A-Ha - Take On Me

The music video which really intrigued me was 'Take On Me' by A-Ha. The video was produced in the 1980's (before i was born) but when i first watched it i was perplexed by how it told it's story.
Unfortunately the video did not allow me to embed but i do have a link;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

The favourite thing for me in this video is how they fused the real world with the comic world.

It began with drawings from a comic and it was the first time i had seen something like this so it had struck me. But what got me was when the video introduced the comic world into the real world.

The picture shows a hand coming out from the comic a girl is reading to invite her into the comic book. The originality and flair i saw in this video really excited me and it grabbed my attention.

Even though the video shows a couple of shots with the band performing i think the video is mainly story based. It begins in an American diner where a girl is drawn into a comic. The two protagonists (the male and female characters) are then interrupted by a couple of villains but fight them off after the male character allows the female to go back to her world. The male character then follows her after defeating the villains.
Most of the video portrays this story.

I think the most effective part of the video was when the camera was facing the female who was on one side of the panel and it showed her as if she were in the real world. Although the other side of the panel showed the comic world. The camera then moves nearly 180 degrees facing the male character showing the male as a real world figure and the female as a comic figure. This effect is done really well and could symbolize that nothing can keep these two apart, not even realities.

Final Cut Express

This is the software I used to edit the Radiohead mash-up as well as do the previous lip sync exercises (feeling good and editing practice).

Final Cut Express is a non-linear editing system which works with both video and audio. It is the consumer version of Final Cut Pro (an editing system used by professionals to edit many movies and television shows).

Radiohead mash-up

Radiohead mash-up using 'Viva la vida' by Coldplay

Evaluation
This task asked us to mash up the video from 'Lotus Flower' by Radio-head with another song. My choice was to use the audio from 'Viva La Vida' by Cold-play.
The task obviously required editing skills since we were using the program Final Cut Express, but due to us experimenting and improving our editing skills in the previous tasks we could dive into the use of effects and see how much that could effect a video, especially a mash-up video.

The main idea of the mash-up was to try and make the audio match the video so I cut many pieces of the video to try and fit with the audio and make it look like the video belonged with the audio. Well, i tried to make the video look good with the audio.

Cutting the video and putting them in different places was nothing new at this moment since i focused on cutting on the previous task. Although i did try out some effects and although i only have two effects used on the video above i did experiment with a number of them.

In order of appearance the first effect used was the blink effect. I actually used the blink effect twice on the same video clip as well as putting a clip above another so that instead of just blinking black it would continuously blink between both clips. It was a fun effect to experiment with since there were a few things you could do with it and it also emphasizes the visual aspect of the video.

The second effect used was a stylize effect, line art. It basically changes the visual imagery into a sketch like appearance. This gives a different look at the video and changes what the audience sees which could potentially draw an audience in.

This was also a rather interesting effect to use since there were many different options to choose from that you could change and keyframe/animate, including the smoothness, colour, contrast, how well the original image and sketch image mixed etc. I chose to simply change the colour of the outline from black to red to give the overall video a bit more colour since the video mostly consists of the two colours; black and white.

TBC

Lip Sync Exercise 2 - Feeling Good

Our class decided to do a practice lip sync exercise to get a feeling of what we would have to do for our coursework when making our own music video. We chose a song which we knew and thought would not be too difficult to lip sync; it was a lot harder than anticipated. 

Our choice in the end was 'Feeling Good' by Michael Buble.

We did the first 1 1/2 minutes of the song and thought it went well for a first try. It wasn't great but the timing of the lyrics was good although we will have to get a number of different shots from a number of different locations so we can cut different shots in instead of having one long shot per verse.