Jess and Sarah: Animatic creating

When watching our animatic after it was edited to the music, we can see that our shots change in time to the music (an important aspect of music videos) and that we have enough shots and variation of shots to keep the video interesting and fill the song completely without any shots over-running.

To make sure that we have got enough variation of the angles and distances of the shots, we are going to film each shot from lots of different angles, so that if certain shots do not work well later on when the video is developing, we can change the distance or angle of the shot easily. We are going to take close-ups of instruments, distance shots of the "chase", a birdseye view shot of the drummer drumming and lots of other different shots.

After producing the storyboard we realised that we couldn't shoot the main singer on the garage roof as the garage is not stable enough to hold his weight safely; this was found out during a risk assessment. This problem meant that we have had to find a new location to film these shots.

To film the frames of our storyboard, we used a tripod so that our shots would be steady and look professional. Unfortunately, the camera kept trying to focus and our frames were to small for the focus. To solve this problem, we decided to start filming our frames again but by holding the camera in our hands instead. This worked well as we could hold the camera as near to the frame as we needed so that it would fill the screen.

When editing the animatic, we encountered a problem when adding our soundtrack to the timeline. We had our song "No Easy Way Out" by The Pink Spiders on an ipod but found out our system couldn't transport the music from the ipod onto our timeline. Instead, we had to find our track on Youtube (and make sure it was the whole of the song) and import the track from there, deleting the visuals that came with it. We had to split most of our shots as when we filmed the frames we filmed each frame moving to the next shot, so we had to split the start and end of each shot and get rid of the shots of us transferring from one shot to the next. We also had to make some of our shots longer so that the editing would be in time to the music.

Through all this editing and detailed work with our animatic we have a much clearer understanding of the work we need to put in and what exactly we are yet to complete in terms of shot plans and music timing.