Welcome

Hello everyone.
Welcome to my blog. I've never really blogged before, so this is exciting. Here you can follow the progress of my 'Live and Direct' project I am working on as part of a group at Kingston University. From pre - production all through production to post -production. You can swift through ideas I have come up with and inspirations I may have gotten. There are videos, pictures, music clips. Feel free to have a look and have your say.
Thanks
K1104321

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Editing Suite: Day 4

Throughout the editing process we realised that as soon as we made slight changes to a clip within the timeline, a lot of time was spent rendering each change in a video.


Once we had finished our focus on green screen, we then decided we wanted our studios to look more interactive, to achieve this we included youtube videos in the introduction and entertainment studios. The clips needed to be in topic with what the presenter was saying therefore, research was carried out to find the best possible clips. We had also included a movie trailer within the actual story of the show. I learnt that layering clips and other items within the timeline allowed us to achieve more and edit the studio around a little more. 


Our target audience for the show is focused around young adults/ university students of 18-25. The music tones included in the programme needed to be upbeat and lively, after narrowing down our selections to two choices per section, we played both songs whilst playing the video in the background to see which choice worked better and decided on:


Kraftwerk - Dentaku (News)
Goldfrapp - Ooh La La (Fashion)
Fatboy Slim - Weapon Of Choice (Bloopers)




Here is a print screen image of the movie trailer being included in the timeline for the show.


When we were coming to finishing this project, we realised it was more like Lorraine (part of Daybreak) rather than This Morning. Lorraine is more contemporary and has a wider target audience.  

Monday, 7 May 2012

Editing Suite: Day 3

Green Screen Fashion Section:

This proved to be the most difficult part of green screen editing as there was movement involved in the takes and editing around the green was a little bit more difficult. Softening the edges and the saturation were challenging withe the movement going on in the takes and when we managed to eliminate the green the image would become pixelated . 


When cropping the first layer (the moving image) we needed to pay extra attention to where to cut exactly. This needed to be very particular as the model is walking towards the camera therefore, the size of the model gets a little bigger as she gets to the front and stands.

We were originally going to have a voice over narration of the outfits presented by the models and have the focus on the outfit whilst on the screen, however we decided against that nearer the time as the shot looked rather empty. So we added the presenters to the shot on the opposite side; it seemed easier to watch as there was a form of interaction between the presenters and the models. 



Editing Suite: Day 2

After we had logged and captured all the takes we filmed, we decided to focus on getting the order we wanted the clips to appear in. Originally we had created a structure we wanted the show to go with however, when we were putting the show together, we realised the structure didn't work as well as we had hoped due to a few obstacles and mistakes we made whilst filming. When we came to edit 'Summer Shape Up with Mr Fit' we had found out that some of the footage had been lost, therefore we lost the introduction we had with a presenter which made it complicated to then have a presenter at the end of the exercise. We managed to overcome this issue by inserting an introduction page.

After we had finalised the timeline and order of which we wanted the show to go in, we had an idea to add bloopers and outtakes in, so we had to cut the youtube clips as much as we could in order to be able to fit roughly around a minute of footage. Due to none of us in the group having much knowledge or skills with Final Cut Pro, editing the clips took much longer than we had anticipated however we cut the cooking tips to roughly around a minute from three. This allowed us to gain skills and learn functions with the programme. The weather section which we had also managed to get from youtube took longer and more patience with editing because the presenter speaks extremely fast, so getting the right time and point to cut was challenging. This was also cut down to roughly fifty seconds. 

After all this was done, we began editing the green screen, we used youtube tutorials to learn how to use specific tools like chroma keyer as well as motion and filters where the videos explained in great detail what each function enabled us to do. We also managed to get some help from our tutors and technicians. I found the green screen rather easy to operate on Final Cut Pro and enjoyed the whole process; it may have been very time consuming and I found that it was one step forwards two steps back, however it got me to practice using the software lots. 


This is a print screen image of the first attempt at using green screen with the introduction. This particular shot is the clip of the entertainment introduction of Carys introducing new movies coming out. The main problems with this particular take we had experienced were the shadows between Carys' legs. 
After we used the motion and filter tools to crop as much of green screen out as possible, we then proceeded to use Chroma Keyer to eliminate the green and stick the studio background into the shot. 


When the introduction section was edited and we were happy with it, we decided to watch it back, coming to a conclusion that the studio looks a little plain with just the presenters standing there, so we had decided to include youtube clips which related to the script the presenters were reading out. So an example, where Bradley (male presenter) is talking about music at Reading Festival, we have clips of bands and the actual festival playing. 


This image shows the attempts at trying to perfect the size we wanted the presenters to be for the given studio. Where he should stand etc. The actual image has a little green illumination itself, where the lights from outside are on, so we needed to make sure that as much as green was cut out as possible from around our presenters.