushing everyone to keep to time, which is what we will have to do when we direct our own videos.

Left to right: Camera Op and Director

Left to right: First assistant director and Producer

Lastly, I discovered how on shoots with large crews and casts, such as ours, the cast had lots of waiting around when they are not acting, whilst the crew were always working. This meant for some parts of the day I got to be included in other jobs, like playback and being a runner, with the rest of the crew.

Us waiting around while the shoot is going on

Editing

When editing, I learnt new skills such as adding flashes to the photography scenes using key frames and the brightness and contrast tool.

We used key frames to make the flashes in the photography scenes

I also improved other skills such as lip syncing the music to our mouths, which was more difficult for the remake than the audition videos because the clips were shorter, therefore there were many more of them to sync.

I also improved my colour correcting skills, using procamp and the three way colour corrector tool. We graded all the shots, especially some which were too dark or the skin tones were off.

The graded shots of the yellow scenes